Jurors displace guilt onto the legal system’s decisions

Evidence

Some jurors in the study by Haney and colleagues explicitly distanced themselves from the responsibility for their decisions: “My justification of the whole thing is, it’s not really my decisions, it’s the laws decision” (Haney et al., 1994). The instructions to one jury depicted the guidelines as doing the deciding: “I think having those questions sort of takes that burden off of you because if you can answer ‘yes’ to the questions, well then he- that makes him eligible for the death penalty” (Costanzo & Costanzo, 1994). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2001

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Overly strict abortion laws led juries to acquit four-fifths of the accused; Fault-based divorce law produced collusive perjury in court — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 1151; Formal written jury instructions became opaque to the juries they supposedly guided. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2316