Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Jury by Peers
As a law student, I spent a semester interviewing jurors in death penalty cases as part of Texas' Capital Punishment Clinic. I was regularly surprised by the heuristics that jurors used to assess guilt. Most often, jurors stopped listening to the defendant's story because elements of it were not part of their everyday, middle-class life. Some statements I heard: "What kind of person is hanging out in a park at 2:00 a.m.?" "What kind of person hitches a ride to Dallas with someone they just met?" The oddest shortcut I witnessed was a woman who told me that the defendant was probably guilty because his dad was in jail. When I asked her why she thought his dad was in jail (he wasn't), she said that they let him out of jail to testify, and he was in his jail uniform. Unfortunately, he was in his highway construction worker uniform.
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