The Jury: Disorder in the American Courts.

• Author: Franklin, Daniel

At the climax of the movie Twelve Angry Men, after two hours of watching a crusading Henry Fonda chip away at an obstinant Jack Warden and 10 others to save an innocent man from death row, it's almost impossible not to cheer. What a wonder democracy is, you think, when the instincts of one ordinary man can force reason to prevail over emotion and prejuice. And for a long time, the movie represented a real, deeply felt national sense that juries--and, by extension, democracy--worked. Late in the action, one juror, a European refugee, muses:

This is a remarkable thing about democracy. That we are--what is the word? ... ah, notified! That we are notified by mail to come down to this place--and decide on the guilt or innocence of a man; of a man we have not known before. We have nothing to gain or lose by our verdict. This is one of the reasons why we are strong.

Increasingly, however, the front pages--and Court TV--are telling a very different story: More and more jury verdicts are offending common sense by contradicting publicly known facts of the case. We all watched Los Angeles police officer Stacy Koon and four others beat Rodney King nearly to death; yet a Simi Valley jury let the cops walk. Then we all watched hooligans beat truck driver Reginald Denny nearly to death with a brick in South Central L.A.; yet another Los Angeles jury let them off the most serious charges. And daytime TV has never offered better fare than the saga of whether Lyle and Erik Menendez's murder of their millionaire parents was in self-defense; yet the only people in the country who seem to think the boys were defending themselves were sitting in the jury box.

Of course, there are eternal problems with juries. There's always the possibility that one lawyer will be shrewder (and more expensive) than another; that judges won't explain all the legal issues and evidence clearly; and that the affluent and well-educated will opt out of the system.

But in the last 25 years or so, these naturalenough flaws have become worse, leading to verdicts that fly in the face of reason. What, exactly, is going on in the courtrooms and jury boxes around the country? Stephen J. Adler, legal affairs editor of The Wall Street Journal, asks this question, and the answers he gives in The Jury are an enormous contribution to understanding what's wrong with the system as well as how to fix it. In a tour of recent legal history--or at least that part of it where ordinary people intersect with the courts--Adler discovers gullible jurors; savvy lawyers who play on prejudices with impresario skill; judges who leave panels in the dark about essential details; and, most important, professional jury consultants who, for a price, can tell a lawyer why an Episcopalian is more likely than a Methodist to convict a Baptist.

If you're hunting for the main villain in the jury system, the consultant stands out from the crowd. While trial lawyers in the forties and fifties would get a routine credit report on potential jurors to see what they could find out, jury consulting, nineties-style, is big, big business. (Used to be that everyone was entitled to a lawyer; these days, if you have the cash, a consultant is about as routine.) Using psychology, sociology, and marketing methodologies, a consultant can tell a lawyer which characteristics in a juror reveal subtle prejudices for or against a client's case, and the industry generates well over $200 million a year in revenues. They're earning their keep: One successful Southern California consultant promises a 96 percent chance of a favorable verdict if he's allowed to convene focus groups, advise on strategy, and vet the panel. You can pay jury consultants, for example, to write questionnaires that will reveal consumer tastes, habits, even the cars they drive. That becomes important when, in a drunk driving case, for example, a consultant can tell the defendent's lawyer that the owner of a minivan is more likely to vote to convict than a Porsche driver is. Conclusion: Keep the minivan owner off the jury.

Hiring a consultant is obviously more subtle than slipping a juror a wad of $100 bills, but it...