NCJ Number
180983
Journal
Law and Human Behavior Volume: 23 Issue: 6 Dated: December 1999 Pages: 705-714
Date Published
December 1999
Length
10 pages
Annotation
This paper critiques the findings of Hastie, Schekade, and Payne (1998) regarding the performance of jurors and juries in verdicts on whether punitive damages should be allowed.
Abstract
They concluded that jurors are very poor at making these decisions. They then discussed the legal policy implications of their findings regarding the role of juries in deciding punitive damages, including proposals to substantially change procedures in jury trials. This paper identifies a serious conceptual flaw in the experiment that renders it irrelevant to legal policy. Specifically, the experiment asked the jurors to make decisions about law, decisions that are in the exclusive province of the judge. Additionally, the authors created the impression that trial judges, as opposed to juries, were in agreement on the appropriateness of damages and would have "got it right" if they had decided the cases. In fact, this was not true in two of the four cases. The author also discusses the basic presumptions on which the experiment was based and his concerns about the policy implications the Hastie study drew from its research. 36 references