Compendium of "Mixed Juries" Receives Book Award
Juries, Lay Judges, and Mixed Courts: A Global Perspective, a book coedited by Sanja Kutnjak Ivković, Shari Seidman Diamond, Valerie P. Hans, and Nancy S. Marder, won the 2024 Lawrence S. Wrightsman Book Award. The honor was bestowed by the American PsychologyLaw Society.
After Mistrial Declared, Colorado Jurors Speak Out Against Holdout Colleague
CBS News Colorado quotes murder-case jurors expressing their frustration over their colleague who rigidly refused to vote to convict a sheriff’s deputy. The report is a peek into the dynamics of jury deadlocking.
"The Imagined Juror: How Hypothetical Juries Influence Federal Prosecutors"
That’s the title of a new book written by legal scholar Anna Offit. Anya Bernstein at the University of Connecticut wrote a laudatory review of The Imagined Juror in Law and Politics Book Review. Ms. Bernstein expresses appreciation for Offit’s application of ethnography (a methodology commonly used in anthropological research) to analyzing how prosecutors use their intuitions of a typical jury in making charging decisions. Across cases, Offit argues, prosecutors “approached nearly every aspect of their jobs” by considering the reactions of “laypeople—that is, laypeople of their own invention.”
Indigenous Peoples on Argentine Juries Are Setting a Record
The Jur-E Bulletin has repeatedly presented news of Argentina’s ongoing efforts to establish a jury trial system commonly used in adversarial court jurisdictions. We now report the province of Chaco established a triple requirement for jury selection. First, equal gender composition, second, if the accused is Indigenous, six of the twelve jurors must be Indigenous, and finally, if both the victim and the accused are Indigenous, all twelve jurors must be Indigenous. Last week, a jury of twelve members of the Qom and Wichi indigenous peoples found two men from the Qom community guilty of homicide. This is the first time a jury solely composed of Indigenous peoples rendered a verdict in a jury trial, hence its enormous historical and political significance. More details and photos are available here.
Without Judge Approval, Bailiff Tells Jurors to Erase Words from Whiteboard in Deliberation Room - Should Final Verdict Be Reversed?
A Georgia appellate panel in McCloud v. State says “No.” Their reasoning:
During the state's case-in-chief the courtroom bailiff informed the trial court that he had seen notes on the jury room’s chalkboard (also referred to in the record as a whiteboard). The notes suggested to the bailiff that the jurors were already discussing the case. The bailiff stated that he told the jurors to erase the notes and informed them that they could not discuss the case until the trial court instructed them to do so. The trial court then gave the jurors an instruction, agreed to by the prosecutor and McCloud's counsel, that they could not begin deliberating until the court told them to do so after the close of the evidence, and that until such time they must keep their notes to themselves and not discuss the case with each other. In two enumerations of error, McCloud argues that the trial court should have declared a mistrial sua sponte because the jury had improperly engaged in deliberations before the close of the evidence and because the bailiff, by telling the jury to erase their notes, “had caused the destruction of evidence of jury misconduct without any direction from the court or parties.” These claims of error are not subject to our review. McCloud did not preserve them for ordinary appellate review because he “did not raise any objection below to the trial court's handling of [this] issue.”