CRIMINAL JURIES
Criminal juries--General characteristics of juries--statistics show that their decisions are independent of their composition--The manner in which an impression may be made on juries--The style and influence of argument--The methods of persuasion of celebrated counsel--The nature of those crimes for which juries are respectively indulgent or severe--The utility of the jury as an institution, and the danger that would result from its place being taken by magistrates.
Being unable to study here every category of jury, I shall only examine the most important--that of the juries of the Court of Assize.These juries afford an excellent example of the heterogeneous crowd that is not anonymous.We shall find them display suggestibility and but slight capacity for reasoning, while they are open to the influence of the leaders of crowds, and they are guided in the main by unconscious sentiments.In the course of this investigation we shall have occasion to observe some interesting examples of the errors that may be made by persons not versed in the psychology of crowds.
Juries, in the first place, furnish us a good example of the slight importance of the mental level of the different elements composing a crowd, so far as the decisions it comes to are concerned.We have seen that when a deliberative assembly is called upon to give its opinion on a question of a character not entirely technical, intelligence stands for nothing.For instance, a gathering of scientific men or of artists, owing to the mere fact that they form an assemblage, will not deliver judgments on general subjects sensibly different from those rendered by a gathering of masons or grocers.At various periods, and in particular previous to 1848, the French administration instituted a careful choice among the persons summoned to form a jury, picking the jurors from among the enlightened classes; choosing professors, functionaries, men of letters, &c.At the present day jurors are recruited for the most part from among small tradesmen, petty capitalists, and employes.Yet, to the great astonishment of specialist writers, whatever the composition of the jury has been, its decisions have been identical.Even the magistrates, hostile as they are to the institution of the jury, have had to recognise the exactness of the assertion.M.Berard des Glajeux, a former President of the Court of Assizes, expresses himself on the subject in his "Memoirs" in the following terms:--"The selection of jurymen is to-day in reality in the hands of the municipal councillors, who put people down on the list or eliminate them from it in accordance with the political and electoral preoccupations inherent in their situation....The majority of the jurors chosen are persons engaged in trade, but persons of less importance than formerly, and employes belonging to certain branches of the administration....Both opinions and professions counting for nothing once the role of judge assumed, many of the jurymen having the ardour of neophytes, and men of the best intentions being similarly disposed in humble situations, the spirit of the jury has not changed: ITS VERDICTSHAVE REMAINED THE SAME."
Of the passage just cited the conclusions, which are just, are to be borne in mind and not the explanations, which are weak.Too much astonishment should not be felt at this weakness, for, as a rule, counsel equally with magistrates seem to be ignorant of the psychology of crowds and, in consequence, of juries.I find a proof of this statement in a fact related by the author just quoted.He remarks that Lachaud, one of the most illustrious barristers practising in the Court of Assize, made systematic use of his right to object to a juror in the case of all individuals of intelligence on the list.Yet experience--and experience alone--has ended by acquainting us with the utter uselessness of these objections.This is proved by the fact that at the present day public prosecutors and barristers, at any rate those belonging to the Parisian bar, have entirely renounced their right to object to a juror; still, as M.des Glajeux remarks, the verdicts have not changed, "they are neither better nor worse."Like all crowds, juries are very strongly impressed by sentimental considerations, and very slightly by argument."They cannot resist the sight," writes a barrister, "of a mother giving its child the breast, or of orphans." "It is sufficient that a woman should be of agreeable appearance," says M.des Glajeux, "to win the benevolence of the jury."Without pity for crimes of which it appears possible they might themselves be the victims--such crimes, moreover, are the most dangerous for society--juries, on the contrary, are very indulgent in the case of breaches of the law whose motive is passion.They are rarely severe on infanticide by girl-mothers, or hard on the young woman who throws vitriol at the man who has seduced and deserted her, for the reason that they feel instinctively that society runs but slight danger from such crimes,[24] and that in a country in which the law does not protect deserted girls the crime of the girl who avenges herself is rather useful than harmful, inasmuch as it frightens future seducers in advance.
