Search results

This study aims to examine whether country of residence, sex trafficking attitudes, complainant gender, juror gender and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) influenced juror decision-making within a sex trafficking case.

Jury-eligible participants from the USA and the UK participated in an online juror experiment in which an independent group design was used to manipulate the complainant’s gender. Participants completed the juror decision scale, the sex trafficking attitudes scale and the RWA scale.

Sex trafficking attitudes predicted the believability of both the defendant and complainant. Greater negative beliefs about victims predicted greater defendant believability and lower complainant believability. US jurors reported greater believability of both the complainant and defendant, and RWA was associated with greater defendant believability. However, none of the other factors, including complainant and juror gender, predicted participants’ verdicts. The findings suggest juror verdicts in sex trafficking cases may be less influenced by extra-legal factors, although further research is needed, especially with a more ambiguous case.

This is one of the few cross-cultural comparison studies in the area of jury decision-making, specifically regarding sex trafficking cases. The findings indicated that US participants held more problematic attitudes about sex trafficking than their UK counterparts, although all participants held problematic attitudes about sex trafficking. However, those attitudes did not affect verdict formation about either a male or female complainant. Participants who were more knowledgeable about sex trafficking reported greater complainant believability, suggesting that educational interventions may provide greater support for victims in court.

Juries are a decision making peer group composed of citizens who did not volunteer for the task, who do not know one another, and who are not connected to the people and events in the trial on which they will render a verdict. This chapter illuminates the communication events during deliberations, from selecting a foreperson, deciding when and how to vote, participation and turn-taking, the emergence of conflict, and rule-breaking. Deadlock juries, storytelling jurors, and juror misconduct are described during the group's task. Sources for scholars to gain access to jury data, partner with organizations in the judicial system, and available recent recordings of jury deliberations are shared. Knowledge gaps are pointed out in understanding how group verdicts emerge from the unregulated talk of jurors, as well as new challenges for the judicial system as the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic suddenly rendered jury service an unhealthy task for citizens.

The Scottish Government hope to pilot judge only rape trials to increase the woefully low rape conviction rates in Scotland. The reasoning is that by removing jurors, the court will be attenuating the role that rape myths and other cognitive and social biases have on conviction rates. However, a plethora of research from cognitive and social psychology, legal literature and decision-making science has shown that experts, including judges and other legal professionals, may be no less biased than laypeople. This paper aims to outline the research highlighting that experts may also be biased, why biases in judges can be elicited, and potential alternative recommendations (i.e. deselecting jurors who score highly on rape myths and providing training/education for jurors). Furthermore, piloting with real judges, in real trials, may not be best practice. Therefore, the authors recommend that any piloting is preceded by experimental research.

N/A

Furthermore, piloting with real judges, in real trials, may not be best practice; therefore, the authors recommend that any piloting is preceded by experimental research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first of its kind to directly compared the decision-making of jurors and judges within the current Scottish legal context.

Mortality is a salient factor during capital sentencing. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role death plays in jurors’ decisions when sentencing a severely mentally ill defendant who is subject to possible discrimination in a capital trial because of that status.

The current experiment measured venire jurors’ (n=133) mental illness dangerousness beliefs, and then experimentally manipulated type of mortality salience (dual-focused: participants who contemplated their own mortality and were exposed to trial-related death references vs trial focused: only exposed to death references) and the type of defendant (severely mentally ill vs neutral) accused of a capital offense.

Mock jurors perceived mental illness to be an important mitigating factor when dual (i.e. self) focused mortality (DFM) salience was induced, whereas participants only exposed to trial-related death references considered mental illness to be an aggravating factor in sentencing and were more likely to evidence stereotype adherence toward the defendant.

The implications of the authors’ findings are problematic for the current legal system. During the majority of capital sentencing, jurors will only be exposed to trial-related death references, as individuals in the trial-focused mortality condition were. The findings suggest that these jurors are likely to engage in discriminatory stereotypes that do not consider fair process when making sentencing decisions. This research also suggests that mortality salience may be able to increase jurors’ attention to such concerns in a trial scenario even when negative mental illness stereotypes are present.

Research builds on existing terror management theory and offers a more nuanced perspective of how focusing on one’s own death can affect jurors’ reliance on stereotypes and lead to inappropriate decisions. Mortality salience can lead to decisions based upon procedural fairness when stereotypes and mortality salience are both present.

Since the passage of the Double Jeopardy (Scotland) Act 2011, mirroring changes in other jurisdictions, a person who has been acquitted in Scotland can, under certain circumstances, be retried for that offence. Jurors could have knowledge of the previous acquittal verdict (whether not guilty or not proven) through media sources, potentially biasing the new jury in their decision-making. The purpose of this study is to detemine the influence of knowing a trial is a retrial, on conviction rates.

The current study invited 253 participants to give a verdict to a mock murder trial after either receiving pretrial information about the original verdict or no information about the case being a retrial.

Significantly more acquittal verdicts were given when the participants were told that it was a retrial, compared to the control condition, irrespective of whether the prior verdict was not guilty or not proven.

Findings are discussed in light of jurors’ knowledge of legal concepts and acquittal verdicts and the increasing exposure of the general Scottish public to the not-proven verdict due to increased media coverage.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how mock jurors’ experiences of deliberations are impacted by the defendant having a personality disorder.

