In the Courtroom

This study focuses on hung juries as a means of comparing Whether or not the merit of juror decisions outweighs How effectively an attorney communicates with the jury.[I think this hasn’t come out the way you intended it to, since you’re claiming here that jury decisions are independent of the cases presented by either prosecuting or defending counsel, impossible in the U.S. system of justice.] The cases of the U.S. vs. Menedez and the U.S. vs. Nururdin are compared to current social psychological Research, [too vague—what kinds of research: game theory? Attribution theory? What?] and the implications are discussed.[this is a template for what you needed to say here: what are the implications? For what?] Michelle: You haven’t quite got the abstract straight: you leave out methods, you don’t indicate your findings/results—which holds good even for qualitative papers like yours—and you mention that you discuss implications without even indicating for which field or process these implications hold good. Also, the formatting here is unfortunate—you needed to go back into Word after it went through and autocorrected everything and switch the uppercase letters at the beginning of each line into lower case. This looks a bit like poetry as a consequence of how it’s set up and makes it very difficult to read the first sentence in particular. Grade: C] INTRODUCTION The relationship between law and psychology has long been an issue of great deliberation and endless research, and with good reason. The study of legal and psychological proceedings is extremely important, for rulings made in a court of law often produce long-lasting and far-reaching effects on the lives of individuals and society for years after they are decided. As these decisions are usually ordained by jury vote, it is easy to see why phenomena surrounding jury dynamics are among the most widely researched topics in realms of law and psychology. But in order to reach a verdict, a jury cannot have its members voting any way they please—it must vote unanimously, or the result will be a hung jury. If there is discordance [nice word—but its meaning here is foggy: this is saying that if there is a lack of agreement in the way evidence is presented—but between what? The two attorneys or teams? Among jurors deliberating afterward? Also, I’m not sure “discordance” is a proper derivative of “discord” (I can’t find it in my dictionary, which doesn’t mean much); the usual form is “discord” or “discordant”] in the way evidence is presented by an attorney in court, a hung jury may result. A hung jury exemplifies disagreement, and attorneys want the jurors to agree. In this study, the psychological factors which affect jury decisions will be discussed in context, as well as possible factors leading the jury to favor or not favor a certain case, according to available literature. [Pretty good formulation of your point sentence for the entire study--] This study will employ the theory of socioanalysis to do this, taking elements from prior research in social psychology [this was what you needed to indicate in your abstract] and using it as criteria to compare certain cases with hung juries.