Deliberative Democracy and the American Civil Jury (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Journal of Politics, 2002
Deliberative democratic theory posits that civic discussion leads to increased involvement in public affairs. To test this claim, this study explored the link between jury deliberation and electoral participation. It was hypothesized that empanelled jurors who reach verdicts are more likely to vote in subsequent elections than empanelled jurors who fail to reach a verdict or even begin deliberations. Data collected in Thurston County, Washington, supported this hypothesis. Controlling for other trial features and past voting frequency, citizens who served on a criminal jury that reached a verdict were more likely to vote in subsequent elections than were those jurors who deadlocked, were dismissed during trial, or merely served as alternates.
Policy Studies Journal, 2006
When considering the merits of deliberative democracy, it is important to look to the experience of the American jury system. The jury has demonstrated the potential for citizen deliberation to play a central role in longstanding governmental institutions, but it has also played an unrecognized role in promoting civic engagement. Building on previous research demonstrating how jury service spurs increased electoral participation after jury service, we present results from a three-wave panel survey that show that a subjectively rewarding jury experience can spur broader civic engagement beyond voting. Given the value of the jury as both a model of deliberation and an engine of civic spirit, we consider the potential value of creating citizen juries to improve the initiative process, which currently lacks the citizen deliberation that is essential for any effective direct democratic processes.
Human Communication …, 2008
This investigation assesses the attitudinal impact of one of America's most distinctive and famous group activities-jury deliberation. Tocqueville and the U.S. Supreme Court have both reasoned that jury service can promote civic engagement and recent research supports this view. The present study examines whether the attitudinal impact of jury deliberation depends on the quality of one's jury experience. Two panel surveys of 2,410 total jurors tested the reciprocal relationship between the subjective experience of deliberation and the changes in civic attitudes toward oneself, fellow citizens, and public institutions. Principal results of structural equation models showed multiple effects of jury deliberation on attitudes, but there were no effects on one's civic identity and political self-efficacy. Reciprocally, every civic attitude except faith in fellow citizens was predictive of deliberative experience in at least one of the two studies. Overall, the study bolsters the claim of deliberative democratic theorists that the experience of consequential face-to-face talk can make private individuals into public citizens by reinforcing their confidence in fellow citizens and public institutions.
Jury Participation as Civic Engagement
This study conceptualizes jury service as a form of civic engagement and asks who has had the opportunity to serve on a jury one or more times. Drawing on existing literature on other forms of civic involvement, we examine human capital, motivation, and social capital factors as predictors, considering how these variables will be affected by the variety of organizational practices that determine jury participation. Using survey evidence from a sample of 1380 Texas residents, we find that social capital -particularly residential stability and state nativity -and a willingness to serve distinguish former jurors from people who have experienced attrition at an earlier stage in the "selection" process; voting history and education also have effects. Neither race nor ethnicity accounted for participation when we controlled for age. We consider the implications of these results for understanding how organizational practices shape civic participation.
Jury Service and Electoral Participation: A Test of the Participation Hypothesis
The Journal of Politics, 2008
The participation hypothesis holds that when people undertake one civic activity, their likelihood of future political participation increases. Three original studies test this hypothesis by linking the nonvoluntary, institutionalized activity of jury deliberation with future electoral participation. First, 12 in-depth interviews with recent jurors demonstrate that people can conceptualize jury deliberation and voting as related responsibilities. Second, a national study of court and voting records demonstrates that criminal jury deliberation can significantly increase turnout rates among those who were previously infrequent voters. Third, a survey of jurors in a Northwestern county demonstrates that both the objective and subjective experience of jury deliberation influences future voting rates.
How Jury Service Makes Us Into Better Citizens
Studies on juries have often relied entirely on self-reported data (surveys) or a handful of in-depth interviews. In either case, the skeptic can doubt the truth claims about the jury based on this evidence. After all, many addicted smokers assert that they can “quit tomorrow.” Are they any less reliable than others who self-report? To be fair, surveys and interviews have their place as legitimate research tools, but we did not feel they were definitive enough to decide our real money wager. The test we proposed to resolve our wager about the civic impact of jury deliberation avoids common measurement problems by linking official jury records with the actual democratic act of voting as recorded by the county’s registrar of voters. This is not the best way to understand the robust and varied nature of civic engagement, but it can demonstrate whether an effect exists under the most rigorous of testing conditions. Although subject to human error, the public records we gather do not depend on fragile human memory or anyone’s desire to impress an interviewer. Given that the researchers and recording clerks only meet long after the court and voting documents have been produced, bias in the recording of the data is implausible. In addition, this approach can yield as close to a perfect response rate as the archives will allow, with little chance that jurors’ experience at the courtroom could influence the odds of their appearing in our final dataset. Because jury service is mandatory, it also brings into our study many people who embark on their public service journey at the county courthouse only reluctantly. Finally, our approach allows us to collect data spanning a period of years, such that we can measure the impact of jury service on voting in elections held months or even years after the study participants completed their service.
