Jury Deliberation Research Paper

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How to Use Critical Thinking in Deliberation of a Verdict? Critical thinking is the key to survival in everyday life. Making financial, legal or personal decisions, critical thinking involves finding solutions to problems based on self-experience, ideas and reasoning. Self-experience or training knowledge is necessary, but is not a sufficient condition for careful critical thinking. Additional investigation, evaluation and interpreting the facts, and reaching a conclusion are the basic activities in critical thinking. Although adults often exhibit deficient reasoning, in theory most people can be learned to think critically or to improve their skills by “mental disciplines” (Ruggiero, 2012, p.22). An example of high level of critical skills is the jury deliberation in criminal cases. Jury trials in…show more content…
This is a type a persuasion dialogue in which the goal is to resolve a conflict of opinions by understanding how the opinions were shaped “I’m just thinking out loud now, but it seems to me that it’s up to us to convince this gentleman—(indicating EIGHT)—that we’re right and he’s wrong” (online script). An effective way to make an argument more persuasive is to associate with strong reactions “There were eleven votes for guilty. It’s not so easy for me to raise my hand and send a boy off to die without talking about it first” (online script). In the critical discussion dialogue, a factor more important than the fact that the majority of the jurors hold a certain belief that the defendant is guilty is the reason why, “I never saw a guiltier man in my life. You sat right in court and heard the same thing I did. The man’s a dangerous killer. You could see it” (online script). In this case, the main reason is a stereotype, which is a form of generalization about the background of the
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