Our Mission
Fair Trial Analysis exists to ensure that criminal trials are not only procedurally correct, but meaningfully fair.
We advance fairness in high-stakes criminal cases by bringing objective, empirical evidence to questions that determine liberty, life, and legitimacy: Did the error matter? Did it change the outcome? Was the trial fair?
Why This Work Is Necessary
The ideal of justice is often represented by balanced scales—precision, neutrality, and fairness. In practice, those principles are difficult to achieve when courts must evaluate the effects of trial errors without reliable tools for doing so.
Modern appellate doctrine frequently turns on counterfactual judgments: what would have happened if the trial had been conducted differently? Courts are asked to assess whether an error influenced a jury’s deliberations or verdict. But the most direct evidence—the jurors themselves—is unavailable. Jury deliberations are secret, and the law properly bars inquiry into how jurors reached their decisions. As a result, courts must evaluate the impact of errors without access to the very information that would answer the question.
This constraint forces judges into a difficult position. They must reconstruct hypothetical trials and estimate how jurors would have responded under different conditions. These judgments are necessarily speculative. Even experienced judges must rely on intuition about how juries think, what evidence matters, and how decisions are made—areas where empirical research consistently shows human judgment to be uncertain and prone to error.
The problem is not one of effort or good faith. It is structural. The legal system asks questions that cannot be answered reliably using traditional legal reasoning alone.
At the same time, these determinations carry profound consequences. Findings about whether an error was harmless or harmful affect not only individual defendants, but also victims, families, and public confidence in the justice system. When courts lack reliable tools to assess harm, there is a risk that outcomes will reflect guesswork rather than grounded judgment.
Scientific analysis provides a path forward. Empirical methods can be used to estimate how specific trial conditions influence juror decision-making and case outcomes. These approaches do not replace legal judgment, but they supply information that courts currently lack—information that can make evaluations of fairness more accurate, transparent, and disciplined.
Our Commitment
Fair Trial Analysis is committed to narrowing the gap between the ideal of fair trials and the realities of decision-making under uncertainty.
We aim to ensure that when courts evaluate fairness, they do so with the best available tools—tools capable of addressing the questions the law itself requires them to answer.
Fairness should not depend on speculation. It should rest on evidence.