So we got the facts...now what?

Are Twelve Heads Better than One?

By Phoebe C. Ellsworth

I actually found this article to a rather intriguing and eye-opening study. Essentially, Ellsworth conducted a study of a mock trial using a random sampling of people from California. After watching a video-taped reinactment of a criminal trial, the participants were divided in 18 juries and asked to deliberate for one hour in an attempt to reach a verdict (which was not expected). The point of the study was to record the jury deliberations in order to see how much jury members understand about the law when it comes to discussing the facts of the case.

The results were interesting, and not all that surprising. In general juries did a fine job of understanding the facts of the case, and were able to accurately discuss them in order formulate opinions of the trial. Yet it was somewhat upsetting to see how little people truly understood the essence of the law when it came to applying the judge's instructions, yet this is understandable because people are generally ignorant of the law. Just one of last week's articles easily demonstrates this - Seron's article about providing legal representation to impoverished tenants in NYC. Simply having someone with legal knowledge present immediately increase the efficiency of their cases and, if I remember correctly, doubled the rate at which cases were determined in their favor.

Essentially, we are now taking those people who know very little about the law and are asking them to render a legally sound verdict. That's very hard to do, and unsurprisingly, the juries struggled in this study to do it. It's amazing and that juries are often given these legal instructions when discussing a case, and much of the time have no interpretation of those instructions, nor any way of even remembering them. By serving on a jury, each member is already having a great deal of neew information thrown at them in a very short time, and honesetly it's surpring they do as well with the facts as they do. But in general, they have very little help when it comes to the legal issues they must confront, and that really represents a problem within the legal system. Furthermore, it's upsetting that the judge's intructions may actually hinder the deliberation process (i.e. "We can't speculate about what the defendent was thinking or what he wasn't thinking.")

And though I know the law is very difficult to understand without a degree or at least some type of legal education, I was actually surprised by some of the things coming out of the juror's mouths -"Yeah that's right. Self-defense would be manslaughter," or "If you kill your girlfriend, it's manslaughter." Neither of those phrases really makes any sense, and just goes to show how little we commong folk understand the law. Though it's interesting to note in the introduction how juries are often picked by the defense becase they are not the best and the brightest, rather the ideal jury is more common and less educated than some of the potential jurors who pass through.

So, are 12 heads better than one? One might think so, but that does not appear to be the case at all when it comes to interpretating the law, because clearly only one of those 13 heads has the education to properly do so.