Juror Perceptions of the Legitimacy of Legal Authorities and Decision Making in Criminal Cases

Abstract

Literature on trust in legal authorities and institutions demonstrates that trust affects individual behavior, yet there is little research on whether attitudes toward legal authorities such as the police or courts influence juror behavior as a third party assessing evidence and determining legal outcomes for others. Additionally, the literature on juror decision making confirms that juror race is an important predictor of juror decisions, but explanations for differences among racial groups are not clear. Since minority groups hold less favorable attitudes toward legal authorities generally, legitimacy theory may help explain racial differences in decision making among jurors. Using data from nearly 2,000 jurors in felony trials, this research utilizes multilevel modeling techniques to find that jurors' trust in legal authorities is related to juror outcomes, though the effect of juror trust and confidence in the police is opposite that of juror trust and confidence in the courts. Additionally, juror race conditions the effect of trust in police and courts. Trust is a stronger predictor of both perceptions of evidence and voting for black jurors than it is for white jurors.

Race, Gender, and Juries: Evidence from North Carolina

“…13 It is possible that race is correlated, or at least is perceived to be correlated, with unobserved characteristics that are reasonable grounds for the use of peremptory challenge, such as views towards police or the criminal justice system generally. Devine and Caughlin (2014) and Farrell et al (2013) find evidence supporting this claim. The unequal application of criminal justice in the United States, and North Carolina specifically, has been widely publicized in recent years (see for example Alexander (2012) and "The Disproportionate Risks of Driving while Black," The New York Times, October 25, 2015).…”

Everyone Knows the Game: Legal Consciousness in the Hawaiian Cockfight

“…Much of the existing “legitimacy research does not … distinguish between perceptions of the legitimacy of different types of legal authorities” (Farrell, Pennington and Cronin ). Procedural justice tells us little, for example, about whether someone might view an authority as legitimate but a law as illegitimate, or vice versa, and why this might occur.…”

Jurors' Subjective Experiences of Deliberations in Criminal Cases

“…Model 3 adds an indicator of whether jurors held minority opinions relative to their fellow jurors at the start of deliberations. Since jurors with minority opinions have previously been shown to be less satisfied with their jury's deliberations (Waters and Hans ), this addresses the possibility that the results we observe are attributable to members of certain groups being more likely to hold minority opinions, given differing attitudes toward the legal system and proclivities for supporting the prosecution or defense (Farrell, Pennington, and Cronin ). Finally, Model 4 addresses this possibility with increased specificity by adding interaction terms between minority opinion status and our status characteristics of interest as well as three‐way interaction terms between minority opinion status and the individual‐level interaction terms in Model 2.…”