The Sydney bomber study : introducing the mock jurors

The focus in this chapter is the mock jurors, their demographic characteristics and attitudinal profiles, and in particular, their attitudes to justice. The reason social scientists collect information about people's attitudes is because jurors who come to court fearful of terrorism may hold a potential prejudice against an accused person charged with terrorist offences. The presence of a bias or prejudice may make it difficult for citizens empanelled as jurors in a terrorism trial to remain neutral and objective. People are not always conscious of their social prejudices, and if they are, they may be reluctant to disclose their biases or prejudices openly, so we attempted to measure social prejudice using a range of indirect questions. We were interested in assessing general attitudinal dispositions about justice, towards courts, police and prosecutors, as well as specific attitudes towards particular people suspected of terrorism, and accused of terror-related activities.