NCJ Number
196672
Journal
Sex Offender Law Report Volume: 3 Issue: 3 Dated: April/May 2002 Pages: 33-33,45-47,48
Date Published
April 2002
Length
6 pages
Annotation
This first article in a multi-part series on jury decision making in rape trials discusses some of the pitfalls and shortcomings that have developed in the process of producing justice through trial by jury, particularly in consent-defense rape cases.
Abstract
Rape cases in which the issue of consent is paramount generally involve a juror's subjective judgments regarding issues of witness credibility and culpability. This article describes the underlying assumptions and methodology used in a study designed to determine how juries "make sense" of the evidence presented at trial. This forms the basis for a theory of jury decision making to be presented by the author in a later article. Nine mock juries of 12 jurors apiece deliberated to verdict after reading 1 of 3 versions of a scripted consent-defense rape case. The cases varied in the "amount" of victim legitimacy presented, as defined by the extent of prior relationship between the defendant and the victim. After reading one of the three case variations along with jury instructions used in the trial of rape cases in Pennsylvania, jurors recorded their individual votes (verdict preference); simultaneously, they wrote brief narratives in support of their individual decisions. Single and multiple-level analyses assessed the weight individual jurors assigned to elements of the case and to the jury instructions when deciding how to vote. Following this individual-level data collection, each jury deliberated as a group. Each deliberation was observed, videotaped, and transcribed. The analysis focused on comparing the ways jurors voted individually with the manner in which they reached verdicts in groups. Another stage of the analysis measured the words and sentences spoken during the jury deliberations, so as to determine whether jurors referred to prior relationship and/or other measures of victim legitimacy while deliberating. This series will next discuss two perspectives concerning jury decision making.