Juror Decision Scale accurately predicts verdicts of jury members

Pre-conceived bias by jurors can lead them to decide on their verdict even before they have deliberated the case

A RESEARCHER at the University of Huddersfield has devised a unique Juror Decision Scale that can use the attitudes and psychology of jury members to accurately predict the verdict in mock rape trials.  It is based on a painstaking simulation of court cases, but now Dominic Willmott aims to take the project a stage further and test the scale with real-life juries.

The findings could strengthen the case for the introduction of jury vetting in rape cases, so that verdicts are not pre-determined by preconception and prejudice.  It might also be possible to extend the concept in order to ensure neutral juries for other offences, states Dominic Willmott, who has degrees in psychology and criminology from the University of Huddersfield.

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Now, he is in the closing stages of his doctoral project, and has already earned widespread attention for experiments that have shown how pre-conceived bias by jurors can lead them to decide on their verdict even before they have deliberated the case.

For example, “rape myth acceptance” – such as the attitude that a woman who agrees to go home with a man is effectively consenting to sex – can lead to a juror, especially from a less well-educated background, being biased against victims.  Women, as well as men, can harbour these views.

At the University of Huddersfield, where his PhD is supervised by Professor Daniel Boduszek, who directs the Quantitative Research Methods Training Unit, Dominic Willmott set up an ambitious series of simulated trials.

After making random contact with members of the public via the electoral roll, he had 100 volunteers from whom he made up juries for nine day-long trials, with actors as defendant and alleged victim and using real-life barristers.  A lecture theatre was transformed into convincing facsimile of a court room and the judge was played by the barrister Nigel Booth, of Manchester chambers St John’s Buildings, who supported the research and ensured the simulation was accurate.

Before each “trial”, Dominic used an internationally-established psychological attitudes scale in order to question and appraise every “juror”.

“What I was really interested in was whether attitudes and psychological constructs would enable us to predict the outcome.  And we found that they did,” said Dominic.

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As a result of his simulated trials he has been able to devise his Juror Decision Scale.  It has the potential to be a tool used to screen out jurors who were liable to reach pre-deliberation verdicts.

But Dominic anticipates that the legal system will argue that although his simulated trials achieved a high degree of realism, they were still not the real thing.

“So what we are saying to the Ministry of Justice is, based upon these findings, give us better access and let us test these ideas on a couple of real juries, and if we get consistent results, then we could argue for screening.”

In the USA, research into decision-making had been conducted by using parallel juries drawn from the pool of jurors on duty at a court, and there has already been transatlantic interest in Dominic’s ideas.  Although he is now the closing stages of his PhD thesis, he will continue to develop his work and disseminate his findings, which could have a wider application.

He would like to establish if pre-deliberation verdicts are an issue unique to rape, or whether his psychological concepts could be used to detect jury bias in crimes such as murder, domestic violence or burglary.