Duties and Rights of Juries Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Jurors play a unique and somewhat paradoxical role in the U.S. criminal justice system. Most criminal justice actors, such as police, prosecutors and defense attorneys, and trial judges, are paid professionals whose ethical responsibilities are exhaustively delineated in state and federal statutes and administrative rules, professional codes of conduct, contractual obligations of employment, and professional acculturation. Jurors, in contrast, receive no specialized training in law or criminal justice.

The only formal expression of their ethical responsibility is articulated in a remarkably general oath of service to render a verdict that comports with the evidence and applicable law. Instead, juror ethics is grounded in broader principles of moral behavior including honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, compassion, and courage. Jurors have certain duties, and those duties change over the course of their jury service both with respect to whom those duties are owed and the relative importance of different ethical principles. Jurors also have rights that may need to be enforced against individuals within the criminal justice system.

Jurors’ Paradoxical Role

The criminal justice system in America is primarily a state-run rather than a private institution. Although some jurisdictions still permit private individuals to pursue criminal claims for limited types of cases, most criminal cases are initiated by state and local police officers and prosecuted by district attorneys, all of which are employees of the executive branch. Even the trial judge, whose judicial responsibilities include protecting the substantive and procedural rights of criminal defendants, are part of the public infrastructure of government. As public employees, all of these individuals adhere to certain ethical standards of behavior. These ethical requirements are grounded in constitutional and statutory provisions, administrative rules, professional codes of conduct, and contractual obligations of employment. Failure to abide by these requirements can result in professional discipline, employment sanctions, loss of licensure, and even criminal charges under some circumstances.

Jurors, in contrast, are private citizens who are conscripted into public service. Qualifications for jury service are statutorily defined and generally require only U.S citizenship, residency in the jurisdiction, minimum age of 18, the ability to speak and understand English, and the absence of any legal disqualifications such as prior felony convictions or an adjudication of incompetency. Of key significance, jury service does not require any particular educational or occupational expertise. In fact, it is jurors’ status as laypersons that is the essence of their unique role in the criminal justice system. Because jurors are randomly selected from the community, they are believed to be largely independent of and immunized from the political or institutional biases of other criminal justice actors. They are valued because they bring common sense, life experience, and community values to bear when deciding the guilt or innocence of criminal defendants. Their verdicts reflect the collective judgment of the community, and thus simultaneously legitimize the decisions of the judicial branch and provide a bulwark against tyranny from overzealous or corrupt police, prosecutors or judges.

A jury summons is a specialized court order demanding that a person appear at the courthouse on a specified date to be considered for service as a trial juror. Failure to do so can result in arrest, the imposition of fines, and even incarceration for contempt of court. Although jury service is compulsory, rendering a verdict in a criminal trial—the cornerstone of the juror’s role—has remarkably few legally enforceable constraints. The only formal articulation of jurors’ ethical obligations is the oath they swear upon being selected as trial jurors, which typically consists of a promise to render a verdict in accordance with the evidence and applicable law. Jurors cannot legally be punished or rewarded for their verdicts. From an ethical standpoint, their behavior is governed almost exclusively by broader ethical principles that define and characterize good or moral behavior in contemporary society. These principles include honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, compassion, and courage.

Two additional aspects of jury service are implicated in the ethical duties and rights of trial jurors. The first involves two questions: (1) to whom do jurors owe a duty, and (2) which ethical principles take precedence in governing their service. In most jurisdictions, the term juror encompasses an individual’s public service from the receipt of the jury summons, through the process of selecting the trial jurors, through the trial itself, the jurors’ deliberations, and the public announcement of a verdict. Jurors are subject to different duties involving different ethical principles at each of these stages of jury service.

