Word: harrisburgs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Maurice Stans read an article in TIME'S Law section about the innovative techniques developed by Psychologist Richard Christie and Sociologist Jay Schulman for selecting un prejudiced juries. Although their major successes involved cases brought by the Nixon Administration against such radicals as the Gainesville Eight and the Harrisburg Seven, Stans instructed his lawyers to get in touch with Christie, who expressed interest. However, his promise to pick a fair but not necessarily winning jury failed to impress Stans' codefendant, former Attorney General John Mitchell, and the deal was called...
Leading the team are Sociologist Jay Schulman and his principal aide, Psychologist Richard Christie, who have run up a short but impressive trial record. Consultants in three previous trials of radical defendants (the Harrisburg Seven, the Camden 28, the Gainesville Eight), the jury-selection specialists have helped pick 34 jurors who voted for acquittal. Their two misses were the jurors who held out for conviction and forced a hung jury in Harrisburg...
Broken down into categories, the results fill 1,000 pages of computer printouts which are designed to help predict how types of people from the particular community might be expected to react as jurors. There are, says Schulman, significant regional differences. In Harrisburg, polling indicated that women would be more friendly to the defense than men. They promised to be harsher in Gainesville, and the same as men in St. Paul. Following their predictive profiles, the defense looked in Harrisburg for working-class Lutherans, Roman Catholics and Brethren, a pacifist sect in the area. In Gainesville, defense lawyers tried...
...Hire. Schulman, 46, comes to his avocation from a radical background. He calls himself a "broken-down academic," having lost posts at Cornell and City College of New York because of his activism. He got into the Harrisburg case partly because of his friendship with Daniel Berrigan. Christie, 55, a Columbia professor of social psychology, became involved through his friendship with Schulman...
Though many lawyers are interested in the Schulman technique, there is also some skepticism. Ramsey Clark, one of the defense attorneys at Harrisburg, observes, "Generalizations developed through sociological data can be very misleading. They can be used to reinforce prejudice as well as eliminate it." Judge Nichol is far more enthusiastic: "I can see the Government adopting this system some...