Chapter Twelve Law. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12-2 Figure 12.1: Overview of the American Criminal Justice System Adapted.

Chapter Twelve

Law

Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. 12-2

Figure 12.1: Overview of the American Criminal Justice System

Adapted from the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1967.


Jury Selection


The Jury Selection Process

• Stage #1: A master list of eligible citizens is compiled.

• Stage #2: Certain number of people are randomly drawn from the list and summoned for duty.

• Stage #3: Pretrial interview or voir dire of potential jurors to uncover signs of bias.• Lawyers permitted peremptory challenges.


Putting Common Sense to the Test…

Contrary to popular opinion, women are harsher as criminal

trial jurors than men are.

Answer: False…Let’s see why!


Trial Lawyers as Intuitive Psychologists

• To aid jury selection, lawyers rely on implicit personality theories and stereotypes.

• Research does not support folk wisdom that juror’s verdict can be predicted on basis of demographics.

• However, there are individual differences among jurors with respect to favoring the prosecution or the defense.


Table 12.1: Some Items Used to Measure Juror Bias

S.M. Kassin & L.S. Wrightsman, 1983, "The Constructionand validation of a Juror Bias Scale," Journal of Research in Personality, 17, 423-442.


Scientific Jury Selection

• A method of selecting juries through surveys that yield correlations between demographics and trial-relevant attitudes.

• Does scientific jury selection work?

• Is scientific jury selection ethical?


Death Qualification

• A jury selection procedure used in capital cases that permits judges to exclude prospective jurors who say they would not vote for the death penalty.

• Are death-qualified juries prone to convict?


The Courtroom Drama



Without being beaten or threatened, innocent people sometimes confess

to crimes they did not commit.

Answer: True… Let’s see why!


Table 12.2: The Nine Steps of Interrogation

Inbau et al., 2001.


Approaches to Police Interrogations

• Pressure the suspect into submission by expressing certainty of his or her guilt.

• Befriend the suspect.


The Risk of False Confessions

• May confess merely to escape a bad situation.

• Internalization can lead innocent suspects to believe they might be guilty of the crime.

• Two factors can increase the risk of false confessions:• Lack of a clear memory of the event in

question.• Presentation of false evidence.


Table 12.3: Factors That Promote False Confessions

From S.M. Kassin and K. L. Kiechel, "The Social Psychology of False Confessions: Compliance, Internalization, and Confabulation," Psychological Science (1996). Reprinted by permission from Blackwell Publishers.


Confessions and the Jury: An Attributional Dilemma

• Juries are powerfully influenced by evidence of a confession, even if the confession was coerced.• Fundamental attribution error revisited.

• A jury’s reaction can be influenced by how confession evidence is presented.



A person can fool a lie-detector test by suppressing arousal when

questions about the crime are asked.

Answer: False… Let’s see why!


The Lie-Detector Test

• Polygraph: A mechanical instrument that records physiological arousal from multiple channels.

• Do the lie-detector tests really work?• Truthful people often fail the test.• The test can be faked by artificially inflating

arousal responses to “innocent” questions.



Eyewitnesses find it relatively difficult to recognize members of a

race other than their own.



Eyewitness Testimony

• How accurate are eyewitness accounts?

• Three conclusions about eyewitness testimony:• Eyewitnesses are imperfect.• Certain personal and situational factors

systematically influence eyewitness’ performance.

• Judges, juries, and lawyers are not well informed about these factors.


Eyewitness Testimony: Acquisition

• Refers to the witness’s perceptions at the time of the event in question.

• Factors influencing acquisition:• One’s emotional state• Weapon-focus effect• Cross-race identification bias


Eyewitness Testimony: Storage

• Refers to getting the information into memory to avoid forgetting.

• Memory for faces and events tends to decline over time.

• But, not all memories fade over time.• However, the “purity” of the memory can be

influenced by postevent information.


Figure 12.2: Biasing Eyewitness Reports with Loaded Questions

(Top Portion) Adapted from E.F. Loftus and J.C. Palmer, "Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, Vol. 13, 1974, pp. 585-589. (Bottom Portion) From G.R. Loftus and E.F. Loftus, Human Memory: the Processing of Information. Copyright © 1976 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Reprinted with permission.


Eyewitness Testimony: Storage (cont.)

• Misinformation Effect: The tendency for false postevent information to become integrated into people’s memory of an event.

• If adults can be misled by postevent information, what about children?• Repetition, misinformation, and leading

questions can bias a child’s report, particularly for preschoolers.


Eyewitness Testimony: Retrieval

• Refers to pulling the information out of storage when needed.

