What's in the Box? Punishment and Insanity in the Canadian Jury Deliberation Room

In insanity cases, although the defendant's eventual punishment is legally irrelevant to the jury's decision, it may be psychologically relevant. In this three-part mixed-methods study, Canadian jury eligible participants (N = 83) read a fictional murder case involving an insanity claim, then took part in 45-min deliberations. Findings showed that mock jurors who were generally favourable towards punishment had a lower frequency of utterances that supported the Defence's case. A qualitative description of keyword flagged utterances also demonstrated that mock jurors relied on moral intuitions about authority, harm, and fairness in justifying their positions. These findings may have application in crafting effective Judge's instructions and lawyer's opening statements.

Waiving Jury Deliberation

This article argues that, given the current pervasive uncertainty about the reliability of jury deliberation, we ought to treat it with epistemic humility. I further argue that epistemic humility should be expressed and enforced by turning jury deliberation from a mandatory rule of the jury trial to a waivable right of the defendant. I consider two main objections to my argument: the first one concerns the putative self-defeatingness of humility attitudes; the second objection points to the burdensomeness of granting an unconditional jury deliberation waiver to the defendant.

Inequality in talk and group size effects: An analysis of measures

The earliest studies of talk in small groups indicated that larger groups experience more inequality in participation than smaller groups. However, there has been insufficient attention to how to properly measure inequality when group size varies. We describe properties of a common inequality metric, the Gini coefficient, and consider it in light of early efforts that modeled talk in small groups using harmonic and exponential distributions. We use these classic distributions to develop novel inequality measures and also consider a measure developed specifically to examine inequality across small systems of different sizes (the CON). We apply all measures of inequality to data from four highly realistic jury deliberation datasets, including one involving real juries, examining both word counts and turns. All indicators correlate very highly with one another, but both the Gini and a Gini adjusted for group size privilege smaller groups over larger ones, producing significant positive correlations with group size. The model-based values and the CON offer a different ordering of datasets compared to the Gini and do not show the same correlations with group size. Results offer several reasons to recommend the CON measure as a promising way of comparing inequality across small groups of different sizes.

Assessment of the Jury Systems in Asia: A Comparison of Korea and Japan

This article compares the Korean and Japanese jury systems, evaluating the performance of jury trials as reflected in empirical studies in these countries, and identifying some innovative practices in Korean and Japanese systems that can be adopted by other jurisdictions. This comparative study of Korean and Japanese jury systems will also address common problems and investigate different approaches to those problems. At this juncture, numerous existing empirical studies conducted in both countries provide a good framework for comparison. Although jury trials are firmly entrenched within the Korean and Japanese legal systems, there are several common challenges faced by each country that uses lay juries: avoidance of bias, judicial oversight and intervention for reasoned decision-making, importance of rationality in the jury deliberation process, etc. A careful analysis of the Korean and Japanese experiences will provide useful guidance to not only policymakers in Asia but also criminal justice scholars around the world.