The Jury

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about the jury, focusing in particular on: (i) Bornstein and Greene’s 2011 definition of juries as being made up of twelve ordinary citizens with no legal training who must hear evidence, make sense of conflicting facts and reach a verdict; (ii) some key restrictions for jury eligibility in the UK, including age and location of residence; (iii) the fact that individuals are not eligible for jury duty if they lack capacity to give fully informed consent to do so; (iv) Kassin and Wrightman’s criticism of the blaming of juries for their poor decision making; (v) Eisenberg and colleagues’ 2005 research, which found that judges agree with jury verdicts 75-80% of the time; (vi) the tasks that a jury must perform, involving understanding a judge’s instructions, deciding which information to trust and reaching a unanimous verdict; (vii) breaking down the elements and challenges of listening to and following the directions of a judge (viii) Judge Jerome Frank’s scathing review of the usefulness of a jury; (ix) Findlay’s 2008 report, which stated that many jurors failed to properly understand DNA profiling evidence; (x) the Innocence Project, which supports people in overturning wrongful convictions; (xi) the Innocence Project’s findings that misleading and false forensic evidence was a factor in 24% of wrongful convictions nationally; (xii) the verdict and evidence driven approaches that juries can take when reaching a verdict; (xiii) jury susceptibility to incorrect beliefs, including their views on the effectiveness of interrogation techniques.

About the lecturer

Dr Cody Porter is a senior lecturer in social psychology in the department of Health and Social Sciences at the University of the West of England. Dr Porter’s research interests are in information elicitation, lie detection and offending behaviour. Some of Dr Porter’s recent publications include ‘Implementing converged security risk management: Drivers, barriers, and facilitators’ (in press) and ‘Applying the asymmetric information management technique to insurance claims’ (2022).