As prospective jurors who have been summoned for jury service, they owe a duty to their communities to be responsible citizens. Responsibility encompasses their duty to appear for service as directed in the jury summons, to respond candidly to questions about their qualifications for jury service, and to uphold the social contract of shared participation in the burdens of jury service and an implied commitment to the rule of law to guide private conduct. During jury selection, they owe a duty to the litigants—the defendant and the prosecution—to be candid in responding to questions about their ability to judge fairly and impartially. If selected as a trial juror, they owe a duty to the litigants to listen attentively to the trial proceedings and to refrain from drawing conclusions about the defendant’s guilt until all of the evidence has been presented. During jury deliberations, jurors owe a duty to the other jurors to consider all of the competing interpretations of the evidence, and to set aside preexisting biases and judge the evidence fairly and impartially. In delivering the verdict, jurors owe a duty of fairness to the litigants and responsibility to their communities that may require substantial amounts of personal courage if the verdict goes against public sentiment or institutional interests.

Finally, the collective nature of jury service is an important distinction between jurors and other criminal justice actors. While the actions of a single police officer reflects on the police department as a whole (for good or ill), those actions are nevertheless governed and judged individually. The same is true for individual prosecutors, defense attorneys, and trial judges. They are all accountable for their individual actions and decisions. Jurors, on the other hand, render a collective verdict. Thus, their individual ethical responsibilities of honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness, compassion, and courage become somewhat diffused, making it extremely difficult to hold individual jurors morally accountable for their verdicts. This lack of individual accountability is both an inherent protection against potential jury tampering or coercion and a weakness insofar that each verdict ultimately depends on the collective integrity of the jurors.

Duties of Jurors

The ethical principles enumerated above are implicated in the duties that jurors owe in fulfilling their jury service to some degree at all times, but their relative importance may depend on the stage of jury service and the nature of the case. The ethical principle of fairness is perhaps the most frequently articulated duty owed by jurors, but in the earliest stage of jury service, when jurors first receive their jury summons, they rarely know to which case they may be assigned. They simply know that they have been selected to become a member of the pool of prospective jurors to be considered for one of possibly dozens of upcoming trials. Indeed, in many courts, jurors are summoned for jury service weeks or even months before the trial calendar for the court is set. The duty of fairness, therefore, is a considerably more abstract principle than it will become if they are ultimately selected as a trial juror. Instead, the principles of responsibility, respect, and honesty play a much more dominant role. Jury service is ultimately a communal obligation. For the institution of trial by jury to succeed as an effective form of adjudication, it requires the support of all facets of the community. Citizens must respect the justice system enough to acquiesce when summoned for jury service. They must exercise responsibility by responding to the jury summons with honest answers about their qualifications for service and their ability to serve.

It is only when jurors are assigned to a panel for jury selection in a specific case that some of the other ethical principles such as fairness and courage come into play. Even so, honesty is still the most dominant principle at this stage of the trial. Jurors must respond to questions posed by the trial judge and attorneys about their ability to judge fairly and impartially given the specifics of the case so that the litigants themselves as well as any public observers have confidence in the integrity of the selected jurors.

The degree of candor cuts both ways: Jurors must candidly disclose relationships to trial witnesses, knowledge about the facts of the case, and actual biases or life experiences that might undermine their ability to evaluate the evidence fairly. But they also must refrain from manufacturing false reasons to be excused from jury service. The process of voir dire may require some degree of courage insofar that jurors may be called upon to disclose sensitive information about themselves that they would otherwise prefer to keep private. They also may require courage to accept the potential hardships of jury service including lost income, sometimes for an extended period of time, and the possibility that they will be asked to consider emotionally disturbing or gruesome evidence presented at trial.

For the jurors who are ultimately selected to serve in a given case, the ethical principles of responsibility, fairness, and respect become the dominant considerations during the evidentiary stage of the trial. Responsibility largely entails paying careful attention to the evidence presented and resisting distractions from home or work. Fairness requires that jurors keep an open mind about their verdict preferences until all of the evidence has been presented. Respect involves adhering to all procedural rules concerning the jurors’ conduct during trial such as avoiding discussions about the case details with other jurors or with family and friends while the trial is underway. Respect in this context is essentially respect for the rule of law concerning jurors’ role in the trial process.

Fairness to the litigants is the dominant principle during jury deliberations, but depending on the nature of the case, respect, compassion, and courage may also play significant roles. Respect during jury deliberations refers to respect for the views and opinions of the other jurors and listening with an open mind to competing interpretations about the evidence. Compassion for the defendant or possibly for crime victims may be an important part of jury deliberations, especially for cases in which the jury is asked to decide not only the defendant’s guilt or innocence, but also the appropriate sentence upon conviction such as in capital felony trials or even noncapital felony trials in some jurisdictions. In some cases, courage may be required to render an unpopular verdict or one that contradicts significant institutional interests.

