Unclear capital sentencing instructions cause jurors dangerous confusion.

Evidence

Eisenberg and Wells’s (1993) characterization of jury instructions as causing “deadly confusion” is amply supported by jurors’ accounts of their bewilderment over prescribed rules for determining who should live and who should die. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1999

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Capital punishment was struck down because juries imposed it arbitrarily and freakishly. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2002; Formal written jury instructions became opaque to the juries they supposedly guided. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2316