About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

41 New Eng. L. Rev. 435 (2006-2007)
CSI and Its Effects: Media, Juries, and the Burden of Proof

handle is hein.journals/newlr41 and id is 443 raw text is: CSI AND ITS EFFECTS: MEDIA, JURIES, AND THE BURDEN OF PROOF SIMON A. COLE* & RACHEL DIOSO-VILLA** INTRODUCTION Deciding between the guilt and innocence of an accused criminal is the weightiest of the weighty tasks that law sets for itself. Such decisions can terminate free individuals' life and liberty, and they can bestow or deny justice to free individuals who have been terribly victimized. Law's mechanisms for making such decisions are unabashedly imperfect. Law manages to live with this imperfection through the belief that these imperfect mechanisms are preferable to the alternatives. In U.S. law, the ultimate authority for this decision is vested in the jury, a non-expert democratic body. The law exerts a great deal of control over the supply of information to the jury, but the actual decision-making process is treated as sacrosanct and generally outside the purview of the law. American law's faith in the jury bespeaks a faith in deliberative democracy, the wisdom of numbers, and in common sense. Every day, all over the United States, juries must decide whether the evidence supporting a particular accusation meets the threshold necessary to warrant a criminal conviction. U.S. law relies on juries to make these threshold judgments fairly, consistently, and without prejudice. The idea that these threshold judgments are being skewed under the influence of media cuts to the core of the law's function in distributing justice. Such a phenomenon, if true, should be of grave concern to everyone involved with administering justice. If television programmers are skewing jury verdicts as a side effect of entertaining the American public, perhaps we should find other means of entertaining ourselves. If, on the other hand, the jury Associate Professor of Criminology, Law & Society, University of California, Irvine; Ph.D. (science & technology studies), Cornell University; A.B., Princeton University. This project was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (Award #SES- 0347305). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. ** Doctoral student, Criminology, Law & Society, University of California, Irvine; M.A. (criminology), University of Toronto; B.Sc., University of Toronto. 435

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most