I'm watching 12 Angry Men.
The Jurors bring up among themselves all these questions. Arguments then ensue.
Why should Jurors not be allowed to address their questions/concerns to people who could answer them? In what ways would this harm the process?
I think we're really hesitant to do Jury Reform, and for good reason. But how many hundreds of years, with how much progress in understanding how it is that 1) people come to decisions (cognitive) and 2) how groups of people come to decisions (social psych)? And how much more complex are the methods that Jurors have to understand? And the laws?
So much has changed since last we changed. Maybe it's time to start asking these questions.
I sincerely hope someone responds, in comments or email, "we don't allow Jurors to do this because *VALID REASON HERE*."
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2 comments:
1. Juries can, and often do, ask questions - during deliberation, they can direct questions to the judge, who decides whether and how to answer it.
2. There are rules - the Rules of Evidence - that say that some evidence is "admissible" in court (the jury can hear and consider it), and some evidence isn't. This is a whole law school class on its own, and each evidentiary rule has its reasons (and problems), but let me just give you an example: whether the defendant goes to church every Sunday might influence the jury's verdict, but it's not something they SHOULD be considering because it's not relevant. Therefore they can't hear about it. Juries are often curious about things that are legally irrelevant to the case, and that's probably the main reason they can't question the parties involved themselves. Note that this is only America - other countries (like some continental European countries) that use the civil law system have a judge who acts as investigator and questioner, instead of having the parties have lawyers to do the investigation and questioning. That might be better or worse, but it's not our system.
In my experience on a jury:
There were questions about the architecture of the crime scene, on the identity of other voices 911 recordings that were directly related to the relevance of the evidence and opened probabilities for alternate explanations. We were unable to investigate areas that may have been missed by investigators. Jurors bring experience to court that is outside of the experience of the legal professionals. I guess this falls into the "reasonable doubt" pile.
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