"An Empirical Exploration of a Jury Veto"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper available via SSRN authored by Stephen Henderson, Vanessa Edkins and Matthew Jensen. Here is its abstract:

Among the many contemporary dissatisfactions with American criminal justice are longstanding concerns relating to the scarcity of jury trials and the resulting lack of democratic oversight and control in the adjudicative process.  A novel solution has recently been proposed in the form of a ‘jury veto’: perhaps a jury could be empaneled, prototypically if not exclusively by defense request, that would be empowered to select between the judicially-imposed sentence and a prosecutorial and defense alternative.

We conduct the first empirical exploration of such a structure and find reason to believe it could lessen the disconnect between the American framing vision of citizen control and the current reality.  In particular, we find sentencing preferences different from prevailing norms and resilient to the form of conviction (i.e., guilty plea versus trial verdict), but predictably influenced by anchoring, framing, and adjustment. This suggests a veto could improve criminal adjudications but will require careful structure, and we describe how further study of both citizen pools and legal actors could continue to probe this novel device.