Jurors' talk

Angel M.Y. Lin (mylin who-is-at oise.on.ca)
Wed, 4 Oct 1995 12:47:25 -0400 (EDT)

Teresa's observations are interesting: members of a close community have the
shared resources available to them to do discussions efficiently even on
topics they're supposed not to have discussed before. So, what would be
some examples of these resources?

I fin this interesting because the discipline of conversation analysis
was first started as Harvey Sacks, trained first as a lawyer and only
later as a sociologist, became interested in analysing jurors'
discussions, in finding out the "methods" or resources, or "common sense"
reasoning and warrants that jurors use in reaching a "reasonable" verdict.

I don't have the ref. off hand, but could find out later on...
Angel

On Wed, 4 Oct 1995, Teresa M. Meehan wrote:

> Dear xmca-ers,
>
> My voice is not often heard on the list because I really prefer the
> lurking role, but something caught my attention the other night
> (pre-verdict) that I would like consider from a Vygotskian perspective. I was
> listening to a group of legal analysts on CNN who were discussing the
> relatively short time the jury took in diliberating the OJ case. Several
> of the analysts were quite sure that the jury had begun deliberations
> among themselves before they were supposed to. One analyst even suggested
> that if the verdict turned out to be guilty that one of OJ's lawyers (I
> don't remember which one) would probably file some sort of petition with
> the court, try to prove that the jury talked ahead of time, and get the
> case thrown out on those grounds.
>
> Now, here's my humble opinion. It seems to me that what we have hear is
> case that involves a group of people (12 jurors) who were forced into a
> community. They essentially moved in a herd for 9 months. Granted, they
> could not talk about the case during that time, but they could talk. In
> looking at this situtation from a Vygotskian perspective, I am not at all
> surprised that when the time came, the jurors were able to communicate
> swiftly and effectively and reach a consensus.
>
> At the risk of running this case even further into the ground, I would be
> interested in other people's views.
>
> Teresa Meehan
> Doctoral Candidate
> Educational Linguistics
> University of New Mexico
> meehan1 who-is-at unm.edu
>
>