Psychology in the Jury Room
Going by the contents of the research publications I read, scientific studies of legal practice are pretty rare. Since ours is a society of laws, and since lawyers are indeed important to its present manner of functioning, scientists really should enter the legal realm and snoop around---or so I think, anyhow.
Which is why I was delighted to encounter one report of some psychologists' attempts to understand how juries arrive at decisions. Nancy Pennington and Reid Hastie, both with the University of Colorado, recruited people called for jury duty but not empanelled to serve on an actual trial. The recruits watched a movie of a murder trial, realistically reenacted by professional actors. The psychologists then interviewed each of their quasi-jurors, asking detailed questions to outline the reasoning that led them to declare the defendant innocent or guilty. The psychologists repeated this procedure, recording the views and judgments of panel after panel of would-be jurors.
They found that nearly half of what the jurors used as the basis for their decisions hadn't been presented in the courtroom. That is, as the jurors explained the steps by which they had reached a verdict, the interviewing psychologists made careful note of what references were made to specific events. Forty-five percent of those events had not been included in the testimony. They came instead from each juror's experience, assumptions about human nature, and judgments about the character and psychology of the participants in the case.
The jurors had paid attention to what was presented---collectively, the jury panels accurately recalled 93 percent of the facts in the case---but had found it inadequate to make sense of what had occurred. The jurors, in effect, were writing stories instead of analyzing details. They were spinning threads to connect the disconnected points of evidence into a whole script that was coherent in terms of their own experience. So they listened to the evidence and the arguments, but they cast those presentations in terms of what they knew---or thought they did.
One point in the case seemed to illustrate this especially well. The murder was the result of a stabbing in the parking lot of a bar in which, earlier on the night of the killing, the defendant and the victim had argued heatedly. From courtroom testimony, it was not clear whether the defendant had returned to his home to get the lethal knife after the argument or if he had it when he first entered the bar. Jurors of conventional upper middle class backgrounds were highly likely to assume the defendant had gone home to pick up the knife, which would indicate premeditation and hence a verdict of guilty. The jurors were extrapolating from the world as they knew it; bankers, stockbrokers, and suchlike usually do not pack weapons when they go out for some social drinking. However, working-class jurors were far more likely to accept that the defendant would carry a knife as a matter of course, and would more easily believe that the stabbing could be unpremeditated, self-defense, or even accidental.
Pennington thinks her work suggests that trial procedures should be revamped with an eye toward presenting facts in reasonable rather than legal order. For example, murder trials often begin with a coroner's testimony that a death occurred. "Juries have little or nothing to tie such facts to unless an attorney suggested an interpretation in the opening statement," Pennington said.
That's an alarming thought, giving rise to images of jurors writing internal novelettes to suit the prosecutor's plot---unless, of course, the attorney for the defense is better at pitching plausible fiction. It all boils down to this; no matter how strong the facts, studies show that jurors arrange details to reflect their beliefs.
