You are on page 1of 2

Juries hearing a death penalty case: is there any bias?

Legal Background
In USA an important question of legal interest is whether the present jury
selection procedure used in cases in which capital punishment is a possibility is
biased against the defence. Some 90 percent of the criminal cases prosecuted in
America are settled by plea bargaining without a trial. Of the remainder, fewer
than half are heard by juries. And of those heard by juries, in only a portion is the
outcome truly in doubt. Hence in terms of frequency of invocation, a trial by jury
is the exception rather than the rule. Nonetheless, juries play a vital role in
American criminal law.
In USA, in each state and in each federal district, law and court rules establish
the basic lists from which juries are to be chosen. When a case is ready to be
heard by a jury, a group of summoned potential jurors are examinedusually by
the judge, often by the attorneys as wellto see if they should be excused from
the case for cause. The reasons a person may be excused for cause are
restricted to those that would directly impair their ability to hear the case
impartially, for example, being a close relative of the defendant, the victim, or
one of the attorneys, or having a fixed opinion on the defendants guilt. In
addition, the law provides for peremptory challenges for each side, which can be
used by the defense or the prosecution to eliminate potential jurors without
having to explain their reasons.
In capital cases jurors are also questioned on their views about the death
penalty, and some are excused because of their attitudes toward the death
penalty. At one time all jurors who opposed the death penalty were excluded
from capital cases.
In Witherspoon v. Illinois (1968) the Supreme Court limited this practice. Under
Witherspoon the only jurors who may be constitutionally excused from capital
cases for cause because of their opposition to the death penalty are those who
say either (a) that they would automatically vote against the death penalty in
every capital case, regardless of the evidence, or (b) that they could not be fair
and impartial in deciding a capital defendants guilt or innocence. In addition, in
some statesnotably Californiajurors are also excused for cause from capital
cases if they state that they would automatically vote for the death penalty in
every capital case in which they made a finding of first degree murder and
aggravated circumstances, regardless of the evidence. The accompanying data
is with regard to the California procedure.
The EXCEL sheet (jury_prejudice2) is based on survey which was administered to
811 persons eligible for jury duty in Alameda County, California at random by
random digit dialling. The questionnaire asked whether they could decide the
question of guilt or innocence fairly and impartially; 717 respondents indicated
that they could. (The remaining analyses are limited to those self-designated fair
and impartial respondents.) They were also asked whether their views on capital
punishment were such that they could never vote to impose it, or whether they
would vote to impose it in some cases. The results are shown in the Table given
in the EXCEL sheet.

The respondents were classified into two groups- NEVER and ALS: NEVER =
Never vote for Death Penalty. ALS = At least sometimes vote for death penalty.
The authors of the study concluded the following:
That those who would AT LEAST SOMETIMES impose the death penalty were
consistently more prone to favor the point of view of the prosecution, to mistrust
the criminal defendant and his counsel, to take a punitive attitude toward
criminals, and to be more concerned with crime control than with due process.
By contrast, those who would NEVER impose the death penalty tended to be
more concerned with mercy, more oriented toward due process, and less
mistrustful of the defendant and his legal representative.

Presentation to be made:
What are your findings based on the data. You can make different types of tables,
cross-tabulation, any graph to make your point. Please note the figures are
percentages of people of one group who answered the question. For example,
consider the first question:
Sr. No.

Questions

Better some guilty


go free

Group of
Responde
nt
NEVER

Agree
Strongly
32.5

Agree
Somewha
t
30

ALS

16.1

27.9

The data should be read as follows:


32.5% of 120 people belonging to NEVER group Strongly Agreed with the view
expressed in the question. Similarly 16.1% of 585 people belonging to ALS group
Strongly Agreed with the view expressed in the same question.

You might also like