The Jury

Hi, I'm Doctor Cody Porter, and I'm a senior lecturer in psychology from U E Bristol.

And I'm going to be talking to you in today's

lecture about the jury and what the jury means.

So burning

and green in 2011 defined Juries as being made up of

12 ordinary citizens with no legal training who must hear evidence,

make sense of conflicting facts and reach a verdict.

Now, eligibility, in order to be a jury member, is governed by the Juries Act 1974.

And what this means is that you have to be at least 18 years and older,

but you also have to be under the age of 76. To take part,

you must be registered to vote, and you must live in the United Kingdom.

The Channel Islands

are the island man for any period of at least five years since the age of 13 years old.

Now, people who lack capacity,

uh, under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 are ineligible to take part in jury duty.

Now, what we mean by lacking capacity is that, uh,

they don't have capacity to consent to take part in jury duty

If somebody has a mental disorder or a disability,

reasonable adjustments can be made.

So, for example, if somebody had hearing difficulties,

then reasonable adjustments can be made to help support them

to get the same information across.

It's also important to know a little bit more about jury members,

so jury members aren't paid.

They're ordinary members of the community that come in that take part in jury duty,

and they're not paid for that role.

So lay people participate in the legal system,

and this is because it's considered central to a healthy democracy.

In other words, in order to have a fair trial, you must have lay persons involved.

Now this is a viewed as an effective way to address state power.

Throughout this course,

you're going to learn about jury decision making to help you form an opinion

on whether or not they should be used within the criminal justice system.

But it is important to bear in mind that Juries have a difficult task to carry out,

and there's no training provided.

And on that note, Cain

Andres,

in

1988 came out and said

to blame. The jury

is somewhat like blaming the messenger for delivering bad news.

They're just there to serve a role.

They're not trained in legality in any way, shape or form,

and most of them don't have a good understanding of the criminal justice system.

But research does tell us that Juries

generally weigh evidence and apply the law correctly

again. Bernstein and Green support this with their 2011 research,

in fact,

and colleagues in 2005 found the Juries generally agree with

the verdicts around 75 to 80% of the time.

And, of course,

it does lead a problem because that's around 25% of incorrect decisions or rather,

25% of disagreements.

So let's think about the jury's task and what it is they have to actually do.

So there's three things they have to do.

They have to listen to and understand the judge's instructions on legal matters.

They have to weigh up evidence and decide which facts of the case to trust.

Now,

this is quite difficult when you think that the Crown Prosecution

Service are building a case and trying to present an argument.

But the defence is trying to counter argument that they're

trying to suggest that actually something else might have happened.

And finally they have to reach a unanimous verdict of either guilty or not guilty.

Beyond unreasonable doubt.

They're the three main tasks of a jury

now taking each component of that. Let's break it down into a little bit more

so in terms of listening to and understanding the judge's

instructions on legal matter that enforces a lot of jargon,

a lot of legal definitions that are quite worthy and quite difficult to interpret,

especially if if you've had no legal training,

two thirds of jurors do not fully understand

the judge's legal directions, and that's according to research.

Additionally,

younger jurors have the highest level of comprehension of legal instructions.

So we do know that that there's an age effect going on as well.

So while they have a difficult task to carry out what the judges think,

so I've got a quote here from,

um, Judge Germon Frank, that I wanted to read to you.

So while the jury can contribute nothing of value so far as the law is concerned,

it has an indefinite capacity for mischief.

For 12 men can easily misunderstand more law in

a minute than a judge can explain in an hour

now granted, that was taken from a judge in a case in 1948.

But it does give you an idea of what judges tend to think about Juries.

They tend to acknowledge the fact that

actually Juries aren't trained in legal matters,

and often they don't understand what's happening

in the legal consequences of those actions.

When it comes to weighing up the evidence and

deciding the facts for the case and what to trust

again, this can be quite a difficult task.

And Findlay in 2008 found that jurors exposed to DNA profiling

evidence in criminal trials had real difficulties understanding what this meant

Now the innocent project was set up in 1992 following UM, really DNA exonerations,

which led to wrongful convictions of innocent people being overturned.

Now the innocent project is responsible for overturning wrongful convictions,

are rather supporting people,

uh, to get these wrongful convictions overturned.

Now this is usually on false or misleading evidence,

and what they found was a false or misleading forensic Evidence

was a contributing factor in 24% of all wrongful convictions nationally

and mistaken identifications were a leading factor in wrongful convictions.

So there's a lot that can happen within,

um, a court case that can lead Juries to make the wrong decision.

Remember, they're not trained. They're not trained in legality.

But also they're not trained in science

specifically forensic science and DNA profiling.

So it can be quite difficult for them to interpret and understand this.

And their final task is to reach a unanimous verdict

of guilty or not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

Now there are two main approaches that research tells

us that jury members take when they're reaching this.

When I say jury members reach, I mean as a whole as a group as a collective,

there's a verdict driven approach, which has taken a photo at the onset,

followed by individual arguments for the verdict preference afterwards.

And there's the evidence driven approach,

which involves discussion beforehand and then voting at the end.

So those are the two different approaches jury members typically take.

And of course,

we should also consider the fact that jury members are susceptible to falter.

Incorrect beliefs

Research has shown that most jury

members perceive interrogation tactics to be cohesive

and likely to elicit confessions from guilty suspects but not innocent suspects.

Now that's really powerful. When jury members are exposed to interrogations,

the fact that they believe that only a guilty member, uh,

will will elicit a false confession is really, really powerful.

What we know from the confessions false confessions literature is that actually,

when interrogations are used because they're not robust because

they're not ethical because they're not based on information,

um, and report building.

Actually, false confessions tend to happen for both innocent and guilty parties,

but jury members aren't aware of that.

They think that, well, people won't confess unless they're guilty,

even if there's been a coercive interrogation.

OK, so just a little bit of a recap.

Jury decision making is a really powerful part of the court process,

and it involves laypersons making decisions for any legal training.

It is considered to be the most effective or the best method

of giving people giving defendants guilty parties a fair trial.

It is seen as the best method in terms of reducing state control,

and it is seen as the most optimal way to make sure that evidence is presented.

Understood,

um,

and displayed