Jury Trial For Juveniles

For this assignment, I chose two articles that studied jury trials for juveniles. The first article; “The Verdict on Jury Trials for Juveniles: The Effects of Defendant’s Age on Trial Outcomes” studied the effect that the age of the defendant has on the jury’s verdict. The second article; “Jurors’ Perceptions of Juvenile Defendants: The Influence of Intellectual Disability, Abuse History, and Confession Evidence” studied the perception jurors have towards juvenile defendants. Both of these research studies, studied the relationship between juvenile defendants and the jury’s’ opinion of the juvenile defendant based on specific criteria. In the first article, The Verdict on Jury Trial for Juveniles, the theory suggested that the defendant’s …show more content…
The first sample group made up of undergraduate students from Toronto, Canada. While the second sample group was individuals from the general public recruited from Toronto, Canada. The participants were not permitted to discuss the case with one another even though they were run in groups of five. All of the participants received identical information and questions with the exception of the defendants age; it was presented as either 13, 17, or 25. The results of this study were separated into three categories: participant attitude, verdict, and sentencing. The analysis of the three attitude measures found that the community sample perceived youth to be somewhat less criminally responsible for their actions than the students in the University sample. The response on the three attitude scales did not significantly differ by the sex of the respondent in either sample. As for the verdict category; only 35% of students voted guilty while a mere 25% of community respondents voted guilty. The respondents’ verdict was determined to not significantly relate to the defendants age or ethnicity in either of the samples. It was interesting that in the university sample, female students were more likely to have a guilty verdict than the make students. In the last result category, sentencing, the University sample had a lower average sentencing length than the community sample. Finally, it was found that the …show more content…
These participants were in small groups or alone while executing the study. Every participant received the same instructions: play the role of a juror and take this role very seriously, make judgments about the case and verdict. After all consented, participants were given a paragraph to read describing a girl juvenile defendant followed by four paragraphs describing her crimes. Then, the participants completed case judgments, filled out the demographic and manipulation questionnaire, and were debriefed. The results showed that 266 of the 512 participants found the defendant to be guilty. As predicted, jurors assigned a lower degree of guilt to the intellectually disabled than the nondisabled juvenile. The disabled juvenile was perceived differently than the nondisabled juvenile to the jurors in terms of issues relevant to interrogation and confession. The jurors were significantly more likely to consider the juvenile guilty and responsible if they confessed voluntarily than if they were coerced to confess. In short, study 2 revealed a main effect of intellectual disability on degree-of-guilt ratings as well as a marginal effect on attributions of responsibility. In addition, it was found that the effects of intellectual disability on degree of guilt, responsibility, and perceived deviance were only evident in the drug case, while not evident in the more serious cases presented to