Preempting Jury Challenges: Strategies for Courts and Jury System Administrators

Improving the Jury System: Reducing Jury Size

Within the last several years there has been increasing concern over the rising costs of California's legal system. Many within and outside of the legal community have focused their attention on the issues of caseload volume, delay and congestion within California courts as a result of the rising number of civil and criminal cases. These mounting concerns have spawned a growing movement for cou...

Improving the Jury System: Peremptory Challenges

One of the most controversial stages in the jury selection process is the lawyers' exercise of peremptory challenges. Peremptory challenges allow a party to remove a prospective juror from the jury panel without giving any reasons. The United States Supreme Court has held that the purpose of the peremptory challenge is "to assure the parties that the jurors before whom they try the case will de...

Peremptory Challenges and Jury Selection

I examine how peremptory challenges, which are vetoes that attorneys may use on prospective jurors, affect jury composition. The purpose of peremptory challenges is to eliminate biased jurors, however I show that under the two most common rules used in the United States peremptory challenges make biased juries more likely. I show that if unanimity is required for conviction, the distribution of...

Diversity and Fairness in the Jury System

Extending the Condorcet Jury Theorem to a general dependent jury

We investigate necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Bayesian-Nash equilibria that satisfy theCondorcet Jury Theorem (CJT ). In theBayesian game Gn among n jurors, we allow for arbitrary distribution on the types of jurors. In particular, any kind of dependency is possible. If each juror i has a “constant strategy”, σ i (that is, a strategy that is independent of the size n ≥...