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To what extent does random selection of jury members create bias and would jury selection provide a solution?

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To what extent does random selection of jury members create bias and would jury selection provide a solution?

The theory behind the UK system of random selection is based on many assumptions. Firstly that randomness produces a representative sample of the population, which will provide verdicts, representative of the general public. It is assumed that if one juror has an apparent prejudice, then those in other jurors will counter it and so bias does not occur in this system[1]. Another assumption is that having “12 good men and true”[2] randomly selected into the jury “strengthens the legitimacy of the legal system.”[3] However, it is clear that randomness does not provide representativeness …show more content…

Jurors are told that if they have any reasonable doubt as to whether a defendant is guilty then they are to find him not guilty. However in complicated cases it is argued that jurors are likely to unconsciously disguise their confusion as reasonable doubt and therefore more people are likely to be acquitted than if more experienced, specialised people were selected, as could be the case with jury selection.[8] Lord Denning argues, in What Next In Law?, that “ Jurors are summoned who are not sufficiently intelligent or educated to perform their task”[9] and argues that the jury should be chosen like magistrates. A case, that illustrates random selection providing incapable jurors, is R v Young (1995) where the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial of a man convicted of double murder because 4 of the jurors had tried to contact the victims using a Ouija board in what was described as a “drunken experiment”.[10] Jury selection could provide a solution to this problem by selecting jury members with the knowledge and capacity to give verdicts, which don’t rely on unscientific experiments or on how confused the jurors are. This would suggest that jury selection could provide a solution where random selection creates a bias of ignorance, inexperience and confusion.

Another bias created by random selection is that ethnicities are

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