The Effects of Rehabilitative Voir Dire on Juror Bias and Decision Making

During voir dire, judges frequently attempt to “rehabilitate” venirepersons who express an inability to be impartial. Venirepersons who agree to ignore their biases and base their verdict on the evidence and the law are eligible for jury service. In Experiment 1, biased and unbiased mock jurors participated in either a standard or rehabilitative voir dire conducted by a judge and watched a trial video. Rehabilitation influenced insanity defense attitudes and perceptions of the defendant’s mental state, and decreased scaled guilt judgments compared to standard questioning. Although rehabilitation is intended to correct for partiality among biased jurors, rehabilitation similarly influenced biased and unbiased jurors. Experiment 2 found that watching rehabilitation did not influence jurors’ perceptions of the judge’s personal beliefs about the case.     

The socialization of jurors the voir dire as a rite of passage

The socialization of jurors, which takes place as a latent function of the voir dire, is described in terms of the distinct experiences that constitute the passage from the status of “ordinary citizen” to membership in the courtroom social setting. Implications of the lack of this voir dire socialization on mock jury research are discussed. Future research on the significance of the juror role and the extent to which the socialization during voir dire helps jurors set aside their normal decision-making rules are also discussed.     

Examining legal authoritarianism in the impact of punishment severity on juror decisions

Recent Supreme Court decisions point to an increased reliance on juries to determine a defendant's sentence. Evidence is mixed on whether jurors are more likely to convict when the potential punishment is mild. The current study examined this issue, as well as the impact of legal authoritarianism (LA) (Kravitz, D. A., Cutler, B. L., & Brock, P. 1993. Reliability and validity of the original and revised legal attitudes questionnaire. Law and Human Behavior, 17, 661–677. doi: 10.1007/BF01044688), on jurors’ decisions. An ethnically diverse sample of participants completed the individual difference measure prior to viewing a videotaped, reenacted criminal trial. We manipulated the severity of the punishment the defendant would receive if convicted. Results indicated LA moderated the effect of punishment severity on verdict. Specifically, at higher levels of punishment severity, civil libertarians convicted less, while legal authoritarians convicted more. That is, the severity-leniency effect held for civil libertarians, but not for legal authoritarians. As juries become more responsible for determining a defendant's sentence, attorneys should be aware of the defendant's potential sentence and use voir dire to identify jurors who are higher on LA.     

The Attorney–Client Relationship in Capital Cases and Its Impact on Juror Receptivity to Mitigation Evidence

The United States Supreme Court has placed a great deal of trust in the ability and willingness of capital jurors to consider mitigation evidence during sentencing deliberations as a constitutional aspect of capital sentencing. This paper examines the jurors’ perception of the affective warmth and friendliness shared by attorney and client, and the degree to which the defense attorney appears to regard the defendant as a close working member of the defense team. Using data obtained from interviews with 725 jurors in capital trials, regression analysis revealed that respondents were more receptive to mitigation evidence when they viewed the relationship between the attorney and client as warm and friendly, but less receptive when they reported the attorney–client as having a close working relationship. Analysis of interaction terms revealed that the negative effects of the close working relationship can be suppressed by modeling a warm affective attorney–client relationship.     

Defendant-juror similarity and mock joror judgments

It was hypothesized that joror-defendant similarity would lead to greater leniency toward a criminal defendant when the evidence against that defendant was weak or inconclusive; but when evidence was strong, it was expected that this relationship would be reversed. In Study 1, religious similarity was found to be simply and positively related to evaluation of the defendant and leniency, a relationship unaffected by the strength of evidence. This pattern of results was attributed to (a) insufficiently strong evidence against the defendant and (b) the lack of anticipated jury deliberation, problems addressed in Study 2. In that study, when evidence was strong against the defendant, juror-defendant racial similarity did increase the likelihood of conviction, but only when jurors anticipated being in the racial minority in their jury. Implications of the findings for psychological theory and for voir dire were discussed.The authors wish to thank Howard Klein and Jane Stanfel for their assistance in data collection and analysis in Experiment 2, and the Editor and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on an earlier draft.     

Attorney communication and impression making in the courtroom

This study investigated the effectiveness of attorney communication and impression making in the courtroom. Trained in-court observers rated attorney presentations for factual and legal informativeness, organization, articulateness, and rapport during the opening statement phase of 50 trials. After the trials, jurors were asked to evaluate the attorneys' overall articulateness. enthusiasm, and likableness during the trial. The attorneys were then questioned about their own performance on these indices. The results revealed that the opening statements of prosecuting attorneys were judged by observers as better organized and more factually and legally informative than defense attorneys. However, these variables were not related to trial outcome. Juror evaluations of prosecuting attorneys more closely agreed with these attorneys' self-perceptions of courtroom performance while defense attorneys rated themselves significantly more favorably than did jurors. More courtroom experience did not generally lead to better courtroom performance during opening statements for either prosecuting or defense attorneys, and often resulted in significant overestimations of general performance relative to juror evaluations, particularly among defense attorneys. System constraints operating in favor of prosecutors and performance feedback mechanisms available to prosecutors but not to defense attorneys are discussed. These mechanisms may account for the discrepancies between juror perceptions of attorneys and attorney self-perception.     

