Juror and Defendant and Decision-Making

CONVICTION OR ACQUITTAL? RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS OF JUROR AND DEFENDANT: A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia warned a few years ago that jurors tend to sympathize with defendants of their own kind (Marcotte, 1989, p. 41). The clear implication of the justice's warning was that such sympathies may well extend to biased trial judgments. While Scalia's statement is more anecdotal than scientific in character, the justice does speak from a position of unquestioned knowledge on the issue.

The Rodney King police beating case in Southern California caused a storm of controversy when a predominantly white, middle-class jury acquitted white, middle-class police officers in the face of an overwhelming public perception of defendant guilt (Jury with no blacks, 1992, p. 9). Regardless of what the actual bases of the verdict were, the public perception was that racial bias played a major role in the jury's decision.

Obviously, many defense and prosecuting attorneys act on a belief that a causal relationship does exist between a juror's decision in a case and a coincidence of socio-economic characteristics of juror and defendant. Prosecutors frequently attempt to peremptorily challenge prospective jurors who are residents of poor, violent-prone neighborhoods when defendants are also from such backgrounds (Peremptory based, 1992, pp. 1047-1048). Defense attorneys frequently attempt to peremptorily challenge prospective jur

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in the society is exercised by a set of elites. Nevertheless, power differences between elites vary. The class model, in contrast to the elite pluralist model, places different socio-economic groups in competition and conflict with one another (diZerega, 1991, p. 340-372). In Britain, the Labour Party is held to represent working class Britons, while the Conservative Party is held to represent the business and professional classes, and, to a lesser extent, the aristocracy. Social classes are not as well defined in the United States as they are in Britain, and any application of the class model in contemporary America often finds itself impaled on the shifting compositions of the underprivileged and the privileged. In the United States, the relationship between the mass of American citizens and the social elites in contemporary American society has been effectively defined by the societal elites which, for the most part, represent elements of government and business, and which, to a lesser degree, represent labor, and professional organizations. For the greater part, the American population has long accepted and cherished the notion of the United States as an egalitarian and classless society. In the early-1960s, doubt beg

Category: Government - J