The Jury Crisis: What’s Wrong with Jury Trials and How We

The Jury Crisis: What’s Wrong with Jury Trials and How We Can Save Them

Juries have a bad reputation. Often jurors are seen as incompetent, biased and unpredictable, and jury trials are seen as a waste of time and money. In fact, so few criminal and civil cases reach a jury today that trial by jury is on the verge of extinction. Juries are being replaced by mediators, arbitrators and private judges. The wise trial of â€œTwelve Angry Menâ€ has become a fiction. As a result, a foundation of American democracy is about to vanish.

The Jury Crisis: Whatâ€™s Wrong with Jury Trials and How We Can Save Them addresses the near collapse of the jury trial in America â€“ its causes, consequences, and cures. Drury Sherrod brings his unique perspective as a social psychologist who became a jury consultant to the reader, applying psychological research to real world trials and explaining why juries have become dysfunctional.

While this collapse of the jury can be traced to multiple causes, including poor public education, the absence of peers and community standards in a class-stratified, racially divided society, and peopleâ€™s reluctance to serve on a jury, the focus of this book is on the conduct of trials themselves, from jury selection to evidence presentation to jury deliberations. Judges and lawyers believe â€“ wrongly â€“ that jurors can put aside their biases, sit quietly through hours, days or weeks of conflicting testimony, and not make up their minds until they have heard all the evidence. Unfortunately, the human brain doesnâ€™t work that way. A great deal of psychological research on jurors and other decision-makers shows that our brains intuitively leap to story-telling before we rationally analyze â€œfacts,â€ or evidence. Weaving details into a narrative is how we make sense of the world, and itâ€™s very hard to suppress this tendency. Consequently, a majority of jurors actually make up their minds before they have heard much of the evidence. Judges, arbitrators and mediators have similar biases.

The Jury Crisis deals with an important social problem, namely the near collapse of a thousand year old institution, and proposes how to fix the jury system and restore trial by jury to a more prominent place in American society.
Country USA
Brand Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Manufacturer Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 1 Halftones, black and white
ReleaseDate 2019-02-08
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781538109533

Country	USA
Brand	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Manufacturer	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	1 Halftones, black and white
ReleaseDate	2019-02-08
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781538109533

The Jury Crisis: What’s Wrong with Jury Trials and How We Can Save Them

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