How A Courtroom Environment Can Shape Jury Effectiveness

“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us” – Winston Churchill

In the workplace, it is now understood that employees who are more satisfied with their physical environment produce better outcomes. In an office, layout, overcrowding, temperature, air quality, natural lighting, acoustics, accessibility, greenery, and distractions affect an employee’s work concentration and productivity. The same reactions can be seen in schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and more. Numerous studies have consistently demonstrated that characteristics of physical environments can have a significant effect on behavior, stress, perceptions, and productivity of employees. Our brain chemistry responds to the geometry and arrangement of the spaces where we inhabit, allowing our environment to affect our mood and well-being.

Aside from a courthouse functioning as an office space, the building houses the site where citizens may spend a large chunk of time together deliberating and making a major decision that impacts a fellow citizen in life-altering ways. While the court stresses the gravity of participating in jury duty, motivation from a judge is not always enough to produce results. Jury duty is often prodded as a negative experience due to distractions, boredom, or discomfort. In our system we ask twelve citizens who typically have minimal understanding of the judicial system to disrupt their regularly scheduled lives in order to pay attention and make sense of complex facts and legal issues, while remaining impartial, often with very little support. In turn, those in dispute sometimes hate to hand over their fate to twelve citizens who, while perhaps trying their hardest, cannot seem to stay awake while the defense attorney rambles on about a minute issue during the six-week antitrust trial.

With huge items on the line at the end of a trial, citizens ought to be concerned that the jurors remain aware, productive, thoughtful, and impartial—just as an employer is concerned for his or her employee. As with any civic institution, courts face some unique challenges in terms of design and architecture, including a need to address valid security concerns and management issues particular to the judiciary. However, such challenges should not be viewed as insurmountable. For example, hospitals meet even more stringent requirements in terms of privacy and sanitation coupled with regular high-stress (life-and-death) situations. Projects in certain cities have attempted to recapture their relevance as a cornerstone of the community. Beyond the importance of ensuring the courthouse design and architecture reflects its value as an integral component of our justice system, courthouse renovations ought to reflect the latest research on how environmental factors impact psychology.

An employer changes the environmental setup in an office because—without an individual’s liberty on the line—outcomes can be tied directly to an individual’s psychological response to his or her environment. Aside from large renovation projects, courthouses can make small changes to create an environment that promotes awareness, focus, productivity, and thoughtfulness. Nursing homes that added greenery initiatives noticed a difference in their residents. Healthcare facilities have documented a number of changes that impact not only employee productivity, but also patients’ healing. Courtrooms can invest in a more comfortable chair for a juror. Where we rely on these humans—our peers—to deliberate the tough issues, find consensus, and produce the right result, we ought to ensure they are in an environment where they can be productive.

For some inspiration, see LA's new federal courthouse.