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Chapter 12 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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Presentation on theme: "Chapter 12 Law. Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 2 Figure 12.1: Overview of the American Criminal Justice System Adapted."— Presentation transcript:

1 Chapter 12 Law

2 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.

3 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 3 Jury Selection

4 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 4 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.

5 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 5 Contrary to popular opinion, women are harsher as criminal trial jurors than men are. Answer: False… Let’s see why! Putting Common Sense to the Test…

6 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 6 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.

7 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 7 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?

8 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 8 Table 12.1: Some Items Used to Measure Juror Bias From S.M. Kassin and L.S. Wrightsman (1983), "The Construction and Validation of a Juror Bias Scale," From Journal of Research in Personality, 17, 423-442. Reprinted by permission of Academic Press.

9 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 9 Figure 12.2: Effects of Racial Diversity on the Jury Sommers, 2006

10 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 10 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?

11 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 11 The Courtroom Drama

12 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 12 Without being beaten or threatened, innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit. Answer: True… Let’s see why! Putting Common Sense to the Test…

13 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 13 Table 12.2: The Nine Steps of Interrogation Inbau et al., 2001.

14 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 14 Approaches to Police Interrogations Pressure the suspect into submission by expressing certainty of his or her guilt. Befriend the suspect.

15 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 15 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

16 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 16 Table 12.4: More Factors That Promote False Confessions Russano et al., 2005.

17 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 17 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.

18 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 18 A person can fool a lie-detector test by suppressing arousal when questions about the crime are asked. Answer: False… Let’s see why! Putting Common Sense to the Test…

19 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 19 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.

20 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 20 Eyewitnesses find it relatively difficult to recognize members of a race other than their own. Answer: True… Let’s see why! Putting Common Sense to the Test…

21 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 21 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.

22 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 22 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

23 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 23 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.

24 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 24 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.

25 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 25 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

26 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 26 The more confident an eyewitness is about an identification, the more accurate it is likely to be. Answer: False… Let’s see why! Putting Common Sense to the Test…

27 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 27 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.

28 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 28 Figure 12.5: Biasing Effects of Post-Identification Feedback Wells & Bradfield, 1998.

29 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 29 Table 12.6: What Eyewitness Experts Say in Court, p.455, 7/e Copyright © 2001 by the American Psychological Association. Reproduced with permission. From S.M. Kassin, V.A. Tubb, H.M. Hosch, and A. Memon, "On The 'General Acceptance' of Eyewitness Testimony Research: A New Survey of the Experts," American Psychologist, 2001. No further reproduction or distribution is permitted without written permission from the American Psychological Association.

30 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 30 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

31 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 31 Figure 12.6: 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.

32 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 32 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.

33 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 33 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

34 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 34 Jury Deliberation

35 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 35 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.

36 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 36 One can usually predict a jury’s final verdict by knowing where the individual jurors stand the first time they vote. Answer: True… Let’s see why! Putting Common Sense to the Test…

37 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 37 Figure 12.7: Jury Deliberations: The Process

38 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 38 Table 12.7: The Road to Agreement: From Individual Votes to a Group Verdict (Kerr, 1981, as cited in Stasser et al., 1982).

39 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 39 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

40 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 40 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.

41 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 41 Less-Than-Unanimous Verdicts Weakens jurors who are in the voting minority. Breeds closed-mindedness. Short-circuits the discussion. Leaves many jurors uncertain about the decision.

42 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 42 Post Trial To Prison and Beyond

43 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 43 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.

44 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 44 The Prison Experience Does the prison situation lead guards and prisoners to behave as they do? Zimbardo et al.’s (1973) Stanford Prison Study.

45 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 45 Justice A Matter of Procedure?

46 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 46 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

47 Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.12 | 47 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.


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