The Impact of Psychological Injury Evidence and Jurors’ Schemas on Civil Case Decisions

Psychological injury evidence is at the heart of many civil claims. Due to the recent burgeoning of sexual harassment and assault claims which predominantly involve psychological distress, it is especially important to understand how jurors process this evidence at the most basic (or schema) level, and how these preconceived notions influence processing of trial evidence and subsequent legal judgments. As a result, the present paper explores rarely addressed—but fundamental—issues regarding how jurors perceive psychological injury evidence. Specifically, do jurors have psychological injury schemas? And if so, what injuries do these schemas contain, how stable are they, how are they evaluated, and how do they affect jurors’ case perceptions and legal decisions? A review of relevant theory and empirical research reveals that jurors have psychological injury schemas, but they are often poorly developed and susceptible to the influence of prompts used to retrieve these schemas (e.g., questions posed by attorneys during voir dire, the actual injuries adduced by the plaintiff). Also interesting is that despite the relative importance of psychological injury evidence, tremendous gaps remain regarding what actual types of psychological injuries jurors believe typically result in civil cases, how stable these injury schemas are, and precisely how they affect jurors’ decisions. This paper addresses these important issues to help organize and direct future research on the subject, including proposing a model for how psychological injury schemas interact with jurors’ perceptions of the plaintiff’s alleged injuries to affect their legal decisions.     

Felony voir dire

The practice of voir dire has a venerable history in the United States. However, despite numerous historical and legal discussions of the topic, and the increased participation of social scientists in the process, few empirical studies have been conducted on what actually occurs during voir dire. The lack of normative data is especially troublesome in the face of recent attacks on the process itself and numerous proposals to drastically limit or even prohibit what many regard as an important criminal justice safeguard—attorney-conducted voir dire in felony trials. This exploratory study attempts to provide some insight into the nature and content of felony voir dire. Our results—based on direct observation as well as juror interview responses—suggest that much of the criticism and calls for drastic reform may be misplaced.     

The effects of attorney presentation style,attorney gender,and juror gender on juror decisions

Extralegal characteristics of attorneys may play a significant role in the decision-making behavior of jurors. Presentation style, for example, is one factor to which trial lawyers pay a great deal of attention. However, a given style of speech may not be perceived equivalently when used by different speakers. The present study examined the effects of the defense attorney's presentation style and gender, and juror gender on jurors' verdicts and evaluation of the attorney and witness. Undergraduate college students read a brief summary of an assault-and-robbery case, viewed a videotape of either a passive or aggressive male or female attorney interrogating a witness, then rendered a verdict and rated the witness and attorney on characteristics such as competency, credibility, and assertiveness. The results indicated that, overall, aggressive attorneys were more successful at obtaining an acquittal for their clients than passive attorneys, and that male attorneys were more successful than female attorneys; presentation style also interacted with gender of attorney and juror. Some possible mechanisms for these effects are discussed.     

Effects of inconsistent eyewitness statements on mock-jurors' evaluations of the eyewitness,perceptions of defendant culpability and verdicts

In attempting to discredit an eyewitness, it is a common strategy for an attorney to highlight inconsistencies in the eyewitness's recall testimony during cross-examination and encourage the jurors to infer, based on those inconsistencies, that the eyewitness's memory is faulty. An experiment was conducted to examine the effectiveness of this cross-examination strategy. Subjects viewed a simulated cross-examination and rendered judgmenets about the eyewitness and defendant. The type of inconsistent testimony was manipulated between subjects. Subjects exposed to inconsistent recall testimony about either central or peripheral details perceived the eyewitness as less credible (as evidenced by ratings on multiple dimensions) and the defendant as less culpable. Inconsistency on central details led to fewer convictions. Results point to the effectiveness of this cross-examination strategh.     

Playing the race card: Making race salient in defence opening and closing statements

Purpose. Researchers have reported that making a Black defendant's race salient reduces White jurors' tendency to find Black defendants guilty ( Sommers & Ellsworth, 2000 ). We examined whether making race salient by including racially salient statements in the defence attorney's opening and closing statements (i.e., ‘playing the race card’) reduced White jurors' racial bias against a Black defendant. Method. We obtained scores on racial attitudes for 151 White college students who participated in an experiment where defendant race (Black, White) and race salience (not salient, salient) were manipulated in a between‐subjects design. Participants read one of four trial stimuli and completed dependent measures. Results. ‘Playing the race card’ reduced White juror racial bias as White jurors' ratings of guilt for Black defendants were significantly lower when the defence attorney's statements included racially salient statements. White juror ratings of guilt for White defendants and Black defendants were not significantly different when race was not made salient. This effect was separate from jurors' level of prejudice (as measured by racial attitudes) as high prejudice participants were more likely than low prejudice participants to find the Black defendant guilty, independent of the race salience manipulation. Conclusion. Our study indicated that an explicit attempt by a defence attorney to ‘play the race card’ was a beneficial trial strategy a defence attorney could use to reduce White jurors' bias towards Black defendants. However, the beneficial effect of such a strategy may not reduce White jurors' bias towards Black defendants for all White jurors.     

