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Jury Deliberation

Jury deliberation begins when a trial ends and the jury moves to a secluded location to discuss the evidence and arrive at a decision. Understanding how juries reach their decisions is a prerequisite for answering the question of how well they serve their function in a democratic society. Jury deliberation has been studied empirically by social science researchers for more than 50 years now, but direct access to the jury room has been always greatly limited due to a concern that any

“external” presence in the deliberation room could influence the jury's decision. As a result, researchers have relied on two other methodologies to study jury deliberation: experimental studies with mock juries and posttrial reconstructions of actual deliberation via surveys of and/or interviews with former jurors.

This entry summarizes what has been learned about jury deliberation using these two methodologies. The picture that emerges is one in which juries take their task seriously and generally do a good job of reviewing the evidence, although they often struggle with their instructions. Influence in juries is a function of information exchange and the pressure to conform. An excellent predictor of the jury's final verdict turns out to be the distribution of verdict preferences on the jury's first vote; the verdict favored by the initial majority ends up being the jury's final verdict about 90% of the time. However, the initial majority does not always prevail, and these “reversals” represent some of the most interesting products of jury decision making.

A General Model of Deliberation

A simple stage model provides a reasonable framework for thinking about jury behavior in many, if not most, deliberations. In the first stage, jurors get oriented toward each other and their task. They settle in, introduce themselves, select a foreperson, and discuss how they will do things. In the second stage, which takes up the bulk of the time spent in deliberation, jurors discuss the evidence, take opinion polls (or “votes”), and confront disagreement among members. During this stage, conflict often surfaces, efforts are made to persuade other jurors to change their minds, and the jury moves toward a consensus. In the final stage, the jury achieves sufficient agreement (usually unanimity) to reach a verdict, followed by attempts to smooth ruffled feathers, reconcile individuals to the group's decision, and help everyone feel good about the collective verdict. Jury deliberations vary considerably in length, but most last somewhere between 2 and 4 hours.

The Foreperson

Juries typically receive little instruction regarding how they ought to deliberate, but one thing they are all told to do is choose a foreperson. Forepersons are usually selected early, often immediately after members assemble in the jury room but occasionally not until the end of deliberation. Most of the time, the selection process is brief and even perfunctory, particularly in criminal juries. Forepersons tend to be White, male, better educated, seated at the end of the table, and the first to speak or the first to identify the need to select a foreperson. This profile suggests that juries tend to eschew confrontation and rely on stereotypes and subtle interpersonal cues (such as seating and order of speaking) to identify a “natural leader.” Only two task-relevant characteristics have been found to be associated with forepersons: They tend to have previous experience as jurors, and they sometimes have a relevant occupational background in civil settings (e.g., an accountant being chosen in a trial featuring complex financial transactions). Much of the research on forepersons was conducted before 1970, however, and it is unclear if the findings related to a foreperson's demographic characteristics still hold in the wake of systematic efforts to increase the demographic diversity of juries as well as significant changes in societal attitudes over the last 40 years.

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