NCJ Number
171876
Journal
Judicature Volume: 79 Issue: 5 Dated: (March-April 1996) Pages: 263-265
Date Published
1996
Length
3 pages
Annotation
Despite what the U.S. Supreme Court has concluded, reducing the size of the jury has numerous negative consequences.
Abstract
In a series of decisions in the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court set aside 600 years of settled common law tradition and two centuries of constitutional history, including the reversal of its own precedents to the contrary, in holding that both criminal and civil juries smaller than 12 do not violate constitutional requirements. The Court's theory was that if a jurisdiction wants to save some time or money at no harm to the process or products of the jury's decisionmaking, then the Constitution has no complaint. The Court was mistaken; the most harmful consequence of reduced size is that it increases the unpredictability of verdicts and awards. Several lines of evidence lead to this conclusion. First, the law of large numbers, one of the most fundamental principles of mathematical statistics, teaches that the larger the sample size, the closer the results come to the population value. Empirical data confirm predictions of statistical theory. Mock jury experiments show that on the same evidence, smaller juries produce distributions of awards with wider dispersion than do larger juries. Also, this conclusion is consistent with common sense. Virtually everyone shares the intuition that smaller samples are less stable and trustworthy than larger ones. Although the Supreme Court has given the States and Federal courts permission to use smaller juries, this does not mean they are required to use them. Everyone will be better served when juries are restored to their traditional 12 members. 17 footnotes