Conduct and its Consequences: Attempts at Debiasing Jury Judgments

Jurors in negligence cases are supposed to judge a defendant by the reasonableness of his or her conduct and not by the consequences of that conduct. But several studies have shown that a cognitive heuristic known as hindsight bias can skew post hoc judgments of some prior behavior. Thus, jurors who must evaluate the actions of a defendant may be influenced inappropriately by the consequences of those actions. A complementary problem arises when jurors must evaluate the injuries incurred by the plaintiff. Here, jurors' knowledge about the defendant's allegedly negligent conduct can proactively influence their assessment of the plaintiff's injuries and determination of damages. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of two procedural techniques intended to reduce or eliminate the impact of hindsight bias in negligence cases—multiple admonitions from a judge about the proper use of evidence—and bifurcation (actually withholding irrelevant evidence from jurors). We presented a re-enacted automobile negligence trial to 355 jury-eligible adults drawn from the community, varied the evidence and instructions that they heard, and measured liability judgments and damage awards from individual jurors both before and after deliberating, and from juries. Results showed that admonitions were generally ineffective in guiding jurors to the proper use of evidence but that bifurcation was relatively more effective. Deliberations had no curative effect on jurors' misapplication of evidence.     

Judging Bias: Juror Confidence and Judicial Rulings on Challenges for Cause

The judge in a jury trial is charged with excusing prospective jurors who will not be impartial. To assess impartiality, prospective jurors are typically asked whether they can be fair. Using an experimental paradigm, we found that small changes in jurors' self‐reported confidence in their ability to be fair affected judges' decisions about bias but did not affect the judgments of either attorneys or jurors. We suggest why a judge's role and unique relationship with jurors is likely to foster a decision strategy based on reported juror confidence, and we discuss the implications of our analysis for current legal debates over jury selection practices. Unexpected patterns in our results also highlight the ways in which perceptions of impartiality are affected, in part, by the social characteristics of the observer.     

Clarifying Life and Death Matters: An Analysis of Instructional Comprehension and Penalty Phase Closing Arguments

We report the results of two studies designed as follow-ups to our earlier research on the comprehension of capital penalty instructions. In the first study we examine whether a California penalty instruction that was revised by the courts to improve its comprehension by jurors accomplishes this goal. In the second study we content-analyze a sample of attorney closing arguments that were given at the conclusion of actual capital penalty phases to explore whether they are likely to clarify those concepts and procedures that are so poorly comprehended in the judge's instructions. Results indicate that the revised instruction suffers from the same comprehension problems that plagued its predecessor and that attorney arguments appear unlikely to significantly reduce confusion among capital jurors.     

The entrapment defense

Most American jurisdictions follow either asubjective or anobjective approach to the entrapment defense. In order to test some of the differences between the two approaches, student jurors viewed a videotaped cocaine trial and were presented with either subjective test or objective test instructions. The admission of prior conviction evidence was also varied. The jurors deliberated, returned a verdict, and then completed a questionnaire that measured their understanding of the instructions and trial facts. Results show that, first, juror comprehension of the principal features of the objective test is very poor. It is suggested that an effort be made to simplify instructions describing the objective test. Should simplification not improve comprehension, it is argued that the judge, not the jury, should decide the entrapment defense when the objective test is used. Second, admission of a prior conviction has a significant impact on verdicts in the subjective test condition, but not in the objective test condition. This finding suggests that the subjective test instructions are effective in encouraging jurors to use prior convictions as evidence of guilt. The content of the objective test instruction may also account for part of the difference in impact. Jurors in the objective test condition were instructed not to take the defendant's predisposition into account, and a substantial minority of the jurors under-stood this aspect of the instruction.     

Teen Court: What Jurors Can Tell Us About the Process

Teen courts are on the increase throughout the United States. These courts provide an opportunity for youth offenders to receive sentences from their adolescent peers rather than from an adult panel or judge. Yet, we know t very little about the teen jurors' perspective or whether their sentences reflect restorative justice principles. In more than 100 youth juror surveys, t teens describe their experiences as they develop sentences consistent with restorative justice tenets. Through their participation, youth jurors gain practical knowledge about and respect for the judicial system. The efficacy of the sentences is validated by high offender sentence completion.