Opinion ID: 1407576
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: The Zeisel Study [59]

Text: In the fall and winter of 1954-1955, Professor Hans Zeisel and two associates interviewed a number of jurors who had actually deliberated on felony cases in the Criminal Court of Chicago, Illinois, or the County Court of Kings County (Brooklyn), New York. Zeisel's purpose was to explore whether the jurors' attitudes toward capital punishment correlated with a tendency to vote for guilt or acquittal in criminal cases. He asked the jurors whether they had any conscientious scruples against the death penalty [60] and how they had voted on the first ballot after the jury started to deliberate. Asking only these two questions would have resulted in a wholly uncontrolled study, for in this posture, the factor of the strength of the evidence had not been taken into account. Zeisel devised a rather ingenious question to get at this factor. He concluded that the strength of the evidence in a given case could be roughly estimated and compared with other cases by determining how the jury as a whole voted on the first ballot after deliberations began. Thus, a first ballot vote of 11-to-1 in favor of acquittal suggested a weak case against the accused; a 10-to-2 vote for acquittal indicated a weak case but not quite so weak; a 9-to-3 vote for acquittal, an even less weak case; and so on, through all 11 possible jury splits, to 11-to-1 for conviction. [61] By grouping each juror's vote into one of the eleven categories or constellations based on the strength of the evidence  from the weakest prosecution evidence to the strongest  Zeisel could roughly control for the weight of the evidence. Zeisel conducted his interviews in the jury assembly room on the last day of the jurors' terms of service. He and his associates interviewed as many jurors who actually sat on a case as possible. Some had deliberated on two cases. Most of the jurors contacted agreed to be interviewed. Zeisel ended up with data on 464 first ballot votes. These were classified according to the strength of the evidence, using the first ballot split as an index of this strength. He compiled the results into table form as follows: Zeisel found that in 10 of the 11 constellations of evidence strength, jurors with conscientious scruples against capital punishment voted to acquit more often than jurors without such scruples. In 9 of the 11 constellations, jurors without such conscientious scruples voted to convict more often than jurors with scruples. [62] Zeisel determined that these differences between the first ballot guilty votes of the jurors without conscientious scruples against capital punishment and the first ballot guilty votes of jurors with such scruples were statistically significant at the.04 level. ( Zeisel, supra, at p. 32.) At the hearing below, he elaborated on his findings. Whatever the case is, if there is a split ballot, my statement is [that] jurors who have scruples against the death penalty as a group will have a lower percentage of guilty votes than jurors [who] have no scruples. [63]