A few random questions about juries

  1. Are jurors allowed to take their own notes?

  2. Is there someone available for them to ask if they have any law-related questions?

  3. Are they allowed to request clarification regarding any points made by the defense/prosecution? I’m assuming no, and that if something isn’t clear they have to either use their best judgement or ignore it.

  4. Obivously they don’t dump all the evidence in juror’s room; who acts as a go-between (if there even is one) to retrieve any evidence/documents the jurors may request for reviewing?

  1. Depends on the local jurisdiction. Some US states allow notes, some do not. I dunno about Canada.

  2. Jurors are not there to decide matters of law, they are there to decide if there is enough evidence to prove a person is guilty of a crime, or liable in a civil case. If the jury has questions about what they can and cannot consider, what a specific term means, etc., then they can ask the judge (usually via a note.)

  3. I don’t think so.

  4. Usually jurors don’t examine physical evidence directly, but listen to the testimony of the experts who examined the evidence. Jurors are not qualified to be forensic scientists.

  1. I have read that some judges disallow note-taking even in jurisdictions that allow it. This seems dumb to me - I don’t know how one could keep track of the details of a case without taking notes.

  2. The judge instructs the jury on matters of the law. The judge tells the jury how to interpret the law before the jury retires to the jury room for deliberation. In the three times I have been on juries, we were allowed to give questions to the bailiff, who would give them to the judge.

  3. Some judges allow jurors to submit written questions of witnesses. Of course, the judge decides which of these questions can be asked (some questions would violate procedure). Once both sides have rested and the jury is deliberating, no more evidence may be introduced, so the jurors can’t ask for clarifications of testimony or other evidence at this time.

  4. Sometimes they just give the physical evidence to the jurors in the jury room. Other times, they allow the jury to ask the bailiff. In none of my cases did the judge ever deny us a piece of physical evidence. I suppose there are cases where they would do it - for example, I don’t think they’d want a jury looking at the raw results of a DNA test, as this requires special knowledge to interpret. On one of my juries, we were allowed to have a pocket knife that was alleged to have been used in an assault, and in another case we were given surveillance videos (and a VCR and TV to watch them).

  1. Note taking is usually NOT allowed for the simple reason that it distracts the note-taker from listening to the current testimony. A Court transcript of all testimony is always available to the jury so note-taking during the trial is not necessary.

  2. Yes, the Judge.

  3. The jury cannot solicit any evidence or testimony that was not presented at trial. The jury has access to the trial record (transcription), but that’s all. The jury may request that unfamiliar terms be defined (by the Judge), but no further clarification of evidence or testimony can be had.

  4. The court officer(s) assigned to the jury handles all such requests.

In the times I’ve been on juries, a transcript was not made available to the jurors. I’ve never heard of a court making printed copies of the testimony available to jurors.

If we wanted to re-hear testimony, the court reporter would read it back to us. This is an inefficient system - the jurors have to figure out which testimony they want to hear, then notify the bailiff. The bailiff then tells the judge, who gets the reporter and the jurors together. The reporter then reads the testimony, after which the jurors are sent back to deliberate.

If note-taking really distracts a juror from the current testimony, why is note-taking by students at lectures so effective? Wouldn’t the students be distracted from what the lecturer is saying?

My thoughts…

I was the foreman on a serious felony case in Texas. We were instructed that we were not allowed to take notes, or try to investigate the crime in any way. Also, we were not allowed to discuss the case with other jurors or anyone else untill we retired for final deliberation.

We were allowed to pose questions during deliberation, which had to be signed by the foreman before being presented to the judge for court record.

Pretty wild…I as the foreman had to sign a document sentencing the accused to 99 years in prison…lemme tell you, it was THE most powerful feeling I’ve ever had in my life…and I never want to ever feel that again. It made me almost sick the amount of power I had over another individual.

It was literally a piece of paper that said “We sentence the accused to <blank> years in prison”…and I had to write in the number of years…

certainly something to be taken very very seriously. I can say I did my civic duty, but it was a hell of an emotional drain…

D.

I was on a jury 1.5 times in NJ. (One was a mugging where we convicted, the other was a civil case that got settled halfway though.)

On one of those, I asked the judge why no notetaking. He said he allows it in cases that are expected to last a long time; in those cases the memory loss is the main factor, but in short cases the memory loss will be minor so it loses to the distraction factor.

In the cases where we deliberated, it was a real cross-section of the local residents - upper and lower class, men and women, young and old, varied ethnic groups and skin tones - and I was very impressed by the seriousness with which everyone took their responsibility. None of this “I wanna go home business.” I can understand what Daylon went through. This is not kid stuff.

The testimony bit was exactly as Jeff Lichtman’s 2nd post described. I was - and still am - shocked that a printed copy of the transcript was not given to the jury. This means that if a witness made an important point which did not register with the jury, he may as well not have said it. If the importance of that point will become apparent only in conjunction with later testimony, no one will be able to “connect the dots”. Because no one remembers that first point. The lawyer may refer to it in his summation, but still it is difficult for the jury to recall what he’s talking about. I realize that a dozen people studying hundreds of pages of transcript may drag out the trial for a long time, but I don’t think that’s too high a price to pay for a fair verdict.

Re Q2 of the OP: The law said the accused was guilty if he “caused” a certain thing. in the mugging case, we the jury agreed that the accused had “indirectly caused” it, and we wanted to know whether an “indirect cause” counts as being a “cause” or not. We posed this question on paper to the judge. We expected him to give a yes/no answer, or to tell us how the case law developed in other similar circumstances. Instead, he simply took out a dictionary and read us the definition of “cause”. He left us hanging, to use our best judgement, with absolutely no access to precedents that might have been set in other cases. I don’t think that is fair to the defendant.

Q4 of the OP: We were given most (all? I don’t remember) of the physical evidence without even asking, including the knife and some photos.