The United States jury system is unique in the world in the frequency of its use and its symbolic significance as a democratic institution. As Neil Vidmar writes, the American jury “remains a strong and vibrant institution even as it suffers criticism and calls for reform.” If the jury is “the lamp that shows that freedom lives,” it is ironic that so little is known about what impact the jury system as a democratic institution has on the citizenry who serve as jurors. Improving our understanding of the jury’s impact is vital, as many nations may choose to adopt or reject the jury based partly on beliefs about how jury service shapes the civic beliefs and actions of citizen-jurors. In particular, legal scholars Kent Anderson and Mark Nolan point out that the proponents of Japan’s new “quasi-jury” system marshaled two arguments in favor of greater public participation in the Japanese legal system — better and equitable legal outcomes and “the belief that it promotes a more democratic society.” Do juries, in fact, have such impacts? One theoretical justification for believing juries can help to sustain democracy comes from the work of small-group-communication scholar Ernest Bormann. His Symbolic Convergence Theory has helped to demonstrate that repeated, salient cultural practices can establish habitual ways of communicating in groups. As Bormann explains, successions of otherwise unremarkable public and educational group meetings, along with instruction about effective group behavior, over the course of decades gradually built the “public-discussion model” that emerged in the United States in the 20th century (and persists to this day). For nearly a century, that cultural model has shaped how people talk and think about group problem solving in the U.S. In a similar way, the cultural-institutional legacy of jury service may be public confidence in jury deliberation itself, as well as in the judges who oversee the process. Thus, we theorize that jury service promotes public support for the larger legal process in which citizens participate as jurors. If true, this finding would have tremendous significance for other nations — including Japan, Taiwan, and Mexico — that are considering implementing the all-citizen jury system, because the reforms they implement could be expected to bolster public faith and confidence in the legal system itself.
1998
One of the main and ongoing problems plaguing the American jury system has been ensuring that juries in civil and criminal trials are truly representative of the communities in which they serve. Historically, minorities have been disproportionately excluded from jury service. This shortfall results from a combination of factors at each stage of the juror identification process. At the jury pool stage, juror notification methods often fail to identify or reach minorities for tie simple reason that minorities generally are poorer and more transient. At the venire stage, those minorities who actually receive notification report to the courthouse at a lower rate than the majority because they ignore the summons and claim hardship more often. Finally, at the petit jury stage, prosecutors and other litigants typically eliminate most if not all, minority venirepersons through the use of both peremptory and for cause strikes. Authors Edward Adams and Christian Lane take on this problem of u...
International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 1999
The paper specifically addresses the many ways in which the facially neutral procedures actually fail to secure representative jury pools. Although the Sixth Amendment's fair cross-section requirement forbids systematic discrimination in the creation of the jury venire and panel, it does not guarantee that the criminal jury will in fact reflect an accurate cross-section of the community. As a result, not only does the Court fail to focus on nonlegally recognized screening mechanisms and factors such as exemptions, excuses, failure to followup jurors, etc., may affect jury representativeness, but also the Court never examined cross-sectional representation at the entirety of the jury selection processes, except jury panels and final juries. The first section of this paper presents a brief overview of the constitutional law impacting impartial juries, especially addressing the fair cross-section doctrine that is the focus of contemporary jmy selection procedures. In providing empirical and systematic comparisons of jury participation at each of the distinct jury selection stages encompassing a general population, jury wheels, jmy qualified pools, jury eligibles, jmy panels, and actual trial jurors, the second section of this paper makes critical analyses of the cumulative effects of screening mechanisms in jury selection. The paper assesses jury compositions by looking at demographic, socioeconomic , and ideological profiles of prospective jurors, illustrating that those jury profiles do not necessarily reflect cross-sectional representation of the community population at comprehensive stages of the jury selection process. The analytical findings show that unless some deep seated reforms are made to eliminate cumulative effects of selection biases and correct representative imbalances of jury wheels, qualified pools, jury panels, and trial juries, historically underrepresented groups such as racial minorities, the poor, and part-time employees will continue to be underrepresented on juries, negating the public's shared responsibility for the administration of justice in one of America's most heralded democratic institutions.