Psychology is present in all aspects of our society. The law is no exception. This is relevant in jury selection. As we talked about in class, lawyers often hire psychologists to help examine potential jurors in a trial. They use them to "evaluate" the person's personality.
In our movie 12 angry men, these jurors were probably not picked out by social psychologists. These were 12 men from different walks of life and when put together they all had their own opinions of the case. This jury would be an ideal jury in a case. They took the time, even though it was not what they wanted to do, to evaluate the evidence and explore the phrase "reasonable doubt". With the leadership of Henry Fonda's character they were able to come to an unanimous decision.
In today's world, these jurors would have most likely been facebook stalked to find out about their personality and their lifestyle habits which would have maybe excluded some of them from serving on this jury.
There is so much social influence on us today as a technology dependant society that its hard to find jurors who have not been exposed to cases. This gives them a bias going into a trial if they make it to the jury. Psychologists can evaluate potential jurors but if a person is not being honest with them how is this effective?
Take for example the Casey Anthony trial. I mean seriously unless you were the world's most reclusive person who didn't hear anything about this case? Let alone like 17 people who hadn't heard about it that lived in the area for jury duty. With a case so public how did a jury even get selected and if psychologists were brought in to help select the jury, boy did they drop the ball. They got the most ridiculous bunch of idiots to serve on this jury. Where was the psychology in that?
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