Files
Abstract
Jury instructions–the rules for jury deliberation approved by the judge and read to the juryduring trial–are an important communication between judges, parties, jurors, and the public. To
judges and lawyers, jury instructions present an opportunity to influence jurors and shape the legal
issues in a case. Lawyers can also use instructions to gain an advantage over opposing counsel and
increase the odds of a favorable verdict. Thus, jury instructions provide a lens into trial court actors’
behavior. This dissertation project tackles three related empirical questions: (1) how do judges’
preferences and professional backgrounds impact their participation in crafting jury instructions,
(2) do a judge’s race and sex, and the race and sex of their colleagues, impact his or her use of
implicit bias jury instructions, and (3) how does indigent defense attorney type relate to participation
in drafting jury instructions? To conduct my study of these research questions, I constructed an
original dataset of federal criminal jury trials from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2018 across
23 federal district courts. The results revealed variation in how judges get involved in the jury
instruction process, that judge sex does play a significant role in the inclusion of implicit bias jury
instructions, and federal defenders operate differently than their private attorney colleagues in the
jury instruction space.