Jurors' comprehension of sentencing instructions: A test of the death penalty process in Tennessee

In response to the U.S. Supreme Court's mandate in Furman v. Georgia to constrain jurors' discretion, several states devised sentencing instructions that ostensibly guide jurors' decision making in death penalty cases. Recently, however, jurors' ability to comprehend these sentencing instructions has come under scrutiny. To test jurors' comprehension, we provided 495 persons summoned for jury duty in Shelby County, Tennessee (which includes Memphis) with a copy of Tennessee's death penalty sentencing instructions and asked them to complete a questionnaire. The scenarios in the questionnaire measured comprehension of differences in the levels of proof and requirements for unanimity on the existence of aggravating and mitigating circumstances, of the process of weighing mitigating against aggravating circumstances, and of nonenumerated mitigating circumstances. The results suggest that comprehension is relatively high when the instructions are clear and concise. However, when the instructions are poorly worded or vague, or when serious omissions regarding the law exist, jurors' comprehension is severely limited. Respondents tended not to consider fully mitigating circumstances. Thus, in actual cases in Tennessee, death sentences may have been imposed unconstitutionally.