A jury is a sworn body of people (jurors) convened to hear evidence and render an impartial verdict officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a penalty or judgment.
12 Angry Men is a 1957 American legal drama film directed by Sidney Lumet, adapted from a 1954 teleplay of the same name by Reginald Rose. The film tells the story of a jury of 12 men as they deliberate the conviction or acquittal of a teenager charged with murder on the basis of reasonable doubt; disagreement and conflict among them force the jurors to question their morals and values. It stars Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Ed Begley, E. G. Marshall, and Jack Warden.
Jury nullification (US/UK), jury equity (UK), or a perverse verdict (UK) occurs when the jury in a criminal trial gives a not guilty verdict regardless of whether they believe a defendant has broken the law. The jury's reasons may include the belief that the law itself is unjust, that the prosecutor has misapplied the law in the defendant's case, that the punishment for breaking the law is too harsh, or general frustrations with the criminal justice system. Some juries have also refused to convict due to their own prejudices in favor of the defendant. Such verdicts are possible because a jury has an absolute right to return any verdict it chooses.
On December 22, 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot four young Black men on a New York City Subway train in Manhattan after they allegedly tried to rob him. All four teenagers survived, though one, Darrell Cabey, was paralyzed and suffered brain damage as a result of his injuries. Goetz fled to Bennington, Vermont, before surrendering to police nine days after the shooting. He was charged with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment, and several firearms offenses. A jury subsequently found Goetz guilty of one count of carrying an unlicensed firearm and acquitted him of the remaining charges. For the firearm offense, he served eight months of a one-year sentence. In 1996, Cabey obtained a $43 million civil judgment against Goetz, equivalent to $80 million today.
The Runaway Jury is a legal thriller novel written by American author John Grisham. It was Grisham's seventh novel. The hardcover first edition was published by Doubleday Books in 1996 (ISBN 0-385-47294-3). Pearson Longman released the graded reader edition in 2001 (ISBN 0-582-43405-X). The novel was published again in 2003 to coincide with the release of Runaway Jury, a movie adaptation of the novel starring Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, John Cusack and Rachel Weisz. The third printing (ISBN 0-440-22147-1) bears a movie-themed cover, in place of the covers used on the first and second printings.
The Juror is a 1996 American legal thriller film based on the 1995 novel by George Dawes Green. It was directed by Brian Gibson and stars Demi Moore as a single mother picked for jury duty for a mafia trial and Alec Baldwin as a mobster sent to intimidate her. The film received highly negative reviews and Moore won a joint Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress for both her performance in this film and in Striptease.
A change of venue is the legal term for moving a trial to a new location. In high-profile matters, a change of venue may occur to move a jury trial away from a location where a fair and impartial jury may not be possible due to widespread publicity about a crime and its defendants to another community in order to obtain jurors who can be more objective in their duties. This change may be to different towns, and across the other sides of states or, in some extremely high-profile federal cases, to other states.
In law, a trial is a coming together of parties to a dispute, to present information in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to adjudicate claims or disputes. One form of tribunal is a court. The tribunal, which may occur before a judge, jury, or other designated trier of fact, aims to achieve a resolution to their dispute.
People v. Goetz, 68 N.Y.2d 96, was a court case chiefly concerning subjective and objective standards of reasonableness in using deadly force for self-defense; the New York Court of Appeals held that a hybrid objective-subjective standard was mandated by New York law.
Barry I. Slotnick is a New York City-based defense attorney. Slotnick is well-known for defending infamous Mafia crime boss, John Gotti and New York City subway shooter, Bernhard Goetz. Along with his son Stuart, he negotiated former First Lady, Melania Trump's pre-nuptial agreement with Donald Trump. In 2021, he was the subject of a NY Times best seller, The Defense Lawyer, written by author, James Patterson, chronicling Slotnick's life.
Scientific jury selection, often abbreviated SJS, is the use of social science techniques and expertise to choose favorable juries during a criminal or civil trial. Scientific jury selection is used during the jury selection phase of the trial, during which lawyers have the opportunity to question jurors. It almost always entails an expert's assistance in the attorney's use of peremptory challenges—the right to reject a certain number of potential jurors without stating a reason—during jury selection. The practice is currently unique to the American legal system.
Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Company, 500 U.S. 614 (1991), was a United States Supreme Court case which held that peremptory challenges may not be used to exclude jurors on the basis of race in civil trials. Edmonson extended the court's similar decision in Batson v. Kentucky (1986), a criminal case. The Court applied the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, as determined in Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), in finding that such race-based challenges violated the Constitution.
In the United States, jury nullification occurs when a jury in a criminal case reaches a verdict contrary to the weight of evidence, sometimes because of a disagreement with the relevant law. It has its origins in colonial America under British law. The American jury draws its power of nullification from its right to render a general verdict in criminal trials, the inability of criminal courts to direct a verdict no matter how strong the evidence, the Fifth Amendment's Double Jeopardy Clause, which prohibits the appeal of an acquittal, and the fact that jurors cannot be punished for the verdict they return.
Twelve Angry Men is an American courtroom drama written by Reginald Rose concerning the jury of a homicide trial. It was broadcast initially as a television play in 1954. The following year it was adapted for the stage. It was adapted for a film of the same name, directed by Sidney Lumet, and released in 1957. Since then it has been given numerous remakes, adaptations, and tributes.
On October 15, 2008, Michael Mineo was arrested and allegedly sodomized by New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers in the Prospect Park subway station in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York. According to Mineo, the arresting police officers pinned him to the ground, while Richard Kern, one of the officers, pulled down Mineo's pants and sodomized him with a police baton. On December 9, 2008, the Brooklyn District Attorney indicted the three arresting officers and charged them with felonies. Kern was charged with aggravated sexual abuse in the first degree, assault in the first degree, and hindering prosecution. Two other officers — Andrew Morales and Alex Cruz — were charged with hindering prosecution and official misconduct. All three officers were tried and found not guilty of all charges.
James Eagan Holmes is an American mass murderer responsible for the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting in which he killed 12 people and injured 70 others at a Century 16 movie theater on July 20, 2012. He had no known criminal background before the shooting occurred. Before the shooting, Holmes booby-trapped his apartment with explosives, which were defused one day later by a bomb squad.
State of Florida v. George Zimmerman was a criminal prosecution of George Zimmerman on the charge of second-degree murder stemming from the killing of Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012.
Lillian Breslow Rubin was an American writer, professor, psychotherapist and sociologist. She was a distinguished professor of sociology at Queens College and also worked as a senior researcher at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley. Rubin was a feminist.
Flowers v. Mississippi, No. 17–9572, 588 U.S. ___ (2019), was a United States Supreme Court case regarding the use of peremptory challenges to remove black jurors during a series of Mississippi criminal trials for Curtis Flowers, a black man convicted on murder charges. The Supreme Court held in Batson v. Kentucky that the use of peremptory challenges solely on the basis of race is unconstitutional. This case examined whether the Mississippi Supreme Court erred in how it applied Batson to this case. The Supreme Court ruled that Flowers' case fell under Batson and that the state inappropriately removed most of the potential black jurors during the trials.
On Tuesday, October 3, 1995, the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder case was announced and Simpson was acquitted on both counts of murder. Although the nation observed the same evidence presented at trial, a division along racial lines emerged in observers opinion of the verdict, which the media dubbed the "racial gap". Polling showed that most African Americans believed Simpson was innocent and justice had been served, while most White Americans felt he was guilty and the verdict was a racially motivated jury nullification by a mostly African-American jury. Current polling shows the gap has narrowed since the trial, with the majority of black respondents in 2016 stating they believed Simpson was guilty.
