Opinion ID: 1407576
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: The Jurow Study [67]

Text: Professor Jurow undertook the first controlled experiment in the post- Witherspoon era. His subjects were 211 employees at a Sperry-Rand Corporation plant on Long Island, New York. Virtually all of these individuals were eligible for jury duty. One-third of the subjects had had prior jury service. The group was overwhelmingly white (98.6 percent), fairly well educated, and had a relatively high median family income. [68] Women constituted 26 percent of the subjects; Catholics nearly 50 percent; engineers 39 percent; and clerical workers and laborers 29 percent. Jurow prepared two audiotapes of simulated criminal trials. A script was prepared for each case, which attempt[ed] to weight the evidence as evenly as possible between acquittal and conviction. ( Jurow, supra, 84 Harv.L.Rev. at p. 581.) The script included opening statements by the attorneys, witnesses' testimony, direct and cross-examination, arguments of counsel, and the judge's instructions to the jury. The audiotapes were pretested to insure that the evidence was appropriately balanced and that the recordings were realistic and did enhance listener involvement. ( Ibid. ) The first audiotape lasted 33 minutes (case I). It involved the murder of a liquor store proprietor during a holdup and the apprehension and trial of an ex-convict seen running from the vicinity of the store who denied any knowledge of the robbery and murder. ( Ibid. ) The second tape (case II) lasted 50 minutes. It portrayed a narcotics addict charged with robbing, raping, and killing a college girl in her apartment. ( Ibid. ) [69] At the conclusion of each tape, the subject/jurors were given time to think about their verdict and mark a ballot. There were no deliberations by the subject/jurors as a group. The attitudes of the subject/jurors toward capital punishment were determined on a five-part spectrum, closely corresponding to the spectrum portrayed on page 20, ante. [70] The percentage of guilty votes cast within each group can be depicted as follows: In both cases, Jurow found some tendency for an attitude favorable to capital punishment to correlate with a tendency to vote for conviction. In case I (the liquor store robbery-murder), this tendency was highly significant (the p value was less than.01); in case II, the tendency was at best marginally significant (the p value is greater than .05). Petitioner has reorganized the Jurow data, to compare directly the percentage of guilty votes cast by the automatic life imprisonment category with the percentage of guilty votes cast by the remaining categories lumped together. [71] This reorganization has been graphed as follows: Jurow represented a significant advance in the controlled studies in two respects. One, since his study followed Witherspoon, Jurow was able to ask his capital punishment questions in a manner precisely relevant to post- Witherspoon capital trials. [72] Two, Jurow used a method for presenting evidence to his subject/jurors (i.e., audiotapes) that was much closer to a real trial than were the written questionnaires employed in Goldberg and Wilson. In that regard, it can be expected that the differences reported in Jurow are probably a closer approximation to reality than are those reported by the other two studies. Jurow is not a definitive controlled study, however. Its presentation of evidence involved only oral, not visual, stimuli. The subjects were drawn from a limited population. There were no group deliberations and there may have been little felt responsibility on the part of the subjects as compared to actual jurors sitting in a real trial. [73]