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Law School News: Whitehouse, Cicilline To Offer 'Inside View' Of 2nd Trump Impeachment Trial 02-17-2021, Michael M. Bowden
Law School News: Whitehouse, Cicilline To Offer 'Inside View' Of 2nd Trump Impeachment Trial 02-17-2021, Michael M. Bowden
Life of the Law School (1993- )
No abstract provided.
Fair Questions: A Call And Proposal For Using General Verdicts With Special Interrogatories To Prevent Biased And Unjust Convictions, Charles Eric Hintz
Fair Questions: A Call And Proposal For Using General Verdicts With Special Interrogatories To Prevent Biased And Unjust Convictions, Charles Eric Hintz
All Faculty Scholarship
Bias and other forms of logical corner-cutting are an unfortunate aspect of criminal jury deliberations. However, the preferred verdict system in the federal courts, the general verdict, does nothing to counter that. Rather, by forcing jurors into a simple binary choice — guilty or not guilty — the general verdict facilitates and encourages such flawed reasoning. Yet the federal courts continue to stick to the general verdict, ironically out of a concern that deviating from it will harm defendants by leading juries to convict.
This Essay calls for a change: expand the use of a special findings verdict, the general …