Jury Prejudice Fear "Unfounded"

SBS
May 25, 2016

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2016/05/25/jury-prejudice-fear-unfounded

Judges in child sex abuse trials could be making wrong assumptions about how prejudiced juries are, a new report has found.

Results from the largest ever study of how juries behave in abuse trials were launched on Wednesday in Sydney.

The findings reveal jurors don't always engage in prejudicial reasoning in child sex abuse trials where there are multiple complainants, or where there's evidence of a defendant's "bad character".

Current laws are based on judges' assumptions that special care needs to be taken in child sex abuse cases to ensure a defendant gets a fair trial.

This means joint trials - where an alleged pedophile has to defend against a number of complainants - or evidence of a defendant's bad character are sometimes not allowed.

At the launch of the study - Jury Reasoning in Joint and Separate Trials of Institutional Child Sexual Abuse: An Empirical Study - abuse royal commission chair Peter McClellan said such judicial assumptions have been largely untested.

Researchers from Charles Sturt University and the University of NSW investigated the issues by presenting 10 different pre-recorded trials involving the same evidence to jurors.

Ninety mock jury deliberations involving more than 1000 people eligible to be jurors were held.

The findings show that juries do not engage in reasoning that is unfairly prejudicial to the defendant nor are they overwhelmed by the number of complainants or witnesses.

At the launch at Parliament House, Sydney Justice McClellan said the results of the study would be "counterintuitive and possibly surprising" for some people.

The commission has already held a public hearing into criminal justice issues.

The study is part of a criminal justice project by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.