• Factors affecting identification performance:• Lineup construction• Lineup instructions to the witness• Format of the lineup• Familiarity-induced biases


Table 12.4: Instructions on False Identifications

From Malpass, R., and Devine, P. (1981). "Eyewitness identification: Lineup instructions and the absence of the offender." Journal of Applied Psychology, 66, 482-489. Copyright (c) 1981 by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.



The more confident an eyewitness is about an identification, the more

accurate it is likely to be.

Answer: False…Let’s see why!


Courtroom Testimony of Eyewitnesses

• Eyewitnesses testimony in court is persuasive and not easy to evaluate.

• Why do jurors often overestimate the accuracy of eyewitnesses?• Lack knowledge about human memory.• Base judgments largely on witness’s

confidence.


Figure 12.3: Biasing Effects of Post-Identification Feedback

Wells & Bradfield, 1998.


Table 12.5: What

Eyewitness Experts Say

in Court

From "On The 'General Acceptance' Of Eyewitness Testimony Research: A New Survey of the Experts" by S.M> Kassin, V.A. Tubb, H.M. Hosch, and A. Memon. From American Psychologist, May 2001. Copyright (c) 2001 by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted with permission.


Nonevidentiary Influences: Pretrial Publicity

• Does exposure to pretrial news stories corrupt prospective jurors?

• Why is pretrial publicity potentially dangerous?• Often divulges information that is not later

allowed into the trial record.• Issue of timing.


Figure 12.4: Contaminating Effects of Pretrial Publicity

From N.I. Kerr, G.P. Kramer, J.S. Carroll and J.J. Alfinin, (1982), "On the Effectiveness of Voir Dire in Criminal Cases with Prejudicial Pretrial Publicity: An Empirical Study," American University Law Review, 40, pp. 665-701. Reprinted with permission.


Nonevidentiary Influences: Inadmissible Testimony

• Why do people not always follow a judge’s order to disregard inadmissible evidence?• Added instruction draws attention to the

information in controversy.• Judge’s instruction to disregard may arouse

reactance.• Jurors want to reach the right decision so it is

hard to ignore information that seems relevant to the case.


Nonevidentiary Influences: The Judge’s Instructions

• To make verdicts adhere to the law, juries are supposed to comply with the judge’s instructions.

• Do jurors understand their instructions?

• What about the timing of the instructions?

• What if the jury disagrees with the law?• Jury nullification.


Jury Deliberation


Leadership in the Jury Room

• A person is more likely to be chosen as foreperson if the person:• Is of higher occupational status or has prior

jury experience.• Is a male.• Is the first person who speaks.• Is sitting at the head of a rectangular table.

• Forepersons act more as the jury’s moderator rather than its leader.



One can usually predict a jury’s final verdict by knowing where the individual

jurors stand the first time they vote.



Figure 12.5: Jury Deliberations:

The Process


Table 12.6: The Road to Agreement: From Individual Votes to a Group Verdict

(Kerr, 1981, as cited in Stasser et al., 1982).


Jury Deliberations

• In criminal trials, deliberation tends to produce a leniency bias favoring the defendant.

• How do juries resolve disagreements?• A combination of informational and normative

influence.


Jury Size

• How does jury size affect the decision-making process?• Possible lack of allies in smaller juries may

make it harder to resist normative pressures.• Smaller juries are less likely to represent

minority segments of the population.• Smaller juries are more likely to reach

unanimous decisions after shorter deliberation periods.


Less-Than-Unanimous Verdicts

• Weakens jurors who are in the voting minority.

• Breeds close-mindedness.

• Short-circuits the discussion.

• Leaves many jurors uncertain about the decision.


Post Trial

To Prison and Beyond


The Sentencing Process

• People disagree on the goals served by imprisonment.• Incapacitate offenders and deter them from

committing future crimes?• Exact retribution for misdeeds?

• Common public complaint is sentencing disparity.


The Prison Experience

• Does the prison situation lead guards and prisoners to behave as they do?

• Zimbardo et al.’s (1973) Stanford Prison Study.


Justice

A Matter of Procedure?


Procedural Justice

• Satisfaction with dispute resolution depends on both the outcome and the procedure used to achieve those outcomes.

• Important aspects of procedure:• Decision control.• Process control.


Which Legal System Do People Prefer?

• Adversarial Model: The prosecution and defense present opposing sides of the story.

• Inquisitorial Model: A neutral investigator gathers evidence from both sides and presents the findings in court.

• Adversarial proceedings seen as more fair and just because the method offers participants a voice in the proceedings.

Chapter Twelve Law. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12-2 Figure 12.1: Overview of the American Criminal Justice System Adapted.

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