Embedding Explained Jury Verdicts in the English Criminal Trial

Estimating the Accuracy of Jury Verdicts

Average accuracy of jury verdicts for a set of cases can be studied empirically and systematically even when the correct verdict cannot be known. The key is to obtain a second rating of the verdict, for example, the judge’s, as in the recent study of criminal cases in the United States by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC). That study, like the famous Kalven-Zeisel study, showed only m...

Forty Years of Civil Jury Verdicts

Debate over civil justice reform in the United States frequently centers on the extent to which damage awards granted by juries have been escalating over time. However, past studies on civil juries have been hampered by lack of data on verdicts spanning a sufficiently long time period. Average jury awards tend to be highly variable from year to year, making it difficult to distinguish trends ov...

Measuring the Consequences of Criminal Jury Trial Protections

The Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution guarantee criminal defendants the right to a jury trial and require that the elements of crimes be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Academics, judges, and practitioners generally assume that these constitutional guarantees protect defendants. Recently, however, scholars and even members of the Supreme Court have suggested that expand...

Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts

It is often suggested that requiring juries to reach a unanimous verdict reduces the probability of convicting an innocent defendant while increasing the probability of acquitting a guilty defendant. We construct a model that demonstrates how strategic voting by jurors undermines this basic intuition. We show that unanimity rule may lead to high probabilities of both kinds of errors and that th...

Cardinal Newman and Jury Verdicts: Reason, Belief, and Certitude