Opinion ID: 1407576
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 17

Heading: The Bronson-California Surveys [91]

Text: Professor Bronson, who had earlier conducted a survey of jurors in Colorado (cf., ante, pp. 43-44), was interested in seeing whether the results of that survey could be replicated in California. He, therefore, conducted two similar surveys in this state, the first in Butte County in 1969-1970 and the second in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Stockton in 1974-1975. These surveys were administered by students over the telephone except in Los Angeles. There, the jury commissioner handed out Bronson's questionnaire. The Butte County survey involved 755 persons on the jury list of a small, relatively homogeneous, rural county. ( Bronson-California, supra, at p. 12.) The jurors were given substantially the same five questions as in the Bronson-Colorado survey. [92] In addition, Bronson added two new questions to the survey. [93] As in Bronson-Colorado, an agree answer was used as a measure of the tendency to favor the prosecution. Bronson found that on each question the percentage of agree responses increased as the jurors' approval of the death penalty increased. As in Bronson-Colorado, Professor Bronson again compared the responses of the group strongly opposed to the death penalty with the combined responses of the remaining groups. [94] On all seven of the questions, the strongly opposed group gave fewer agree responses than did the others. The differences ranged from 16 percent on question 6 to 52 percent on question 3. The results are graphed below. The Los Angeles-Sacramento-Stockton portion of the survey involved 707 jurors and 7 questions. Four of the questions were identical to those asked in the Butte County survey; two questions were reworded in an attempt to overcome problems of response set (questions 2 and 6); and a new question was substituted for question 7 of the Butte County survey. [95] The responses to four of the seven questions showed a statistically significant relationship between support for capital punishment and the number of pro-prosecution responses. (P values of less than .001.) The differences among the groups on the remaining three questions (numbers 2, 6, and 7) were not statistically significant. [96] The chart below reflects Bronson's comparison of the pro-prosecution responses of the strongly opposed group with the combined pro-prosecution responses of the remaining groups: