<Emphasis Type="Italic">Commentary</Emphasis>: A Critical Review of Published Competency-to-Confess Measures

The development of standardized assessments for competency-to-confess evaluations has remained largely neglected for the last several decades. Groundbreaking research was conducted on Miranda waivers during the late 1970s, but researchers have failed to sustain programmatic research. This critical review focuses on four published Miranda measures (Comprehension of Miranda Rights, Comprehension of Miranda Rights-Recognition, Comprehension of Miranda Vocabulary, and Function of Rights in Interrogation). When evaluated by contemporary standards, the validation of these measures is very limited. Major improvements are needed for interrater reliability, test–retest reliability, content validity, construct validity, and criterion-related validity.     

Salvation or damnation?: Religion and correctional ideology

Fundamentalist affiliation and religious beliefs are generally related to more punitive attitudes toward criminals. Fundamentalists also tend to attribute criminality to individual dispositional factors, and in turn, such factors are related to punitiveness. Recently, it has also been found that compassionate dimensions of religion are related to treatment-oriented policies. It is still not clear which dimensions of religion are related to punitive or treatment ideology and what effects religious variables may have when tested against secular concerns about crime and crime attributions. In the present research, we test three models of punitiveness and one model of rehabilitation with demographic, secular, religious, and attributional factors. We found that those for whom religion is salient in their daily lives tend to believe that the death penalty should be reserved for older offenders and that those who believe in a punitive God tend to support harsher punishments.     

Effects of defendant age and juror bias on judgment of culpability: What happens when a juvenile is tried as an adult?

The current study examined the possibility that trying juveniles as adults was prejudicial. One hundred and fifty three undergraduate mock jurors, classified as either prosecution-biased (PB) or defense-biased (DB), participated in the experiment. The jurors were randomly assigned to read a murder trial summary depicting a 19-year-old adult defendant (AD-19), a 16-year-old juvenile tried as an adult (JA-16), or a 13-year-old juvenile tried as an adult (JA-13). Defendant age interacted with juror bias. In the JA-16 condition, compared with defense-biased jurors, prosecution-biased jurors found the defendant guilty more often, had higher confidence in the defendant’s guilt, and set a lower standard of proof. By all appearances, some jurors might lose neutrality when judging juveniles tried as adults.