The Jury: Trial and Error in the American Courtroom

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The American system of trial by jury is unique. No other nation relies so heavily on ordinary citizens to make its most important decisions about law, business practice, and personal liberty - even death. Ideally, Americans take their participation seriously lest they someday stand before their peers seeking justice. But when an actual jury summons arrives in the mailbox, the pieties may prove evanescent. Jury duty is inconvenient. You may lose pay at work. Unless you are chosen to judge a case, you're likely to ...
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More About This Book

Overview

The American system of trial by jury is unique. No other nation relies so heavily on ordinary citizens to make its most important decisions about law, business practice, and personal liberty - even death. Ideally, Americans take their participation seriously lest they someday stand before their peers seeking justice. But when an actual jury summons arrives in the mailbox, the pieties may prove evanescent. Jury duty is inconvenient. You may lose pay at work. Unless you are chosen to judge a case, you're likely to spend days in a waiting room at the courthouse. In short, unless you're a lawyer or a judge, you learn you're not really very important. How can the ideal of jury service coexist with the reality? This is the question Stephen J. Adler answers in The Jury: Trial and Error in the American Courtroom. Adler was dismayed to find that the jury system is in a deep crisis. Many legal thinkers have already suggested that the jury has outlived its effectiveness. The truth is our vaunted system of justice can't be trusted to produce sensible verdicts. Juries are sometimes capricious, often illogical, and in many cases plainly wrong. Lawyers routinely pay high-priced consultants to help them stack or manipulate the jury. Judges and ordinary citizens often unwittingly obstruct justice as they attempt to serve it. Yet the myth continues unexamined as the quality of jury verdicts plummets. Is the jury worth keeping? If it is, what can save it? Steve Adler takes us inside the jury room - a barrier not even television has been able to overcome. He has reconstructed seven cases: a brutal murder in Texas; Imelda Marcos's New York fraud trial; a manipulative drunk-driving case in Pennsylvania; a North Carolina lawsuit pitting two mammoth tobacco companies against each other; an unprecedented punitive-damage suit in small-town Colorado involving AIDS-tainted blood; a New Jersey love triangle that ended in gunfire; and the trial of an alleged exhibitionist in Phoenix. Throug
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Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
We respect juries for their supposedly high-minded deliberations, but they are too often ineffective or overwhelmed in both civil and criminal cases, suggests Wall Street Journal legal editor Adler, who here analyzes deliberations in seven trials. The working-class federal jury in Manhattan that in 1990 cleared wealthy Philippine former First Lady Imelda Marcos of all charges grew to identify with her as a ``fellow sufferer.'' Overmatched jurors in a seven-month trial in 1990 concerning a price war between two tobacco companies judged the case on the basis of witnesses' personalities, not testimony. Yet Adler wants to bolster the jury system, an anomaly among democracies--even Great Britain, source of the jury, relies more on judges. Among several well-founded reforms, he proposes scrapping professional exemptions and limiting lawyers' peremptory challenges to seating jurors, as well as allowing jurors to ask questions and take notes. Although the proposals don't fully address the problems posed by very complex cases or the variability of tort awards, Adler's book should further a debate that, after the Rodney King and Menendez cases, has new urgency. Author tour. (Sept.)
Library Journal
The Wall Sreet Journal's legal editor thinks our constitutionally guaranteed jury system works, but he thinks it should work better. Here he presents the rationale for improvement and his suggestions for the "jury-centric courtroom." His book's structure resembles Seymour Wishman's Anatomy of a Jury (LJ 6/1/86), which used a single court case to explicate the system and to create a compelling narrative. Using six cases, including the Imelda Marcos trial, Adler conducts extensive interviews with the jurors to illustrate how incomprehensible verdicts were reached. The remedies he proposes include elimination of the preemptory challenge, plain-language jury instructions, written legal instructions to the jury at the beginning of the trial, and allowing jurors to take notes. Adler's book will be popular with the thoughtful public trying to understand the verdicts from the Rodney King and Menendez brothers trials.-Janice Dunham, John Jay Coll. Lib., New York
Gilbert Taylor
Adler spoke with the juries that had deliberated in six cases, and he discovered among the members astounding symptoms of obliviousness, illogic, and prejudice. The foibles operated across the variety of cases he picked: two murders, two tort suits, a complex antitrust suit, and the celebrated Imelda Marcos corruption trial. In all of them, frankly, the more education, sophistication, or experience the candidate jurors revealed in voir dire, the more likely they were to be dismissed from service. In the jury room--and this is Adler's forte, breaking down its official secrecy--discussions meandered away from the lawyers' arguments and judges' instructions (impenetrably turgid, in any event) and degenerated into, for example, peer pressure on a holdout, the thrill of having the power to punish a corporation, or the fabrication from thin air of gigantic damage awards. With millions of people having been jurors, this concise diagnosis of the institution's malfunctions, and suggestions for knocking the rust off the machine, should reverberate coast to coast.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780812923636
  • Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 8/10/1994
  • Edition description: 1st ed
  • Edition number: 1
  • Pages: 320

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