A concept in search of a definition: The effects of reasonable doubt instructions on certainty of guilt standards and jury verdicts

Eighty (6-person) juries heard 1 of the 5 reasonable doubt instructions in a trial that either had strong evidence for guilt or favored acquittal. None of the instructions produced acceptable criteria of self-reported reasonable doubt, although instructions that informed juries to be firmly convinced (FC) elicited the highest standards of proof. The FC instructions yielded verdicts that tended to correspond with the evidence in both versions of the trial. FC juries focused proportionately more on the evidence and less on non-probative issues than juries given other instructions. Juries had lower self-reported standards of proof when the trial evidence was weak for conviction as opposed to when it was strong. The discussion addresses the surprisingly low self-reported standards of proof.     

State Crimes of Previous Regimes: Knowledge, Accountability, and the Policing of the Past

The policy of lustration is set in the context of responses to abuses of power by previous regimes. Using examples from three recent forms of social reconstruction (in Latin America, the former communist states, and South Africa), the author reviews the “justice in transition” debate. How do societies going through democratization confront the human rights violations committed by the previous regime? Five aspects of this debate are reviewed: (1) truth: establishing and confronting the knowledge of what happened in the past; (2) justice: making offenders accountable for their past violations through three possible methods: punishment through the criminal law, compensation and restitution, and mass disqualification such as lustration; (3) impunity: giving amnesty to previous offenders; (4) expiation; and (5) reconciliation and reconstruction. A concluding discussion raises the implications of the subject for the study of time and social control.     

Municipal Default Patterns: An Historical Study

The incidence of municipal default is closely related to the business cycles in this country. During national depressions nearly all sectors and regions experience defaults, although not with equal severity. Regional borrowing behavior during the boom years preceding depression determines which regions will be most severely affected by national depression. The history of state and local borrowing is briefly surveyed with attention to four major periods of economic expansion and the national depressions that followed. Regional development cycles are then reviewed with a focus on several cases: special district defaults both at the turn of the century and today; Detroit at the beginning of the automobile industry; and Florida in the 1920s. New York City and Cleveland are analyzed in the context of urban crises. Revenue bond defaults, including toll roads and the Washington Public Power and Supply System (WPPSS) are analyzed for special recurring patterns.     

Jury nullification

The present study was conducted to determine the effects of nullification information to the jury from two sources, judge's instructions and lawyers' arguments, on juries' verdicts and decision making in three criminal cases. In addition, the research tested the impact of challenges to nullification information on trial outcomes. The results, gathered from 144 six-person juries, indicated that when juries are in receipt of nullification information from the judge or defense attorney they are more likely to acquit a sympathetic defendant and judge a dangerous defendant more harshly than when such information is not present or when challenges are made to nllification arguments. Analysis of the juries' decision-making processes suggested that nullification information may alter the way in which juries perceive and use the trial evidence. In those trials in which a nullification defense was successful, juries used the outcome of the case, as well as the intent of the defendant, to evaluate the worth and weight of the evidence. Pronullification conditions devalued the currency of the evidence and permitted juries to utilize nonevidentiary factors in deciding the cases used in this study.This research was supported by a grant from The University of Toledo Graduate School.     

Chaos in The Courtroom Reconsidered: Emotional Bias and Juror Nullification

A widespread presumption in the law is that giving jurors nullification instructions would result in "chaos"-jurors guided not by law but by their emotions and personal biases. We propose a model of juror nullification that posits an interaction between the nature of the trial (viz. whether the fairness of the law is at issue), nullification instructions, and emotional biases on juror decision-making. Mock jurors considered a trial online which varied the presence a nullification instructions, whether the trial raised issues of the law's fairness (murder for profit vs. euthanasia), and emotionally biasing information (that affected jurors' liking for the victim). Only when jurors were in receipt of nullification instructions in a nullification-relevant trial were they sensitive to emotionally biasing information. Emotional biases did not affect evidence processing but did affect emotional reactions and verdicts, providing the strongest support to date for the chaos theory.