Radical enfranchisement in the jury room and public life / Sonali Chakravarti.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chakravarti, Sonali, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Jury--United States.

Jury.

Jury duty--Political aspects--United States.

Jury duty.

Jury nullification--United States.

Jury nullification.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 148 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Juries have been at the center of some of the most emotionally charged moments of political life. At the same time, their capacity for legitimate decision making has been under scrutiny, because of events like the acquittal of George Zimmerman by a Florida jury for the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the decisions of several grand juries not to indict police officers for the killing of unarmed black men. Meanwhile, the overall use of juries has also declined in recent years, with most cases settled or resolved by plea bargain. With Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life, Sonali Chakravarti offers a full-throated defense of juries as a democratic institution. She argues that juries provide an important site for democratic action by citizens and that their use should be revived. The jury, Chakravarti argues, could be a forward-looking institution that nurtures the best democratic instincts of citizens, but this requires a change in civic education regarding the skills that should be cultivated in jurors before and through the process of a trial. Being a juror, perhaps counterintuitively, can guide citizens in how to be thoughtful rule-breakers by changing their relationship to their own perceptions and biases and by making options for collective action salient, but they must be better prepared and instructed along the way.

Contents:

Mature enough to disobey: jurors : women, and radical enfranchisement In Tocqueville's Democracy in America

Mistaken for consensus : hung juries, the Allen charge, and the end of jury deliberation

No one but you : jurors and the internal standard of reasonable doubt

Guilty, not guilty, nullify : nullification in an age of abolition

Radical enfranchisement in the jury room.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226654324

022665432X

OCLC:

1140141713