The Imagined Juror

"If you ask a federal prosecutor to describe an average day at work, chances are you will not hear about a jury trial. Yet when prosecutors talk about how they do their jobs and what their jobs mean to them, jurors seem to be everywhere. It is the figure and role of this 'make-believe' or 'imagined' juror in the professional lives of prosecutors that is the subject of this book. Drawing on an extended ethnographic study of federal prosecutors, it explores this paradoxical feature of the federal legal landscape: though laypeople only infrequently participate in federal trials, make-believe jurors have an outsized presence in the decision-making and professional imagination of some of our most powerful legal actors. In their imagined jurors, prosecutors discover a critical resource for making sense of their ill-defined directives to seek justice and represent the United States. They also find a means of thinking of discussing mercy, acknowledging evolving community mores, and discovering themselves as moral actors rather than line attorneys carrying out supervisors' directives. Even in a period of infrequent jury trials, this book shows, the very existence of the jury system-and the possibility of facing a jury-use their discretion with reference to views of others. At the same time, it highlights the limitation of legal system where jurors are primarily imaginary, calling for reforms that would foster a more inclusive and effective American jury"--