Abstract
Verdict and deliberation content analysis of judges and juries in the Spanish legal context. A contrastive approach. Bearing in mind that jury performance has been subject to considerable criticism in various countries, the aim of the present paper is to contrast the judges' and jury performance. A total of 15 nine-member juries and 15 three-member panels of judges deliberated and reached a verdict on real cases. The results of a contrastive analysis reveal a) neither judges nor juries perform in a normative way; b) juries perform worse than judges; c) judges and juries perform different tasks, driven to the defence by the juries and to the prosecution by the judges; and d) the juries' deliberations are not more exhaustive than the judges' as would be expected in order to compensate for their lack of legal knowledge and experience, and tend to be redundant in content. Finally, the practical implications are discussed as well mechanisms designed to mitigate the non-normative decision-making of judges and juries.
