Jury decision making: Discuss the effectiveness of jury decision making.

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Altaf Korimbocus

Jury decision making: Discuss the effectiveness of jury decision making

The processes by which a jury in a criminal trail decide whether a defendant is guilty or not guilty can be affected by many case factors. Many of which have been psychologically researched, and proven to have an effect on the verdict given.  The main factors that may affect the verdict given by the jury are; exposure to pre-trial publicity about the case, the use of eyewitnesses and the characteristics of the defendant, including the defendants race, attractiveness and accent.  These case factors can sometimes, and sometimes not have an effect of the verdict given by jurors.

Pre-trial publicity can have a major effect on the decision made by jurors.  This can happen before and also can carry on during the trial.  Exposure to details portrayed in the media can lead the juror to form biased decisions based on biased or even incorrect media details or they can form their own personal opinions about the case and/or the defendant.  An example of this s the trial of footballer Lee Bowyer who was on trial for a racist attack.  The media had a huge effect on this trail to the extent that it had to be dropped due to certain articles in newspapers which could have affected the jury’s decision.  The effect this has on juries has been researched by Fein et al (1997) the found that mock jurors were more likely to find a defendant guilty if they were exposed to newspaper cuttings, rather than if they were not exposed.  The effect of the media cannot be escaped because it is everywhere you go, and so therefore jurors will inevitably make up their own personal opinions of the defendant and possibly their previous convictions.  There is also a connection with race and the media, as Fein et al found out, only 45% said guilty when exposed to cuttings that mentioned race, compared to 80% when race was not mentioned.

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Characteristics of the defendant can also be said to affect the verdict given.  These would include, race, attractiveness and accents. There has been some research into the effect of race on decisions including the Fein et al (1997) and the OJ Simpson experiment done by Pfeifer and Ogloff (1991) both had the same results.  Another study by Stewart (1980) found that white American university students were more likely to say that a black man was guilty of committing a crime than a white man even though the crimes were the same, leading us to believe that black defendants would ...

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