The Role of the Individual in the Legal Process Essay

The Role of the Individual in the Legal Process - Essay Example One weakness of jury trial is that decisions of a jury may be influenced by facts that not in issue and irrelevant to the trial. Sadly, personal issues, prejudices, and emotions play a role in deciding critical matters such as the right to liberty of murder suspects. Juror 7 best demonstrates this. He votes depending on how the result will affect the baseball game he has bought a ticket to. He is impatient, wants the trial to end quickly and doesn’t care whether the defendant is found guilty or not. He starts by guilty then changes to not guilty to quickly bring the trial to a conclusion. Jurors 3 and 5 are used to show prejudice. Juror 5 is accused by Juror 3 of voting out of sympathy for the suspect having grown up in a slum like him. In addition, Juror 3 is used to demonstrate how emotions influence jury decisions. He simply wants someone to be punished and opts for the boy to be found guilty and punished. He just says that the boy has got to burn and is slipping through th eir fingers. No profound analysis of evidence presented. Finally, Juror 10 demonstrates the role of prejudice. He simply believes that people raised in slums like the suspect have a propensity to commit crimes and on that basis, would have found the suspect guilty. In some juries, members do not have opinions of their own and only vote according to the reasoning of their friends. For example, Jurors 4, 10, and 12 alter votes according to Juror 8’s logic that the old woman would not have had her glasses on in bed and did not have sufficient time to wear them in order to see the suspect clearly. Some opinions are skewed as they bear no relationship with the facts in issue. It is revealed that juror three remained as the only juror with a guilty verdict due to a bad relationship with his son and nothing to do with the evidence in consideration. Apart from the weaknesses of a jury discussed above, a jury is capable of delivering a