Conversational order of jury deliberation

Abstract

The jury system draws a lot of attention in Japan from the perspective of the promotion of the civil participation in the legal system, yet little has been known about the operations of actual juries. Much of the discussion regarding the competence of jurors in fact finding, for example, ignores their actual practices in deliberations. However, the competence of jurors has yet to be investigated through their practices, for the competence is not a question of knowledge, but rather it concerns their actions in the course of accomplishing their task. In this paper the focus is placed on how jurors do actually deliberate. The data is taken from videotaped mock jury that was held by a local bar association. In the analysis, the conversational order of jury deliberation is elucidated. First, the analysis reveals that jurors in deliberation manage the turn taking in ways that they coordinate one's action to the other, especially concerning to the role of the foreperson. Second, the analysis also shows that in many aspects jurors do fact finding in various ways that they assert their doubts about the validity of the testimony rather than agree to what the truth is.