Abstract
For hundreds of years, in both English and American courts, the jury was a twelve-person group whose members were required to agree unanimously on a verdict. In recent decades, two significant changes have altered the jury’s form. Some jurisdictions now employ juries of six rather than twelve; others allow juries to reach majority decisions rather than unanimous ones. To conclude our study of jury decision-making, we need to explore the impact of these two changes on the functioning of the contemporary jury.
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Notes
Williams v. Florida 399 U.S. 78 (1970) at 89–90.
Ibid, at 100.
See Zeisel, H. (1971). . . . And then there were none: The diminution of the federal jury. University of Chicago Law Review, 38, 710–724.
See Lempert, R. O. (1975). Uncovering “nondiscernible” differences: Empirical research and the jury-size cases. Michigan Law Review, 73, 643–708, for another analysis.
Zeisel (1971), p. 720.
Colgrove v. Battin 413 U.S. 149 (1973).
Ibid., p. 159 n. 15.
Ibid., pp. 166–167. Footnotes omitted.
Saks, M. J. (1982). Innovation and change in the courtroom. In N. L. Kerr and R. M. Bray (Eds.) The Psychology of the Courtoom. New York: Academic Press.
We only touch on some of the major criticisms here. For fuller discussion see: Saks, M. J. (1977). Jury Verdicts. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books. Zeisel, H., and Diamond, S. S. (1974). “Convincing empirical evidence” on the six-member jury. University of Chicago Law Review, 41, 281–295.
Ballew v. Georgia 435 U.S. 223 (1978) at 239.
Saks (1982), Tanke, E. T., and Tanke, T. J. (1979). Getting off a slippery slope: Social science in the judicial process. American Psychologist, 34, 1130–1138.
DiPerna, P. (1984). Juries on Trial: Faces of American Justice. New York: Dembner Books.
For discussion of the origins of the unanimity requirement, see Apodaca v. Oregon 406 U.S. 404 (1972).
Quoted in Brooks, N. (1978). The unanimity requirement: Essential or anarchronistic feature of the jury? Draft, Law Reform Commission of Canada.
Johnson v. Louisiana 406 U.S. 356 (1972); Apodaca v. Oregon (1972). The decisions involved questions of federal jurisdiction over the states as well as issues relating to jury behavior.
Hans, V. P. (1978). The effects of the unanimity requirement on group decision processes in simulated juries. Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto.
Hastie, R., Penrod, S. D., and Pennington, N. (1983). Inside the Jury. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
See Saks (1977); Nerneth, C. (1977). Interactions between jurors as a function of majority vs. unanimity decision rules. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 7, 38–56; Kerr, N. L., Atkin, R. S., Stasser, G., Meek, D., Holt, R. W., and Davis, J. (1976). Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt: Effects of concept definition and assigned decision rule on the judgments of mock jurors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 282–294.
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© 1986 Valerie P. Hans and Neil Vidmar
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Hans, V.P., Vidmar, N. (1986). Six versus Twelve, All versus Some. In: Judging the Jury. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6463-2_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6463-2_11
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