Jury Note-Taking in Criminal Trials

Requiring Jury Instructions on Eyewitness Identification Evidence at Federal Criminal Trials

Enhancing fairness in DNA jury trials

Increasingly, a single forensic expert guides the jury through the DNA evidence; in five out of six DNA cases studied in New South Wales, this was the model (Findlay 2008). The presence of DNA evidence predicts convictions. Archival research revealed that juries were 23 times more likely to vote guilty in homicide cases and 33 times more likely to vote guilty in sexual assault cases when DNA ev...

Measuring the Consequences of Criminal Jury Trial Protections

The Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution guarantee criminal defendants the right to a jury trial and require that the elements of crimes be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Academics, judges, and practitioners generally assume that these constitutional guarantees protect defendants. Recently, however, scholars and even members of the Supreme Court have suggested that expand...

The Scottish Criminal Jury: a Very Peculiar Institution

One of the benefits of the comparative study of legal institutions is that it exposes the extent to which they are shaped by contingency as well as by logic or principle. What is regarded in one jurisdiction as the only possible or acceptable way of doing something is often revealed to be pure preconception. In other words, the comparative study of law can act as a balance to the unconscious et...

The Canadian Criminal Jury: Searching for a Middle Ground

In many important respects, the contemporary Canadian criminal jury system may be viewed as a hybrid of the English and American jury systems. This statement does not imply a direct American influence on the conception of the jury because, as will be discussed below, Canadian judges have often expressly rejected American practices, and in the very recent past, tended to defer primarily to Engla...