Abstract
In 2007, the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) published findings from the State-of-the-States Survey of Jury Improvement Efforts (SOS Survey), the first comprehensive snapshot of jury operations and jury trial practices in the United States. The 2007 SOS Survey featured three discrete components: a statewide survey documenting legal infrastructure for juries and jury trials in each state; a local court survey, which documented jury operations at the county-level in state courts; and a judge & lawyer survey, which asked respondents to describe the characteristics and procedures employed in their most recent jury trial.
By the mid-2010s, NCSC began receiving regular inquiries about when it would publish updated statistics about jury operations and trial procedures, especially from media outlets who were unaware of the cost and time required to undertake the study. Despite several attempts, NCSC was unable to secure external funding to replicate the 2007 SOS Study. So, beginning in 2018, it used internal funds to collect data from a rolling sample of states with the intent to update the SOS Study findings completely within five years. In addition, the new surveys added questions for several areas of interest that had been overlooked in the 2007 SOS Study, including qualification yields for courts with two-step jury operations, use of technology solutions for jury operations, trial length and outcomes, the frequency of legal challenges to the jury system, and judges’ and lawyers’ opinions about the importance and legitimacy of juries and jury trials in the American justice system.
This abstract has been taken from the authors' project overview.
Document Type
Report
Publication Date
2024
Publication Information
National Center for State Courts (2024)
Repository Citation
Hannaford-Agor, Paula; Moffett, Morgan; and Bell, Breanna, "2023 State-of-the-States Survey of Jury Improvement Efforts" (2024). Faculty Publications. 2373.
https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/facpubs/2373