With my wife recently called for jury duty and the subsequent discussions about the role of the citizen in the justice system, I decided to do some research. A recent controversy in the UK caught my eye. In this article, “Twitter fury over ‘surprise rape’ article gets UniLad suspended“ it was claimed that “head of the CPS in London has said that jurors’ preconceptions about women has a negative impact on rape conviction rates.”
It reminded me of a story I used to use in class discussions. A researcher in the late 1970s became concerned about racial stereotypes after an instance with his son. He was driving through a city in America when a black man ran across the road. He son apparently turned and said some along the lines of ‘I wonder who he has just robbed’. The strong association of a black man running and a crime having been committed shocked the father. A former student emailed me a number of years ago with a follow-up story to this discussion. In response to a heated debate, a group of British students has run a very informal experiment. They chose 4 London underground stations from 4 different socio-demographic backgrounds and staged an event in each of them. Casual observations where made, and they used these to draw a conclusion. The event was a young man running down the platform. How would London travellers react to this event at each station?In the course of 20 minutes and a turnover of passengers, they watched and gauged the reactions of the passengers to a ‘white man’, an ‘Indian man’, a ‘black man’ and a ‘Muslim man’ running down the platform. My former student was intrigued by the methodology of this experiment and sent me some reflections, partly to see if his TOK skills were still up to scratch and partly to give me fodder for the classroom. They certainly were, but he could not find fault with the conclusions they drew.
Well, in response to the first part, I tried to find the reference to the head of the CPS (in London). I came up with a report from Professor Cheryl Thomas, titled, ‘Are juries fair?’. Fascinatingly, she is a member of the Centre for Empirical Legal Studies in the Faculty of Laws at University College London. The descriptor ‘empirical’ in this title caught my eye.The report Professor Thomas wrote was from ‘Analytical Services’ which claims to support ‘effective policy development and delivery within the Ministry of Justice by providing high-quality social research, statistics and economic analysis to influence decision-making and encourage informed debate’. Again, the claim ‘high-quality social research, statistics and economic analysis’ caught my eye.
The topic heavily engages with the issue of reason, language, emotion and perception and leads to the issue of methodology in the human sciences.
The Summary (p. i) provides a good insight into its worth as a stimulus for discussion:
“Summary
This research asks: How fair is the jury decision-making process? It explores a number of aspects of jury fairness for the first time in this country, and asks specifically:
- Do all-White juries discriminate against BME defendants?
