Trial Consulting: Jurors' and Attorneys' Perceptions of Murder (original) (raw)
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Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2008
This study involves scale development using theoretically derived items from previous measures and a lay consensual approach for generating new items. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the emergent constructs assessing individual differences in attitudes of prospective jurors. Using case summaries, the Pretrial Juror Attitude Questionnaire (PJAQ) demonstrates superior predictive validity over commonly employed measures of pretrial bias. The PJAQ confirms the importance of theoretically derived constructs assessed by other scales and introduces new constructs to the jury decision-making literature. The attitudes assessed by the PJAQ are conviction proneness, system confidence, cynicism toward the defense, racial bias, social justice, and innate criminality. Implications for assessing such attitudes and for better understanding the decision-making process of jurors are discussed.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2008
This study involves scale development using theoretically derived items from previous measures and a lay consensual approach for generating new items. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to validate the emergent constructs assessing individual differences in attitudes of prospective jurors. Using case summaries, the Pretrial Juror Attitude Questionnaire (PJAQ) demonstrates superior predictive validity over commonly employed measures of pretrial bias. The PJAQ confirms the importance of theoretically derived constructs assessed by other scales and introduces new constructs to the jury decision-making literature. The attitudes assessed by the PJAQ are conviction proneness, system confidence, cynicism toward the defense, racial bias, social justice, and innate criminality. Implications for assessing such attitudes and for better understanding the decision-making process of jurors are discussed.
Law and Human Behavior, 1998
This literature review summarizes the existing research examining how the attitude a potential juror has toward the death penalty impacts on the probability of favoring conviction. The summary of 14 investigations indicates that a favorable attitude toward the death penalty is associated with an increased willingness to convict (average r = .174). Using the binomial effect size display, this favorable attitude towards the death penally translates into a 44% increase in the probability of a juror favoring conviction.
Construing motive in videotaped killings: The role of jurors' attitudes toward the death penalty
Law and Human Behavior, 1998
Death-qualified jurors are generally able to impose the death penalty, whereas excludable jurors are generally either unable or unwilling to do so. A long line of research studies has shown that the former are more likely than the latter to convict criminal defendants. Ellsworth (1993) argues that jurors' attitudes, toward the death penalty predict verdicts because they are embedded in a cluster of beliefs and theories about the criminal justice system. Her studies show that jurors interpret ambiguous conduct based on these belief structures. The present study examines the possibility that death penalty attitudes also influence jurors' conceptions of criminal intent. We showed mock jurors the filmed murder of a convenience store clerk and examined the inferences they drew from this evidence. Jurors who favored the death penalty tended to read criminal intent into the defendant's actions and jurors who opposed the death penalty were less likely to do so. These data provide further explanation of the conviction-proneness of death-qualified jurors.
Juror motivations: applying procedural justice theory to juror decision making
Psychology, Crime & Law
Jurors sometimes consider inadmissible evidence in their verdicts, despite judicial instructions to disregard that evidence. Procedural justice research suggests this is because jurors are motivated to prioritise just outcomes over due process; thus, jurors' non-compliance towards judicial instructions to disregard inadmissible evidence may be the product of a discrepancy between legal and lay peoples' understanding of the juror's role. In this mixed-method design, we examined 294 university students' a priori perceptions about the role and responsibility of jurors, and empirically tested how randomly assigning participants to the role of a juror (versus a judge's associate/ assistant, who helps the judge to ensure a trial is conducted according to proper procedure) influenced their verdict decisions, prioritisation of outcome versus procedural considerations, motivation to protect the community, and perceived obligation to ensure correct procedures. Overall, the results demonstrated ambivalence in lay people's perceptions of the juror role, with many participants perceiving jurors to be responsible for protecting society; however, we did not find support for our predictions that participants assigned the role of a juror (versus judge's associate) would more strongly prioritise outcomes over procedures. Methodological issues, recommendations for future research, and implications are also discussed.
Due process vs. crime control: Death qualification and jury attitudes
Law and Human Behavior, 1984
Juries that exclude people who are unwilling to impose the death penalty (death-qualified juries) may be biased against capital defendants. To evaluate this possibility we compared the demographic characteristics and attitudes toward the criminal justice system of people who would or would not be excluded by the Witherspoon standard. A random sample of 811 eligible jurors in Alameda County, Calitbrnia were interviewed by telephone. Of the 717 respondents who stated that they could be fair and impartial in deciding on the guilt or innocence of a capital defendant, 17.2% said that they could never vote to impose the death penalty, and thus are excludable under Witherspoon. Significantly greater proportions of blacks than whites and of females than males are eliminated by the process of death qualification. On the attitudinal measures, the death-qualified respondents were consistently more prone to favor the point of view of the prosecution, to mistrust criminal defendants and their counsel, to take a punitive approach toward offenders, and to be more concerned with crime control than with due process. Eleven of the 13 items showed statistically significant differences.
Negative Emotions Felt During Trial: the Effect of Fear, Anger, and Sadness on Juror Decision Making
Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2015
During trial, jurors may experience a variety of emotions, many of which are negative. The current study examined the effects the negative emotions anger, fear, and sadness had on jurors' sentencing decisions and explored whether the cognitive appraisal theory or the intuitive prosecutor model could explain these effects. Jurors viewed the sentencing phase of a capital murder trial and were asked to sentence the defendant. Results indicated that after viewing the trial, jurors reported increased anger and sadness, but not fear. However, only change in anger affected jurors' sentences. Jurors who reported a greater change in anger were more likely to sentence the defendant to death. This effect was mediated by the level of importance that jurors placed on the prosecution's evidence and argument. Consistent with the intuitive prosecutor model, increased anger led to higher ratings of the importance of the aggravating evidence and an increase in death sentences. Implications are discussed.