Inconsistent Jury Verdicts

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...

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

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...

Verdicts of Conscience: Nullification and Necessity as Jury Responses to Crimes of Conscience