What If Jurors Don’t Understand Standards of Evidence?

A scene from Twelve Angry Men

by Christopher Shea

Wall Street Journal
August 3, 2012

“Beyond a reasonable doubt,” a “preponderance of evidence”: Forests of trees have been sacrificed as judges and lawyers have hammered out the standards for evidence that should apply in different types of cases. The trouble is, as a new study demonstrates, in many instances it’s ultimately up to laypeople on juries to apply those standards. And ordinary people may not grasp the distinctions lawyers place so much weight on:

Three standards—preponderance of evidence, clear and convincing evidence, and beyond a reasonable doubt—are used by different jurisdictions in trials involving liability for punitive damages. We investigated whether individual mock jurors apply these standards appropriately by instructing them to read two personal injury trial summaries and to use one of three standards in either qualitative or quantitative format when deciding punitive liability. Results showed that jurors tended not to incorporate the standard into their judgments: defendants were just as likely to be found liable when the plaintiff’s burden was high (“beyond a reasonable doubt”) as when the burden was low (“preponderance of evidence”). The format of the instruction also had a negligible effect. We suggest that nonuse of the standard of proof is related to jurors’ preferences for less effortful or experiential processing in situations involving complicated or ambiguous material.

That last sentence sounds like a polite way of saying: If the question is too complicated, jurors wing it. Or, as the authors put it, in the conclusion of their paper, “[J]urors’ judgments in civil cases involving punitive damages may be influenced by their biases and commonsense interpretations of the law.”

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