Effects of Judicial Instructions and Case Characteristics in a Mock Jury Trial of Battered Women Who Kill

This study examined the effects of judicial instructions on the outcome of a mock jury trial that involved a woman who pleaded self-defense after killing her abusive spouse. Jurors were instructed to adopt either an objective or a subjective standard of reasonableness when reaching a verdict. Within objective/subjective instruction conditions, half of the juries viewed a case in which the woman killed her abuser while he was attacking her (confrontational) and the remaining half viewed a case in which she killed him while he was asleep (no confrontation). Juries in the subjective conditions returned significantly more not guilty verdicts than jurors in the objective conditions. At the individual juror level, participants hearing subjective instructions were significantly more likely to rate the defendant as not guilty than jurors given objective instructions when the abuse was nonconfrontational.