NCJ Number
153046
Journal
American Criminal Law Review Volume: 31 Issue: 4 Dated: (Summer 1994) Pages: 1225-1252
Date Published
1994
Length
28 pages
Annotation
After exploring three distinct historical justifications for jury trials, this article analyzes the tension between the ideals of an impartial jury and a jury of one's peers, followed by a discussion of the effect of jury science on these values, along with what this science accomplishes.
Abstract
Attorneys who have begun to use the social sciences to assess jurors are dissatisfied with the speculative approach to jury selection. Jury science is designed to replace the attorney's guesses and intuitions about members of the venire with empirical studies that connect expected biases with actual data about the jury pool. There is little consensus about the efficacy of these sciences. It is time for the legal community to question the role that jury science should play in the justice system. One commentator has warned that as "increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques meet decreasingly sophisticated jurors, the jury of the future might be highly susceptible to manipulation." Another expert admonishes that jury science will potentially undermine the moral values of the current justice system. Further, some scholars have cautioned that those who ignore the laws of science will be controlled by those who understand them. Jury science has received minimum scrutiny since it has been used by attorneys in jury selection. The legal community must pursue some sort of broad analytic framework for addressing the issues that the use of jury science raises. By adopting a framework similar to the one suggested in this article, the legal community can ensure that the science is applied equitably without damaging the legitimacy of the jury system. 116 footnotes