The Illusion of Juror Sophistication

Like most people on juries, the six jurors thrown into the Zimmerman trial were totally unprepared.

American jurors, totally untrained in the legal system, are led to think they are more intelligent and sophisticated than they are. Alone, they are capable of some independent thought. Forced into a room with others, they are a disaster. Although states select potential jurors differently, they are usually drawn randomly from a list of driver’s licenses or lists of registered voters. They are average people, a cross-section of Americana, people content with their lives, unencumbered and blissful, just the type of people lawyers want judging their trials because most people lack the sophisticated skill sets of reasoning and logic needed to be a juror.

Lawyers often decide which jurors to use in a trial based on the potential juror’s perceived lack of ability to think logically. A lawyer once told me that he always chooses jurors with strong religious beliefs because “a person who believes a man can walk on water can be talked into anything.” The job of a lawyer is to manipulate the way a person thinks.

The jurors thrown into the George Zimmerman murder trial were tossed into a situation, as are most jurors, for which they were totally unprepared. They went from quiet, average lives, to supporting stars on the latest reality show. The defense attorneys outlined their parts in the show. They were to play rational, intelligent, sophisticated, impartial, and concerned citizens. Without realizing it, they played their parts perfectly.

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Save the Jury

How to amend the Constitution to make the criminal justice system more fair.

Over the next few weeks, some of Slate’s favorite legal eagles will propose their favorite Constitutional amendments, in the service of our effort, with Me the People author Kevin Bleyer, to rewrite the founding document. Here’s the first crack from NYU law professor Rachel Barkow, for the benefit of another group we think of fondly—accused criminals.

Trial by Jury (Article III and the Sixth Amendment)

Defendants who wish to invoke their right to trial at the moment face an often-exorbitant price.  That’s because prosecutors often charge them with crimes that impose stiff sentences (and often mandatory ones). If they plea bargain, the sentence comes down, but if they gamble and go to trial, they usually do much more time. 

The Supreme Court has prohibited unconstitutional conditions in virtually every other context.  The state is not allowed to condition welfare benefits or permits on the relinquishment of constitutionally protected property rights or First Amendment rights, for example. But the court has taken a different path when it comes to the right to a jury trial. In this context, the court has allowed the state to condition the benefit of a lesser sentence on the relinquishment of the right to a jury trial. And it has done so for the sake of expediency.

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If George Zimmerman Were on Trial

Which evidence about the shooting of Trayvon Martin could a jury hear?

As new information continues to surface about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, we’re hearing a lot about how the facts are dividing rather than uniting us. As David Carr points out, as social media and the Internet take over the conversation, what you make of Martin’s use of the Twitter handle @no_limit_nigga, or the hard-to-hear 911 call in which Zimmerman may or may not have used a racial epithet, has a lot to do with your own predilections. Most of us have staked out a position by now. We have a gut sense about whether Martin was killed for little or no reason, or whether Zimmerman truly acted in self-defense, as he claims. We read the evidence in a way that confirms our instincts.

But let’s imagine for a moment that Zimmerman gets arrested, stands trial for homicide, and argues self-defense in court. That is what I still think should have happened, with or without Florida’s Stand Your Ground law (though it’s true that the law hasn’t helped). If Zimmerman is ever tried by a jury (instead of by public opinion), what evidence would be admitted? What would the jury likely hear in deciding whether to convict Zimmerman for Martin’s death?

I asked a few defense lawyers and criminal law experts that question—Dana Bazelon (my sister) and Paul Messing, a law firm colleague of hers; Harlan Protass (a Slate contributor); and Rachel Barkow at New York University Law School, who enlisted her colleague and evidence professor Erin Murphy. Here’s what they had to say, going through the evidence I asked them about, piece by piece.

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Trial by Fury

Jury trials aren't always satisfying, but they're better than angry mobs.

Jamie Leigh Jones

The right to trial by jury is so fundamental to American democracy that it is enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Thomas Jefferson said the jury trial was "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." The Declaration of Independence excoriates the king for "for depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury" precisely because American colonists were furious that the British tried to deny them just that right.

All that was hundreds of years ago, of course. Nowadays it has become something of an American tradition to call into question one of the most American of institutions.

When Casey Anthony was acquitted last week in the killing of her 2-year-old daughter, the nation collectively went nuts. Anyone who had watched the trial for even a moment—or who had followed the noise of the trial coverage for weeks on end—was certain that Anthony was guilty. The pundits who opined for hours, and from vast distances, about the case on cable news were similarly certain. So when a jury determined that it simply didn't have enough proof to find Anthony guilty of first-degree murder, most Americans decided that those jurors were blind morons. The alternative—that these jurors saw something the rest of us may have missed—was unthinkable.

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