This study used a qualitative approach to explore mock jurors’ experiences during the deliberations of a fictional defendant, Sarah Priest. Ten participants formed two mock juries, and each mock jury were given two case studies to deliberate. Case study one described Priest as having “Severe Personality Disorder, Borderline Pattern” whereas case study two described Priest as having “Complex Mental Health Problems”. There were no changes to the content of the case studies aside from the change in language used to describe the defendant.

An inductive thematic analysis identified two main themes relating to juror experience: “Interaction with Other Mock Jurors” and “Language as a Barrier to a Verdict”. Participants constructed that prosocial interactions with other mock jurors in the deliberations helped them make a verdict decision, but some of these interactions led to disagreements between participants due to a wide variation of opinion. Second, the different description of the defendant in each case study were constructed to have made the deliberations and decision-making difficult, but for different reasons. In case study one, a lack of knowledge surrounding BPD was the reason for this difficulty, and in case study two, participants thought that the applicability of diminished responsibility criteria were unclear, making it hard to reach a verdict.

The findings have key implications for the judicial system; common experiences can be identified and recorded to implement procedures to protect jurors from adverse experiences.

There is a lack of studies that have investigated juror experience in the UK, and the few studies available have used a quantitative methodology. The approach taken in the current study is, therefore, unique in a UK context. The findings have key implications for the judicial system; common experiences can be identified and recorded to implement procedures to protect jurors from adverse experiences.

This chapter investigates whether jurors, in their attribution of auditor responsibility, may be inappropriately influenced by the client use of a principles-based accounting standard, even if this standard is properly applied. Following prior research on questionable auditor conduct and its subsequent evaluation by juries, which is often subject to hindsight and outcome bias, this chapter examines whether an auditor's legal liability increases when its client uses principles-based accounting standards, by conducting a controlled experiment with 124 qualified jurors serving a county circuit court. Each juror is properly instructed and provided one of four different cases, obtained by manipulating two levels of an accounting standard, one principles-based and one rules-based, and by manipulating two subsequent client-loss outcomes, one moderately negative and one severely negative. This study finds jurors evaluate auditors more negatively if auditors have relied on a principles-based accounting standard. This attribution is influenced by hindsight bias and the perceived risk-taking responsibility of the investor, but independent of the client-loss outcome severity. These results contribute to the discussion of adopting or converting to the principles-based International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) by the United States.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how mock jurors perceive female-female sexual harassment.

Participants read a case vignette depicting female-female workplace sexual harassment where the sexual orientation of the harasser (lesbian vs heterosexual) and type of sexual harassment (approach vs reject vs generalized) were randomly assigned across participants. Participants were asked to make a liability determination for the case. They were also asked to rate the unwanted conduct on several legally relevant dimensions (e.g. severity, pervasiveness, and unwelcomeness).

Results revealed that the sexual orientation of the harasser is an important factor used to make legal decisions in same-sex sexual harassment cases. Participants found the same conduct to be more severe, pervasive, unwelcome, and threatening when the harasser was lesbian than when she was heterosexual. As hypothesized, female participants found more evidence of discrimination than male participants.

These findings illustrate biases mock jurors may hold when making legal decisions in female-female sexual harassment cases.

Results are discussed in the context of decision-making models and possible future directions and interventions are explored.

The findings extend the literature on female same-sex sexual harassment.

Purpose – This chapter discusses two puzzles emerging from the literature on race and the jury. First, although changes in laws and institutional practices have dramatically expanded jury participation, it is far from clear what additional changes would create more racially representative juries. Second, the push for racial diversity on juries stems, in part, from a belief that composition is related to decision making; nonetheless, empirical research typically fails to link jury composition and case outcomes.Methodology/approach – Through a review of recent research, I identify the bases for these puzzles, and I consider ways to advance the body of work on race and the jury.Findings – Studies on jury representativeness should simultaneously consider both institution-level and individual-level predictors of participation, examining in particular whether and how attitudes toward jury service differ across racial and ethnic groups. The literature would benefit most from longitudinal and multi-jurisdictional studies. Researchers on race and jury decision making should examine the reason why racial differences in attitudes and individual verdicts may not have an impact on case outcomes. By studying deliberating groups, scholars should consider whether any racial differences in viewpoints are substantively small, whether differences observed are ultimately irrelevant to group discussions, or whether group dynamics limit the participation and influence of racial minorities on mixed-race juries.Originality/value – This chapter advances the literature on race and the jury by considering both questions of representativeness and decision making and by critically examining a number of assumptions and accepted wisdom.

The very contextual nature of most mitigating evidence runs counter to America’s individualistic culture. Prior research has found that capital jurors are unreceptive to most mitigating circumstances, but no research has examined the capital sentencing decisions of trial judges. This study fills that gap through a content analysis of eight judicial sentencing opinions from Delaware. The findings indicate that judges typically dismiss contextualizing evidence in their sentencing opinions and instead focus predominately on the defendant’s culpability. This finding calls into question the ability of guided discretion statutes to ensure the consideration of mitigation and limit arbitrariness in the death penalty.