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Jury Size and Verdict Consistency: “A Line has to be Drawn Somewhere”?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Robert T. Roper
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Abstract

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This research tests the simulated impact of Supreme Court decisions which allow for smaller than twelve-member juries. It identifies variation in judicial output that results from competing operating structures of jury decision making. The research employed a quasi-experimental design to address important problems of simulation, such as structural and functional verisimilitude. The sample consisted of 110 juries composed of nearly 1000 jurors. The findings indicate that a jury's size affects its behavior. Larger juries hang more often than smaller ones do. The degree to which this avoids the committing of a Type I or Type II judicial error remains to be seen; nevertheless, the Court was wrong in assuming that there are no differences in the behavior of twelve- and six-member juries.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , Summer 1980 , pp. 977 - 995
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

*

This research was funded by the Law Enforcement Assistance administration, U.S. Dept. of Justice. I wish to thank Bradley Canon and Dean Jaros for help in the project's development; and John Baker, Albert Melone, the Review's referees, and the editor for comments on previous drafts of this article. Additional data from this study is reported in “The Interactive Impact of a Jury's Operating Structure on the Accuracy of Evidence Recall,” Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming.

References

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