Opinion ID: 1407576
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 15

Heading: The Bronson-Colorado Survey [83]

Text: About 1967, Professor Edward Bronson surveyed 718 persons drawn from jury lists in 8 Colorado counties. Half of these persons were interviewed in person, the balance over the phone. These subject/jurors were asked to agree or disagree with five statements related to crime and the criminal justice system. [84] The number of agree-responses was used as a measure of the tendency to favor the prosecution. (Note the response set' problem. Cf., ante, fn. 82.) Bronson also asked each respondent to indicate whether he or she strongly favored, favored, opposed, or strongly opposed capital punishment. He found that the number of agree-responses differed for each of the four capital punishment groups and that the amount of agreement tended to increase as support for the death penalty increased. This pattern of responses was statistically significant at the .01 level or less. In an attempt to determine what effect this had on the representation of attitudes on capital juries, Bronson compared the responses of the strongly opposed group  which he postulated was a Witherspoon -excludable group  with the combined responses of the remaining three groups. On all of the five questions, the strongly opposed group gave fewer prosecution prone responses than did the others. The differences between the groups ranged from 6 percent on question 2 to 30 percent on question 3. The results are graphed below.