The issue of pretrial publicity is a maze of overlapping attentions and interwoven interests. Lawyers decry pretrial publicity while simultaneously raising their own career stock and hourly fee by accumulating more if it. The media both perpetrate and comment on the frenzy -- newspapers and television stations generate the publicity in the first place and then actively comment on the likely effect that the coverage will have on the trial. When a high profile case is brought to trial, many media outlets report not only on the details of the trial, but also details about the persons involved, in particular the defendant. Much of the information reported regarding the case is released before the trial starts. Furthermore, media outlets may not only report facts, but also present the information in a way that projects the culpability of the defendant. By allowing pretrial publicity of court cases, potential jurors are given information that could sway their opinion of the defendant even before the trial begins, and how they interpret the evidence given during the trial. The right of a criminal defendant to receive a fair trial is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The right of the press, print and electronic media, to publish information about the defendant and the alleged criminal acts is guaranteed by the First Amendment. These two constitutional safeguards come into conflict when pretrial publicity threatens to deprive the defendant of an impartial jury. However, there is a compromise between these two Constitutional rights, which would allow for the selection of an impartial jury and allow the media to report on the details of the case. The media should only be able to report information once the trial has... ... middle of paper ... ...T. M. (1997). Can the jury disregard that information? The use of suspicion to reduce the prejudicial effects of retrial publicity and inadmissible testimony. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(11), 1215-1226. GANNETT CO. v. DEPASQUALE. (n.d.).The Oyez Project at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. Retrieved April 7, 2014, from http://www.oyez.org/cases/1970-1979/1978/1978_77_1301 Hoiberg, B., & Stires, L. (1973). The effect of several types of pretrial publicity on the guilt attributions of simulated jurors. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 3(3), 267-275. Otto, A. L., Penrod, S. D., & Dexter, H. R. (1994). The Biasing Impact Of Pretrial Publicity On Juror Judgments. Law and Human Behavior, 18(4), 453-469. Sheppard v. Maxwell - 1966. (n.d.). Justia US Supreme Court Center. Retrieved April 7, 2014, from http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/384/333/
Lester, etal V Percadani, etal. United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Retrieve October 31, 200 http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/opinions/conner/01v1182a.pdf
With jury bias we examined that the perspective taking, victim impact statements and race of the victim had no main effects with ps > 0.26 and no significant interactions either with ps > 0.64.
In America, every individual has the right to a fair trial, but how fair is the trial? When an individual is on trial, his or her life is on the line, which is decided by twelve strangers. However, who is to say that these individuals take their role seriously and are going to think critically about the case? Unfortunately, there is no way to monitor the true intentions of these individuals and what they feel or believe. In the movie, Twelve Angry Men, out of the twelve jurors’ only one was willing to make a stance against the others, even though the evidence seemed plausible against the defendant. Nevertheless, the justice system is crucial; however, it is needs be reformed.
At trial, your life is in the palms of strangers who decide your fate to walk free or be sentenced and charged with a crime. Juries and judges are the main components of trials and differ at both the state and federal level. A respectable citizen selected for jury duty can determine whether the evidence presented was doubtfully valid enough to convict someone without full knowledge of the criminal justice system or the elements of a trial. In this paper, juries and their powers will be analyzed, relevant cases pertaining to jury nullification will be expanded and evaluated, the media’s part on juries discretion, and finally the instructions judges give or may not include for juries in the court. Introduction Juries are a vital object to the legal system and are prioritized as the most democratic element in our society, aside from voting, in our society today.
Unfortunately crime and murder is an issue in all areas of the country. Trials take place every day from a basic traffic offense to capital murder and the offender’s consequences depend on the jury. The jury consist of ordinary people that live an ordinary life. When faced with these trials, the decision making process is not easy. Some cases may hit home for many of the jurors so when deciding one’s fate does not make the process easy. The court case of Lizzie Borden is a story of a young girl who took an axe to her mother then to her father, the evidence led straight to her and she was later found not guilty by a stunned jury.
Jurors opinions can be influenced by an emotional testimony. Deborah W. Denno’s article Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, and the Criminal Justice System is the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law’s publication of a panel at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. The panel had three goals: “examine the interrelationship between neuroscience and substantive criminal law; to incorporate criminal procedure more directly into the examination in a way that past investigations have not done; and to scrutinize cognitive bias in decision-making,” (Denno
...y had not committed. The 104 participants were paired up, one being the interrogator and the other being the suspect for a mock theft. Some of the suspects were to be labeled as “guilty” while others were labeled as “not guilty”. The interrogators had 10 minutes to as questions, and then report back to the judge their opinion and how confident their opinion was. The discoveries of the experiment showed that the interrogators with the innocent suspects were exerting more pressure for a confession then those who were guilty. Also, those innocent were found guilty more often than those who had committed the crime. This information is parallel with other data discovered during actual interrogations. Officers often presumed guilt before having enough evidence to prove it and when the interrogation is not going their way, they tend to try to coerce a confession.
