Jury Stereotypes

Furthermore, while members of the jury are instructed to ignore and avoid any publicity or outside news about the trial, a case so large and so public would be impossible for the jurors to avoid and, therefore, stay impartial. In normal cases, jurors are asked to stay away from the media and to avoid anything outside of the information that they are given that could sway their vote. However, as previously stated, in a case with so much public attention, it is nearly impossible to prevent jurors from gaining outside information. Researchers argue that any type of public information given to jurors may be “dangerous” (Kassin, Wrightsman cited in Greene 1990: 440) to said case and could leave a “lasting impression on jurors” (Snyder cited in
Both the person under inquiry and the jury scrutinizing the defendant are effected by the presence of the media and that they use to portray their information. It can be seen in the previous examples that women are put on a culture based pedestal and any deviation from what they are “meant” to do is damaging to their reputations and can lead to issues in convincing those who fall into the media’s jargon filled trap of anything other than the opinions that they have already established. As women fight to break free of the stereotypes that they are held to, this begs the question whether society has really come as far as it is portrayed in the case of feminism. Is society intelligent enough to handle media in trials and still hold their own opinions rather than falling into the opinions established by others? This leads to a bigger question as to whether the media has enough benefits to trials to still be allowed in court rooms and to portray their opinions to the public with the possibility of jurors being swayed. The answer seems to be no. The mindset of the viewers and jurors seems to be too easily manipulated to match whatever news that the media has chosen to spew to them as proven by the previous