The effects of defendant and juror similarity on sentencing for university undergraduate research fellows

Abstract

In every criminal case, the selection of jurors is a crucial factor in determining the outcome of the trial. The prosecution and the defense each attempt to construct a jury that will be sympathetic to their arguments. Each side interviews the prospective jurors and attempts to eliminate those people who might be partial to the opposition. Because attorneys have the opportunity to select the jurors, proper evaluation of each candidate is imperative. In many cases, the allocation of punishment is a responsibility given to the jurors. A variety of factors contribute to the decisions that individual jurors make concerning sentence severity. One of these factors may be the degree to which a juror can relate to the defendant. This research intends to analyze how the similarity between a defendant and a juror influences juror decision-making. The deep characteristic of personality and the surface characteristic of sex serve as the comparison between the defendant and jurors for this study. Furthermore, the way in which different types of crimes influence sentence severity is analyzed. This study analyzes the ways in which personality, sex, type of crime, and defendant-juror similarity affect judgments of punishment.