Hoping to make jury instructions in criminal cases more user-friendly, the Judicial Council of California is rewriting them to replace legal jargon with common, recognizable phrases.
The council, the policymaking arm of the California courts, approved new "plain language" instructions for civil cases last year. Those for criminal matters are expected to be approved next year.
The terms are complicated enough to bewilder even the most devoted "Law & Order" fan: malice aforethought, gross negligence, mitigating factors.
Jurors must decipher such terms to decide guilt or innocence, or whether a defendant should receive the death penalty. Confusion can lead to disputes and deadlocks, misunderstandings and mistrials.
Because jurors' educations and language skills vary, judges say, the instructions must be understandable to everybody. They also have to be simple enough to keep jurors' attention.
"The average American attention span has been reduced to a gnat's eyelash," said Carol A. Corrigan, a state appellate justice heading the jury instruction task force. "If we can't get it onto a bumper sticker or in a 10-second spot, no one is going to listen."
The jurors' job is to apply the law to the facts. If they don't understand the law, Corrigan said, jurors can't do their job.
The task of rewriting has fallen to a group mostly composed of lawyers, jurists and professors, who are researching the law to determine the best way to explain it to jurors -- without convoluted language and double negatives. The project began eight years ago, after a Judicial Council commission on improving the jury system determined that instructions were "impenetrable to the ordinary juror."
The new civil instructions have been generally well-received, despite some initial "growing pains," according to Lyn Hinegardner, an attorney with the state Administrative Office of the Courts.
Lawyers and judges have expressed concerns about the computer program that adjusts the instructions to specific cases. But they also have reported that jurors appeared to be understanding the legal concepts better.
Problems with existing criminal instructions have led to challenges in appeals courts. In one case, appellate judges threw out the second-degree murder conviction of a Los Angeles man because the instructions, and the prosecutor's argument, misstated the nature of the defendant's intent that was required to find him guilty.
