Narrative Construction and Law
Can a jury every be impartial?
The Sixth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States guarantees many rights to a criminal defendant, and one of them is the right to an impartial jury that consists of people who are supposed to decide the case based only on the evidence.
However, have you ever questioned the plausibility of this statement? Psychology says that everyone holds biases, many of which are unconscious and formed over a lifetime.
When it is very difficult for people to put aside their biases, is it still possible to have a truly impartial jury? Consider the case Schwartz v. Minneapolis Suburban Bus Co. that involved an automobile accident. One of the jurors, John Herbert, said during jury selection that he would remain fair and impartial. However, it was later discovered that Herbert’s daughter was injured in a car accident not too far from where the accident in this case took place. Now knowing this detail, how would you feel about having a juror like Herbert if you were the defendant? Herbert later admitted that her daughter’s accident had indeed influenced his decision in the case.
Further contributing to biased jury is the questionable motivation of attorneys. As attorneys are expected to win their cases, it becomes a concern whether they truly selected unbiased jurors. Specifically, it is possible that prosecutors only select jurors who are biased in favor of their clients, while defense attorneys eliminate jurors who are biased against their clients.
The Story Model and Empirical Research
In the context of criminal trials, jurors continue to interpret evidence in biased ways by constructing narratives that aid their decision-making process. In court, jurors can be faced with a large body of complex evidence that is not organized in sequential order and is often disconnected from each other. Perhaps, jurors can be presented with DNA evidence and an eyewitness testimony on one day and then be informed about a confession that contradicts the previous eyewitness testimony on another.
You can just imagine how incredibly difficult it is for jurors to render a verdict based on analyses of the evidence. Thus, one particular model that jurors adopt to aid their decision-making process in court is a narrative story structure known as the story model. This model allows jurors to organize messy trial evidence into a narrative format that helps them to make sense of the case. Jurors then use the constructed narrative to render a verdict.
There has been plenty of past research that supports the relationship between narratives and verdict decisions. Early research demonstrates that the construction of narratives is a natural and spontaneous process carried out by jurors to aid their decision-making. An experiment manipulated the order of evidence presentation to control how easy a story, either favoring the prosecution side or the defense side, could be constructed . It turned out that stories that were easy to construct dominated judicial decisions, thus establishing the role of the narrative framework in verdict decisions. Participants were also more confident about their decisions when evidence was organized by narrative than when organized by legal issue.
Phases I of the Story Model
The story model describes three crucial phases that jurors undergo. The first one is the evaluation of evidence through narrative construction. In this phase, the mental activity will organize and combine different kinds of knowledge into a narrative. A narrative story typically consists of three types of knowledge:
Information that is specific to the case
Knowledge about other events that are similar to the current case, such as a crime that happened in the juror’s community
Juror’s own expectations about what a coherent story sounds like
The structure of a story consists of a subset of events and causal relationships both derived directly from trial evidence and inferred by the juror. These events and inferences may be specific actions that took place as well as intentions or goals that could have led to certain actions. The question of which events and inferences should be included in the narrative depends on the juror’s expectations about what contributes to the completeness of a story.
Multiple stories could be constructed during a trial. However, only one appears to best explain the events and is used to render the final verdict. The story that offers the best explanation has to have a lot of coverage of trial evidence, as more coverage means more confidence in a story. An acceptable story also has to be coherent, which means that all pieces of evidence cannot contradict one another. The story itself also has to reflect the juror’s knowledge of what typically happens in similar situations.
Consider the following case in which the defendant Davis is charged with first-degree murder. During a morning encounter between Davis and Smith, they had a quarrel, and Smith threatened Davis with a razor. Later that evening, Davis met up with Smith again and got into a fight. This time, Davis pulled out a knife and stabbed Smith. This ultimately resulted in the death of Smith. With this background information, several inferences can be drawn depending on the juror. For example, a juror may interpret the defendant’s action as a form of self-defense due to fear. Another juror may believe that the defendant intentionally stabbed the victim as a way to pay back the victim’s threat earlier in the day. These inferences, of course, depend on other details such as whether Smith also pulled out his razor during the afternoon fight or whether Davis intentionally went home during the time between the two encounters to get his knife.
Phase II of the Story Model
In the second phase of the Story Model, jurors have to learn about the various verdict categories such as felony murder, first-degree murder, or second-degree murder. The information on verdict categories is presented to jurors with judicial instructions. The language used to explain verdict categories is often complex, involving features that describe the identity, mental state, circumstances, and actions of the crime in abstract terms. For first degree murder, you might be presented with a description of the circumstances as “insufficient provocation” or “interval between resolution and killing.” A description of the actions might be “killing in pursuance of resolution.” If the juror has absolutely no prior knowledge of the verdict categories, then learning these categories based on the abstract descriptions can be a difficult task. However, if the juror has prior knowledge, then that knowledge can interfere with their understanding of the given verdict information.
Phase III of the Story Model
The last phase of the Story Model is the decision-making stage that involves the matching of a story to a verdict category. This is done by comparing features of the verdict categories (identity, mental state, circumstances, and actions) with elements embedded in the narrative (goals, intentions, actions) that the juror either constructed or derived based on prior knowledge or trial evidence. To exemplify this process with the previously mentioned case involving Davis and Smith, the verdict definition of first degree murder states that the perpetrator has to have the intention to kill. This required mental state can be matched with the episode of the story where Davis met up with Smith again that day with a knife. It can interpreted that Davis went home after the first morning encounter to grab his knife, and the murder that occurred in the afternoon was premeditated. However, when attributes of verdict categories do not correspond with specific story events, jurors tend to default to the verdict of not guilty.
Why Should We Care?
The jury system is a unique and vital part of our democratic society, and as citizens, we are very likely to be impacted by a conflict at some point in our lives. We now know that the phrase “trial by impartial jury” is misleading because during a jury trial, jurors pick and choose which events and inferences they would like to include to present an acceptable and coherent narrative of the case. They may omit crucial evidence that cannot be comprehended or does not contribute positively to the overall story organization. How they interpret facts and evidence may be biased, as they are storytellers of the facts. Thus, the question becomes how can we build better jury trial processes that de-bias jurors and ensure fairer trials?
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