Media & Publications
Does bias park at the 49th parallel?
Trial by jury is one of the cornerstones of Canada’s criminal justice system. Survey research finds important applications to jury selection for criminal trials. Canadian law recognizes that members of a jury must be unbiased, “indifferent between the Queen and the accused.”1 Unlike the United States, the presumption made in Canadian criminal law is that jurors are unbiased and can be impartial. But bias may creep into potential jurors’ judgments, bias in the form of a predisposition to believe that the defendant is more likely guilty than innocent. Bias may arise, for example, from pre-trial publicity, from racial prejudice2, from connection to the victims, or from revulsion to the circumstances of the case. If there are grounds for concern about any such bias, an accused has access to at least three remedies: requesting a trial by judge alone, requesting a change of venue for the trial if the prejudice is localized in the immediate community, or requesting a so-called “challenge for cause” of prospective jurors. This article reviews briefly these three remedies in Canadian law and how survey research has played a role. The article further observes the low frequency with which these remedies are granted, relative to the United States, and calls for policy-makers to review the social science evidence that calls into question the presumption of “the impartial juror.”
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