How Juries Talked About Visual Evidence

In the previous chapters, we reported how jurors responded to written survey questionnaires that they completed before and after participating in a simulated trial. What individual jurors disclosed in the privacy of their survey responses was useful, but a more complete picture of the jury decision-making process requires consideration of what the jurors say to each other, and how they perform as a group. This chapter looks more specifically at how the jurors talked about the visual evidence and the people who presented this evidence to them in court. We investigate how jurors assess the relevance of the interactive visual evidence, including how they express both confidence and scepticism in visual images, their debates over the weight they should give to the visual evidence, their expectations of gruesome evidence, and competing approaches to reason. We also explore how jurors assess the reliability of the expert forensic witnesses and the relationship between the witness testimony and the corresponding visual image.