THE JURY EXPERIMENT

The American Mock Trial Association has decreed that collegiate mock trials should be treated as jury trials. Historically, collegiate mock trial rounds have been judged by two or three practicing attorneys who make holistic judgments about the quality of a segment of trial and assign it a score from 1-10.

The first problem with this format is that increasing numbers of lawyers have never conducted a jury trial. Moreover, due to the rising costs of litigation, fewer and fewer lawyers are gaining the experience of arguing before juries. As a result, the wisdom which lawyers could once impart to students is no longer possessed by those who judge mock trial. The second problem is that no matter how experienced the practitioners judging rounds are, they can never simulate the deliberative process utilized by jurors and their legal education ensures that they view disputes and the trial process differently from lay people.

For years, programs who host tournaments have experimented with using "real people" as juries to fill the jury box and to serve as props to help create a ambiance of realism. This is great, but we think we can do better. Last year we presented to you: The Jury Experiment. Thanks to the efforts of SDMT coach Chaz Ball and Dr. Dawn McQuiston, the MAMMTI featured juries of 6 or more in 48% of trials.

This year's MAMMTI will once more feature REAL people acting as REAL jurors. Due to space constraints, we will only be able to place juries of 4-8 people in seven of our 13 trials each round. However, in each of the trials with jurors we will provide the jurors with individual questionaires asking them to evaluate the student advocates in specifically compartmentalized aspects of persuasion. These individual criterion will be evaluated using a 10 point scale but instead of focusing on a direct, cross, or speech, the criteria will ask jurors to assess a student's trustworthiness, engagement, sincerity, and relatability. At the end of the round, we will ask the jury to deliberate on the completion of a traditional "blue ballot." At the end of the tournament, we will make all of the data we gather available to coaches and teams. We will also try to recognize top performers based on jury data in some fashion.

Below you can download a copy of our juror survey. Juror recruitment is going well and we hope to meet our goal of 6 person juries in the top 6 trials each round. The juror survey was developed in conjunction with Prof. Dawn McQuiston of the Arizona State Department of Psychology and her research assistant, Sean Jules. Input was also provided by Sarah Barrios-Cool, Chaz Ball, and Justin Bernstein.