The effect of deliberation on jury verdicts

As ordinary citizens, jurors bring to court a diversity of emotions and views about crime, punishment and terrorism. They may also have different preferred styles of learning, and different capacity for empathy. For some, their dispositions may be so entrenched that the jury experience cannot budge them—not the evidence, nor the judge’s instructions, nor even deliberation with fellow citizens. On the other hand, it is likely that many jurors enter the courtroom with a variety of expectations and prejudices, but that participatory immersion in the experience of the criminal justice process will shape and shift at least some of these views. An extensive body of prior research has demonstrated that jury decisions are affected far more by the particulars of the evidence presented in the context of a specific trial than by jurors’ pre-existing attitudes and dispositions. Thus, general attitudinal biases in jurors are not thought to pose a substantial threat to justice outcomes, as these attitudinal dispositions are expected to balance out across a jury composed of 12 diverse community members. In addition, the strength of individual pre-deliberation attitudes may be reduced by the experience of group deliberation. For example, in one real criminal case, pre-deliberation attitudes among empanelled jurors had a strong association with preferred verdict before deliberation; this difference largely disappeared after deliberation. Factors arising from group dynamics, such as cohesion, norms arising within each group5 or the influence of particular individual jurors on group decisions may all contribute to reduce the influence of pre-deliberation predispositions and attitudes.