Opinion ID: 1407576
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: conviction proneness

Text: An ideal experiment can be conceived to test directly the hypothesis that a death-qualified jury is more conviction-prone than is a non-death-qualified jury. A large number of jurors would sit through a real jury trial. At its conclusion, they would break up into components of 12. Some panels would be comprised wholly of death-qualified jurors and some would not. They would deliberate as a jury and return a verdict. By comparing the percentage of cases in which each type of jury returned not guilty verdicts, verdicts of guilty on the various degrees of the offenses, and verdicts on lesser included offenses, the proposition could be directly tested. However, such an experiment is legally impossible. Thus, the hypothesis must be tested indirectly. One method of indirect analysis is to locate persons who have actually sat on juries and ask them what they did. The strength of this method  which was used in the Zeisel study that follows  is that its data are derived from a very realistic setting: an actual trial. The weakness of this method is the difficulty of controlling for a very important variable: the strength of the evidence. Since it is difficult to assure that the subjects of this type of research experienced the same kind of evidence, it is correspondingly difficult to determine whether any differences discovered reflect true differences in the subjects or merely differences in the stimuli to which they have been exposed. A second type of approach in researching this issue is a controlled study, i.e., a study done in a controlled setting, in which realistic stimuli are so presented that every subject/juror is exposed to the exact same stimuli. If this is done well, then any differences observed must be real differences between the people and not differences in the kinds of experiences to which they are responding. The remaining five studies in this portion of this opinion are of this controlled study variety.