Political Society and Deliberative Democracy
Lest our statistics drown out the voices of the individual jurors in our study, we begin this concluding chapter with the reflections of a King County juror. This particular person had served a previous time on a jury and had returned to the courthouse for another round:
This is the second time in my life I’ve been called for jury duty, and
I think now, as I did then, that our system is about the best anyone
could have. I feel that most jurors take their responsibilities seriously
and do their best to be fair and listen to all the evidence before making
any judgments. In talking to the people around me, I was impressed
with their attitudes about being called for duty. How fortunate we are
to live in America!
The data presented in this book show that many fellow jurors have had equally inspiring experiences. In the broadest sense, then, Justice Kennedy was correct when he asserted, citing Tocqueville in Powers v. Ohio, that juries have a civic educational power. To pull together the findings shown in chapters 3–7, Table 9.1 summarizes the main results of our research on how jury service changes people’s civic and political attitudes and behaviors. Referring back to the map of the state, political society, and civil society, the table shows that the jury has as wide a range of impacts as we initially expected. Those effects measure as small changes, with the only exception being that service at the courthouse has a relatively large positive impact on jurors’ confidence in the quality of the jury system itself. From voting to community conversation, from group membership to public affairs media use, the different aspects of jury service had wide-ranging and intriguing connections to changes in jurors’ post-service behavior. Important civic and
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