Television's Impact on Jurors Juror Essay

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No one could determine Caylee Anthony's cause of death; Casey Anthony's DNA was not on the duct tape covering Caylee's mouth, and there was no evidence that Anthony had been in the same location where the body was dumped (Hoffmeister, 2011). In other words, there was no physical evidence linking Casey Anthony to the crime. Therefore, when the jury decided to acquit Anthony, many people believed the acquittal was due to the CSI effect. Certainly, had there been any physical evidence linking Anthony to the crime, a conviction would have been almost a certainty given Anthony's bizarre behavior after her daughter's death.

However, it is important to realize that a conviction against Anthony would have been difficult to achieve even in the days before TV shows like CSI. There was no evidence linking her to the commission of a murder. The defense's theory was unusual, but it was not unreasonable. The reality is that everyone linked to the child's death behaved very bizarrely in the days following the child's disappearance. It would have been difficult for any prosecutor to establish this case beyond a reasonable doubt, which is what the United States demands for criminal convictions. There is no reason to believe that this jury demanded physical evidence. If the prosecution had been able to turn up a witness that saw Anthony committing the murder or disposing of the body, there is no reason to believe that the jury would have dismissed that evidence because it was not forensic evidence.

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The real problem in the Anthony case was not a lack of forensic evidence but simply a lack of evidence. Gut instinct may suggest that Anthony is guilty of the murder of her child, but gut instinct is not sufficient to overcome the very high burden established for a criminal justice system.

Looking at how the CSI effect has been blamed for Anthony's acquittal, which was probably the legally appropriate decision, leads one to wonder whether the CSI effect is reality or a myth. Donald Shelton, the chief judge of Washtenaw County, Michigan did an empirical study to examine whether or not the CSI effect actually exists. After conducting a survey of people called for jury service, what he and his team discovered was that television-watching habits were not the greatest determinant of a jury's expectations. While they found that jurors did expect to see scientific evidence in murder cases, they also found that those expectations were not linked to TV viewing habits. Instead, jurors were more likely to be impacted by their own personal technology than their TV viewing habits. In fact, "Shelton's study showed that owning the latest BlackBerry has a much bigger impact on how jurors evaluate scientific evidence" (Rath, 2011). Jurors who had more sophisticated personal technology were more likely to have higher expectations about evidence......

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