Opinion ID: 1407576
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 11

Heading: The Ellsworth Conviction-Proneness Study [76]

Text: The most recent controlled study of conviction-proneness was undertaken in 1979 by Drs. Phoebe Ellsworth, William Thompson, and Claudia Cowan. They recruited as subjects 288 adults eligible for jury service in California. Of the group of 288, most (218) had responded to a local newspaper advertisement asking for volunteers for a study of how juries make decisions; 37 were recruited from the jury lists for Santa Clara County Superior Court after being discharged from further jury duty; and 33 were friends of other persons who participated as subjects in the experiment. Forty-five percent of the subjects had had prior jury service. The subject/jurors participated in the study in groups of 12 to 36. They were shown a two-and-one-half-hour videotaped reenactment of an actual criminal trial. The videotape had been developed by Harvard Professor Reid Hastie for use in his studies of nonunanimous jury verdicts. Hastie based the tape on an actual trial in Massachusetts, although it was not a scripted reenactment of that trial but a spontaneous one. The actors in the tape had been provided with a transcript of the actual trial and other relevant materials. The prosecutor and defense counsel were told to conduct the case as they saw fit, and the witnesses themselves were to testify as closely as possible to the real testimony in the transcript. The role of the district attorney was played by a local prosecutor. The defense counsel was a defense attorney in private practice. The judge presiding over the trial was a Massachusetts judge and the role of the police officer witness was played by a recently retired policeman. Ellsworth altered the Hastie tape somewhat. Since the judge in the Hastie tape gave jury instructions based on Massachusetts law, that portion of the videotape was recreated with a law school dean acting as judge and giving CALJIC instructions. After this videotape had been played, each subject/juror was asked to indicate how he or she would vote, based upon his or her own personal individual decision. There were four possible verdicts: guilty of first degree murder, guilty of second degree murder, guilty of voluntary manslaughter, and not guilty by reason of self-defense or excusable homicide. The subjects' views on capital punishment had been previously determined. Of the 288 persons participating in the experiment, 30 were guilt phase includables and 258 were Witherspoon -qualified (i.e., persons who could impose the death penalty in at least some circumstances). [77] The results of the Ellsworth Conviction-Proneness Study are tabulated below: Ellsworth Conviction-Proneness Study: Juror Voting Behavior, Comparison of Witherspoon -Qualified and Guilt Phase Includable Jurors Guilt Phase Witherspoon - Verdict Includable Jurors Qualified Jurors First Degree Murder 3.3% (1) 7.8% (20) Second Degree Murder 23.3% (7) 21.3% (55) Manslaughter 26.7% (8) 48.9% (126) Acquittal 46.7% (14) 22.1% (57) __________ ___________ 100% (30) 100% (258) These results, Ellsworth concluded, provide strong support for the hypothesis that death qualified jurors are more likely to convict than are jurors excludable under the Witherspoon criteria. The most direct test of this hypothesis is a comparison of the relative proportion of guilty and not guilty verdicts among the two groups of jurors. Among the [ Witherspoon ] qualified jurors, 22.1% voted not guilty while 77.9% found the defendant guilty of some level of homicide. Among the [guilt phase excludable] jurors, 46.7% voted not guilty, and 53.3% voted guilty of some offense. This difference is highly significant [`p' value of less than .01] and indicates that the departure from representativeness created by the process of restricting juries in capital cases to [ Witherspoon ] qualified jurors only may have important negative consequences for defendants in death penalty trials. ( Ellsworth Conviction-Proneness Study, supra, at p. 7.) [78] Using a statistical process known as multiple regression analysis, Ellsworth also analyzed the data to determine whether the differences in the jurors' voting behavior could be attributable to factors other than differences in the jurors' attitudes toward capital punishment. She found that none of the other factors examined  prior jury service, age, sex, and source from which the subjects were recruited (i.e., newspaper advertisement or venire list)  correlated with voting behavior. Of the Ellsworth conviction-proneness study, Professor Zeisel testified, this study, with respect to its stimulus, comes as close to the ideal experiment as one can ever come.... There's no way of doing it better.