In the context of the most difficult cases—those that evoke strong disagreements about the conclusions to be drawn from the evidence or the implications of the verdict for the larger community—it is possible that the various ethical principals may conflict with one another. For example, it may not be possible for jurors to be both compassionate and fair to a defendant charged in a criminal conspiracy as a result of poor choices concerning the defendant’s friends. Or it may not be possible for jurors to simultaneously respect the rule of law, be courageous, and be fair to the prosecution and defendant in a case involving the application of an unfair law or a law inappropriately applied given the facts of the case. In most instances, the principle of fairness should be the default choice for jurors as fairness is widely regarded as the strongest justification for trial by jury. The precise weighing of competing ethical principles should ultimately be left to the jurors and the resulting verdict accorded due respect as a valid judgment.

Rights of Jurors

Jurors have rights that empower them to fulfill their legitimate role in the U.S. criminal justice system. In many instances, these rights can be interpreted as duties that courts, judges, lawyers, and their communities owe to the individuals who are summoned for jury service. The first is the right to an equal probability of being selected to receive a jury summons. This is a duty of fairness and responsibility that courts owe to the jury-eligible citizens of their communities to ensure that jurors are neither unfairly burdened with jury service nor unfairly disenfranchised from jury service. For the most part, courts fulfill these ethical obligations to jurors by operating their jury systems effectively, including maintaining an inclusive, representative, and accurate master jury list from which to select prospective jurors. Courts also owe jurors respect and compassion, which entails recognizing that jury service is often inconvenient and sometimes extremely burdensome. To the extent that they can do so, courts should make reasonable accommodations to facilitate jurors’ ability to serve if summoned, such as reducing the term of service to the greatest extent possible, compensating jurors for their reasonable out-of-pocket expenses associated with jury service, and permitting jurors to reschedule jury service to a more convenient date.

During jury selection, jurors have the right to be treated with respect and compassion by the trial judge and attorneys. The questions posed to jurors should simply solicit meaningful information about the jurors’ ability to serve fairly and impartially, and not be intended to harass or embarrass jurors or to invade their privacy unnecessarily. Judges and lawyers should also demonstrate fairness to jurors by excluding only prospective jurors who cannot serve impartially, and not on the basis of race, gender, or for some other discriminatory reason.

Jurors who are ultimately selected to serve have the right to be protected from external factors that might bias their decision making. For courts, this raises a duty to implement and enforce procedural restrictions on lawyers, defendants, witnesses, news media, or members of the public who might have an interest in the trial outcome. This entails providing impaneled jurors with safe and comfortable facilities during the trial and deliberations, and imposing meaningful sanctions on individuals who attempt to influence the jurors’ decision making. It is particularly important that the trial judge take steps to maintain the independence of the jury from the judge by scrupulously monitoring his or her conduct in the courtroom during trial, in communications with the prosecutor and defense counsel, and through informal interactions between jurors, the judge, and the judge’s courtroom staff.

Finally, jurors have the right to be protected from retribution for their verdicts. Jurors cannot be legally prosecuted for returning an acquittal nor can defendants harass, ridicule, or threaten jurors for returning a conviction. Courts owe a duty to jurors to protect jurors from unwanted media attention after their jury service is completed.

Bibliography:

Abramson, Jeffrey. We, the Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hannaford-Agor, Paula. “An Overview of Contemporary Jury System Management.” National Center for State Courts (May 2011). http://www.ncsc-jurystudies.org/What-We-Do/~/media/Microsites/Files/CJS/What%20We%20Do/Contemporaryjurysystemmanagemen.ashx (Accessed August 2013).
Kidder, Rushworth M. You Said What? Ethics in the Information Age. Lecture, July 22, 2002. Chautauqua, NY: Chautauqua Institution.
Kleinig, John and James P. Levine, eds. Jury Ethics: Juror Conduct and Jury Dynamics. St. Paul, MN: Paradigm, 2007.

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