Trials & Litigation
Group Wins Jury Instructions Award; Here is the Plain-Language Text!
Posted Apr 18, 2008, 12:53 pm CDT
By Martha Neil
A California task force has won a first-time award for jury instructions from the National Center for State Courts.
The group's revision, starting in 1998, of the state's civil and criminal pattern jury instructions has created plain-language jury instructions that are now widely in use throughout California and much easier to understand, reports the Metropolitan News-Enterprise.
For example, a revised instruction about witnesses says "People often forget things or make mistakes in what they remember," explained a Judicial Council of California press release in 2003, when the new civil jury instructions were issued. The previous version of the same instruction was "Failure of recollection is common. Innocent misrecollection is not uncommon."
The NCSC announced late last month that the Task Force on Jury Instructions of the Judicial Council of California had won the G. Thomas Munsterman Award for Jury Innovation. The co-chairs of the task force were Supreme Court Justice Carol Corrigan and James Ward, a retired Fourth District Court of Appeal judge.
Links to the latest version of the award-winning criminal and civil jury instructions and related materials are provided by the California Courts website.
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