Having a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of your peers is a constitutional right afforded to everyone in the United States (US Constitution Amendment VI). Jurors are chosen based on their ability to be impartial. Both the prosecution and defense have a role in choosing jurors. Where one side may be in favor of a sympathetic mother of three, the other may choose to select another juror to provide the best possible chance for their side of the argument. The process of being selected as a juror is cognitively exhausting, and this is before the actual trial even begins (Winter & Greene, 2007). At the beginning of the trial, jurors are given large amounts of information by the judge. Throughout the trial, jurors must actively listen to testimony, remember what is said, apply it to all the other information they have already heard, all while evaluating what information may be true or false. It is important to note that jurors are not necessarily familiar with the terms used in courtrooms and in most cases should be assumed to have no prior knowledge or legal jargon (Smith, 1991). In fact, the juror is very likely to have his or her own schemas that alter or distort the true meaning of terms in the courtroom. Pretrial Publicity and Source Memory The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution becomes a challenge when it comes to pretrial publicity. The First Amendment to the Constitution protects a number of rights, including free speech (U.S. Constitution Amendment I). This often becomes a conflict. The Sixth Amendment requires an impartial jury, which is extremely difficult in the age of social media and the First Amendment right to free speech. There are many ways in which the pretrial... middle of paper... is more likely to find someone guilty than jurors who have not been exposed to the pretrial publicity. Jurors who were exposed to publicity that found the individual guilty also gave the individual significantly longer prison sentences than jurors who were not exposed to publicity that found the individual guilty. The researchers also found that jurors exposed to pre-trial publicity were much more likely to experience critical source-monitoring errors. These jurors credited the information they learned from the publicity to the court case and then used that negative publicity to influence their decision on the verdict because they truly believed it was part of the trial. One thing to note is that the jurors didn't necessarily believe they hadn't heard it from the pretrial advertisement but they believed they had heard it in the courtroom as well...