‘Judges, lawyers and psychologists believe it to be just about the least trustworthy kind of evidence of guilt, whereas jurors have always found it more persuasive that any other sort of evidence’ Brown (1986)
Johnson, J., Keyzer, P., Holland, G., Pearson, M., Rodrick, S., & Wallace, A 2011, Juries and social media, Victorian Department of Justice, viewed 8 May 2014, < http://www.sclj.gov.au/agdbasev7wr/sclj/documents/pdf/juries%20and%20social%20media%20-%20final.pdf>.
The second and third order effects that develop following high profile cases go fairly unnoticed and have lasting impressions. How is it that, if polls were used to garner verdicts opposed to12-person jury’s, the majority of the population would find these people guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? Come to think of it, the criminal justice administration field dealing management and organization is deeply affected by the due process system. Ranging from case overloads to setting precedents, celebratory criminal cases need to be dealt with at face value opposed to being geared as a special situation.
In addition, results showed an unexpected contrary effect of popularization—reducing the amount of information was associated with an increase in the punitiveness of mock jurors’ verdicts, independently of the directive content.
Every person, through his or her experiences, will obtain bias simply because it’s a natural human reaction. What the jury trial system does, however, is help minimize bias. An example of this is Document F, an excerpt from Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” – a homicide has been committed, and lawyers are looking for people to be part of a jury to try a suspect. They lawyers ask everyone they interview if they have heard of the event, if they have read about the event, talked about the event, or formed any opinions on the event. If the prospective jurors answer yes to any of the questions, they are dismissed. Even though “Roughing It” is fiction, it is an excellent rendition of the quality of juror looked for in a jury for every trial. Another example of the fairness of jury trials is the Casey Anthony trial of 2008 (Document D). Here, Casey Anthony, whom many believed had committed the heinous crime of killing her own daughter, was acquitted of all charges. In this trial, the evidence was overwhelmingly against Anthony. However, it was also clearly inconclusive, and it was also clear that the prosecution had made assumptions in their case. This showed the grit of the jury as they saw through the assumptions and made the right decision. The last evidence of the fairness of the jury is the statistics regarding the rate of acquitted cases versus convicted cases (Document A). Here, the data shows that 12.15% of cases brought before
The quietness and patience juror 8 displayed caused tension amongst the other jurors creating careful and adequate (Flouri & Fitsakis, 2007, p.453) deliberations. Juror 8 's circle of influence (Covey, 2013) directly influenced the other jurors’ circle of concern (Covey, 2013) when forcing them to question their thought process. Juror 8 chose a collaborative negotiation (Budjac Corvette, 2007, p. 63) method when deliberating with the other jurors immediately handing down guilty verdicts for the defendant. Furthermore, juror 8 used his ACES to help the other jurors cross the creek (Budjac Corvette, 2007, p.
The notion of jurors that a case can only be strong with the admissibility of forensically collected evidence may make them rule judgments that are biased against the prosecutors. Occasionally, prosecutors may fail to avail the requested evidence such as fingerprints and DNA. The public might, therefore, express an opinion that the prosecutors must be sleeping on their jobs, hence, letting criminals get away scot-free (Goodman-Delahunty and Tait 100). Unlike the crime drama programs where there is always some form of incriminating evidence, this may not be the case in the real world. Justice may, therefore, not be served due to the unrealistic evidence that prosecutors are asked to produce. Another effect that crime drama programs have on the criminal justice system is jurors who are highly motivated. There are actually two effects here, both positive and negative. According to Goodman-Delahunty and Tait (103), jurors might have more interest and be more attentive in their civil duty. More often than not, the jurors are highly motivated, as they want to see justice done. They may, therefore, develop a genuine interest and consequently make unbiased decisions. However, they may occasionally feel motivated to live up to the standards of crime drama jurors who are often glorified on the screen. This kind of motivation is wrong since the juror will be after trying to prove a point rather than administering
Within the criminal justice system, it is evident that jurors rely heavily on eye-witness testimony in determining the guilt of a suspect. Psychological research in relation to this issue primarily focuses on the correlation between confidence and accuracy and in doing so asserts that jurors perceive that the more confident a witness appears, the more likely they are to be accurate in their testimony (Cutler & Penrod, 1995). By corroborating both Wise et al. (2009) and Cutler et al. (1995), it is evident that of all the factors which impact on the jury in relation to eye-witness testimony, eye-witness confidence is the most significant in influencing a juror’s verdict. However, this relationship is recorded as obtaining a correlational value