The present study aims to achieve the purposes of facilitating the development of the jury trial system that started in 2008 and maximizing the capacity and ability of Korean jurors.
The first part of the study, assessment of education need, was co ...
The present study aims to achieve the purposes of facilitating the development of the jury trial system that started in 2008 and maximizing the capacity and ability of Korean jurors.
The first part of the study, assessment of education need, was conducted with a stratified random sample of 2,160 juror eligible adults to identify the weaknesses in knowledge and attitudes held by the people and recommend the identified weaknesses as the focal contents to be stressed in public education and public relations. To the purpose, personal beliefs about the legal system, general attitude toward lay participation trials, self-efficacy for the role of a juror, and behavioral intention to participate in criminal trials were selected as the primary factors that can be related with the propensity to participate in the trials when summoned to serve as a juror. The personal beliefs about the legal system and the behavioral intention as measured by the degree to which the respondent willingly accepts the personal cost that may be inflicted by participating in the trial were found to vary by age, the level of education, occupation, the level of income, and marital status of the respondents. Self-efficacy was found to vary by gender, age, and occupation of the respondents. Finally, the respondents were found as possessing a low level of knowledge about the jury trial system (the average score of 57.14 out of 100) and strong efforts to disseminate the knowledge among the people were found to be urgent.
The second part of the study was to provide a basic method to be used in developing model jury instructions. Three different versions of each of the instructions on the standard of reasonable doubt, insanity, and bodily injury resulting in death were constructed based on a survey with law professors and judges and tested for comprehensibility with 168 college students and 251 juror eligible adults. It was generally found that the manipulated three versions were not significantly different from one another in comprehensibility. However, a simpler version tended to be comprehended better than a more lengthy and detailed version for the instructions on insanity and bodily injury resulting in death. On the contrary, a more detailed version tended to be comprehended better for the instruction on the standard of reasonable doubt. Given that the instruction on the standard of reasonable doubt is indispensible for all criminal trials by jury, it was recommended to prepare for a model instruction that is described in easy concepts but with enough details.
The third part of the study was to determine the ideal jury decision rule. "Ideal" was defined by accuracy and efficiency for deliberation quality, the final determination of verdict and jurors' perceived performances. With 120 mock juries, the simple majority decision rule was found to be more efficient than the unanimity rule by resulting in shorter deliberation time and less hung juries. On the other hand, juries under the simple majority decision rule rendered more guilty verdicts for the cases in which evidence was ambiguous, showed a phenomenon of group polarization more frequently, and resulted in more postmortem disagreements on the verdict among the jurors. Thus, the simple majority rule was found to be efficient in some respects but difficult to be relied on for accuracy. Content analyses of deliberation revealed that the unanimity rule may be associated with more rational decisions and more positive appreciations of the jurors for their experiences as fact-finders for criminal trials. The present study revealed some of the important characteristics of different decision rules and found that the different decision rules may compliment each other for jury decision making in terms of accuracy and efficiency. The contradicting characteristics associated with each rule should be weighed by the society to implement the system of trial by jury that is the most desirable for Korea.