Judges, Juries, and Punitive Damages: Empirical Analyses Using the Civil Justice Survey of State Courts 1992, 1996, and 2001 Data

We analyze thousands of trials from a substantial fraction of the nation\u27s most populous counties. Evidence across ten years and three major datasets suggests that: (1) juries and judges award punitive damages in approximately the same ratio to compensatory damages, (2) the level of punitive damages awards has not increased, and (3) juries\u27 and judges\u27 tendencies to award punitive damages differ in bodily injury and no-bodily-injury cases. Jury trials are associated with a greater rate of punitive damages awards in financial injury cases. Judge trials are associated with a greater rate of punitive damages awards in bodily injury cases

Juror First Votes in Criminal Trials

Our analysis of the voting behavior of over 3,000 jurors in felony cases tried in Los Angeles, Maricopa County, the District of Columbia, and the Bronx reveals that only in D.C. does a juror\u27s race appear to relate to how he or she votes. African-American jurors in D.C. appear more apt to vote not guilty on the jury\u27s first ballot in cases involving minority defendants charged with drug offenses. We find no evidence, however, that this effect survives into the jury\u27s final verdict

Juror First Votes in Criminal Trials

Our analysis of the voting behavior of over 3,000 jurors in felony cases tried in Los Angeles, Maricopa County, the District of Columbia, and the Bronx reveals that only in D.C. does a juror\u27s race appear to relate to how he or she votes. African-American jurors in D.C. appear more apt to vote not guilty on the jury\u27s first ballot in cases involving minority defendants charged with drug offenses. We find no evidence, however, that this effect survives into the jury\u27s final verdict

Juror First Votes in Criminal Trials

Our analysis of the voting behavior of over 3,000 jurors in felony cases tried in Los Angeles, Maricopa County, the District of Columbia, and the Bronx reveals that only in D.C. does a juror\u27s race appear to relate to how he or she votes. African-American jurors in D.C. appear more apt to vote not guilty on the jury\u27s first ballot in cases involving minority defendants charged with drug offenses. We find no evidence, however, that this effect survives into the jury\u27s final verdict

Juror First Votes in Criminal Trials

Our analysis of the voting behavior of over 3,000 jurors in felony cases tried in Los Angeles, Maricopa County, the District of Columbia, and the Bronx reveals that only in D.C. does a juror\u27s race appear to relate to how he or she votes. African-American jurors in D.C. appear more apt to vote not guilty on the jury\u27s first ballot in cases involving minority defendants charged with drug offenses. We find no evidence, however, that this effect survives into the jury\u27s final verdict

Judge-Jury Agreement in Criminal Cases: A Partial Replication of Kalven and Zeisel\u27s The American Jury

This study uses a new criminal case data set to partially replicate Kalven and Zeisel\u27s classic study of judge-jury agreement. The data show essentially the same rate of judge-jury agreement as did Kalven and Zeisel for cases tried almost 50 years ago. This study also explores judge-jury agreement as a function of evidentiary strength (as reported by both judges and juries), evidentiary complexity (as reported by both judges and juries), legal complexity (as reported by judges), and locale. Regardless of which adjudicator\u27s view of evidentiary strength is used, judges tend to convict more than juries in cases of middle evidentiary strength. Judges tend to acquit more than juries in cases in which judges regard the evidence favoring the prosecution as weak. Judges tend to convict more than juries in cases in which judges regard the evidence favoring the prosecution as strong. Rates of adjudicator agreement are thus partly a function of which adjudicator\u27s view of evidentiary strength is used, a result not available to Kalven and Zeisel, who were limited to judges\u27 views of the evidence. We find little evidence that evidentiary complexity or legal complexity help explain rates of judge-jury disagreement. Rather, the data support the view that judges have a lower conviction threshold than juries. Local variation exists among the sites studied. The influences of juror race, sex, and education are also considered

The Early Pleistocene Praetiglian and Ludhamian pollen stages in the North Sea Basin and their relationship to the marine isotope record

In this paper, the currently accepted correlation of the Early Pleistocene Ludhamian stage of England with the Tiglian-A sub-stage of the Netherlands is challenged. Recent investigations of Early Pleistocene marine North Sea deposits from a borehole near Noordwijk (the Netherlands) yielded evidence from molluscs, dinoflagellate cysts and sporomorphs for an alternation of warm-temperate and arctic intervals within the Praetiglian and Tiglian stages. Marine equivalents of the terrestrial-based pollen sub-stages Tiglian A and B have been recognised in the upper part of the sequence. A Praetiglian age can be assigned to the lower part of the sequence on the basis of mollusc analysis. Within the Praetiglian, an alternation of warm and cold phases has been recognised from both the dinoflagellate cyst and molluscan records. Three cold phases within the Praetiglian are tentatively correlated with marine isotope stages (MIS) 96-100. The molluscan assemblages provide evidence for climate forcing of the sea level: highest sea levels are reached in the warm-temperate intervals. Within the Praetiglian, an interval with an acme zone of the dinoflagellate cyst Impagidinium multiplexum, is correlated with the Ludhamian and tentatively linked to MIS 97 and/or MIS 96. The cold molluscan assemblages from the Noordwijk borehole include an acme zone of Megayoldia thraciaeformis, the first and only occurrence of this North Pacific bivalve in the North Sea Basin. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

An integrated workflow to assess the remaining potential of mature hydrocarbon basins: a case study from Northwest Germany (Upper Jurassic/Lower Cretaceous, Lower Saxony Basin)

Hydrocarbon provinces require a high level of geological understanding in order to extend the lives of producing fields, to replace reserves through smaller targets and to reduce the risks of exploring for more and more subtle hydrocarbon traps. Despite a large number of existing wells in the area studied in this paper, the depositional environments and the stratigraphic architecture were still poorly known. In order to improve the geological understanding, we propose a workflow to assess the remaining reservoir potential of mature hydrocarbon areas, integrating cores, cuttings, well-logs