After one juror, known only as B, spoke out on CNN last week, saying race was not a consideration in deliberations, some critics said the homogeny of the panel led to a lack of empathy for the dead teenager. Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox?
In addition to added diversity and range of experience, member juries are more likely to deadlock, or "hang," than smaller panels, some experts say. But researchers say further studies need to be conducted to determine other differences between six- and member juries. Summers noted that jurors only have to come back with a simple guilty or not guilty verdict. They do not need to explain why or how they reached that conclusion. And that poses a significant question, he says. Without knowing why a jury made the decision it did, "How do you say that your trial was unfair based on the fact you had a six-person jury?
Subscribe Manage my subscription Activate my subscription Log in Log out. Regions Tampa St. O'Mara met resistance from the judge when he tried to characterize the definition for justifiable use of deadly force.
Prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda objected multiple times during O'Mara's line of questioning, eventually leading to Judge Debra Nelson to twice read what will be the jury instruction once the final jury is selection. O'Mara said screening the prospective jurors for any biases or prejudices "is probably as critical if not more critical than the evidence. This article is more than 8 years old. Prosecutors and defence attorneys choose six-person panel after two weeks of weighing potential bias among candidates.
Florida ii and the Jury of Six. During the s, court reform movements pressed to both increase the efficiency and decrease the cost of court proceedings. One primary target was the traditional jury of twelve peers, and by the late s Florida passed a law that provided for juries of six in civil and criminal trials. Williams was convicted of armed robbery in Florida by a jury of six and sentenced to life in prison.
On appeal, he argued that the Sixth Amendment provided for jury trial according to its characteristics under English and American common law, consisting of twelve peers. It first determined that modern juries were not bound to their common law form, and then adopted a functional equivalence test for any reduction in jury size from the traditional twelve.
In , the Supreme Court further reconsidered the constitutional requirements of jury sizein Ballew v. Ballew was charged for two counts of misdemeanors for distributing obscene materials in violation of Georgia law. He went to trial in the Criminal Court of Fulton County, Georgia, where the court tried misdemeanor cases before five-person juries. On appeal, Ballew raised a Sixth Amendment challenge against the five-person jury, but he was unsuccessful.
The Supreme Court granted certiorari and considered whether a five-person jury in a state criminal trial was valid under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments. While the Court upheld the constitutionality of a six-person jury in Williams , it purposefully did not address whether a jury with fewer than six individuals was constitutional. In Ballew, the Supreme Court was determined to answer whether a jury with fewer than six individuals "inhibite[ed] the functioning of the jury as an institution to a significant degree, and, if so, whether any state interest counterbalances and justifies this disruption.
First, the Court looked at contemporary research demonstrating that smaller juries were less likely to facilitate effective group deliberation. Third, the likelihood of a hung jury decreases as the juries reduce in size; this disadvantages the defense. Hung juries generally only occur where one or two jurors are unconvinced of guilt. He also wrote, "Neither the validity nor the methodology employed by the studies cited was subjected to the traditional testing mechanisms of the adversary process.
In Gonzalez v. Florida , the Calebresi Amici Brief raises several issues with the Ballew decision. Ballew abandoned the functional equivalence test used in Williams in favor of a bright-line rule that six-person juries were constitutional, but five-person juries were unconstitutional.
However, this bright-line rule seems arbitrary given that the Court relied on studies showing that the six-person juries perform worse than twelve-personjuries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. George Zimmerman, charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of year-old Trayvon Martin, looks at the potential jurors during his trial. By Michael McGough.
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