The Law for Regular People: Problems with Jury Instructions

On Thursday, a jury in Iowa left the court frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of justice being served: while they felt that Ceasar Davidson was guilty of helping to plan the murder of Demarcus “Peanut” Chew, they were not certain he was the actual shooter, and their jury instructions did not include an option to convict Davidson for aiding and abetting a murder – a strategic decision on the part of prosecutor Lisa Schaefer in the hopes of ensuring a guilty verdict on the murder charge. The jury foreman expressed a concern that haunted the jury: they were “fairly confident” that Davidson was the shooter, but “How do you define reasonable doubt? Is it 51%? Is it 80%?” It’s not controversial to assert that jury instructions matter. Attorneys may spend entire days before the trial bargaining over the jury instructions, and faulty ones can get a case overturned. The instructions define the jury’s options: in the Davidson case, the prosecutor elected not to give the jury an option to convict the defendant of aiding and abetting; in the Jeremy Christian murder trial in Oregon, however, the jury could convict for a number of lesser charges. Ultimately, jury instructions can make or break a trial.

However, some psychologists argue that lawyers and judges fail to effectively communicate to the jury what the law they’re being asked to enforce actually says. While sometimes this is the result of ambiguities in the law, in other cases jury instructions fail to adequately direct the jury to enforce the law, though experimental jurors generally try their best to follow instructions when they understand them.

Others question whether jurors are actually capable and willing to conform to the law’s requirements on how to use information presented at trial. To mitigate this, much effort has been put into trying to determine what information can make jurors better at their job: for instance, in the Wegener et. al article linked above, explaining to jurors the reasoning behind the limitations in the law can boost their compliance with its needs; for example, when judges explain the reasoning behind the exclusionary rule, so that jurors understand its purpose in the legal system, jurors generally make a more conscious effort to ignore the inadmissible evidence. Additionally, when the law is ambiguous, jurors will generally ignore the specifics of the instruction to conform the law to their “common sense” understanding of the matter at hand.

Perhaps, too, the Davidson jury can be forgiven for their questions about reasonable doubt; much to-do has been had over the specific definition to be given to jurors, and how jurors are instructed to interpret their burden of proof impacts their decision-making, both as individual jurors and as a group, with more specific standards producing more uniformity in jurors’ understanding.

Ultimately, the difficulty of jury instructions is that they must be interpreted by regular people, rather than the lawyers and judges who craft them with the benefit of a legal education behind them. More efforts should be made to ensure that jury instructions adequately define legal concept and tests, including the burden of proof, for jurors, and that these instructions justify to the jury the limitations presented by the law. Doing so will result in more reliable and more consistent outcomes, and will likely even boost the jury’s perception of their own ability to deliberate and come to a verdict in difficult cases.