Jurors prefer that witnesses speak in jurors' predominant language. Witnesses who testify in a foreign language are often perceived to be less credible than witnesses who testify in English. Do jurors who speak the language of a non-English speaking witness also judge that non-English speaking witness to be less credible? Hosch and colleagues (1996) explored jurors' verdicts...

Parties have a right to the judgment of jurors unclouded by bias, prejudice, or a fixed or preconceived opinion. Juror questionnaires are often opposed because they are argued to cause delay or are deemed unnecessary to identify bias. Flores (2011) compared potential jurors' disclosure of biases in oral voir dire to what they were willing to disclose on written juror questionnaires...

Juries are becoming increasingly ethnically diverse in the United States. How much do non-Caucasian jurors participate in deliberations in comparison to White jurors, and does participation depend on how many minorities are on a jury? Cornwell and Hans (2009) studied the participation levels of 2,306 actual criminal jurors who served on 311 juries in Los Angeles, Phoenix, New York and Washington, D.C....

In the 1950s, Strodtbeck and colleagues (1956, 1957) conducted realistic mock jury research, using mock jurors chosen from the jury rolls, to determine which jurors talked most during deliberations. Jurors' participation levels varied widely, with jury deliberations typically dominated by only a few jurors. On average, three jurors accounted for more than 80% of the total speaking acts in jury deliberations, and most often these dominant jurors were upper-class men. In 1983, Hastie and colleagues also conducted mock jury research, and reported that male jurors initiated about 40% more comments than female jurors. In 2006, in an important study...

Jurors' verdicts in sexual harassment cases are usually studied absent any consideration of the race of the plaintiff and defendant. Bothwell and colleagues (2006) examined discrimination against Black plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases, to determine whether White jurors are more inclined to attribute what happened to a plaintiff's ignorance or carelessness, rather than to defendant misbehavior. In the research, 186 prospective jurors made individual decisions regarding liability and damages before and after deliberating in 56 juries...

Many trials are conducted with courtroom interpretation of testimony. Berk-Seligson (1987) analyzed 2,470 answers by 27 Spanish-speaking witnesses as interpreted into English by six interpreters to determine if the interpreter's rendition conveyed a different impression of the witness from the one originally conveyed by the witness testifying in Spanish. ...

The study of jurors' opinion formation and change over the course of trials rarely relies on data from real jurors, and instead is usually based on studies of mock jurors or student jurors. Two studies have explored the verdict preferences of actual jurors who served in many different civil and criminal cases about when they began leaning toward one side or the other, and when they made up their minds about who should prevail...

Witnesses differ in how powerless or powerful their speech style is, and their speech style affects their credibility. O'Barr (1982) investigated the courtroom speech style of witnesses, and identified two speech styles: powerless speech (i.e., low social power) and powerful speech. Powerless speech includes:...

The position of the juror who is a dissenter in deliberations is glorified in the movie Twelve Angry Men. But which jurors dissent, which hang the jury, and which simply acquiesce to the majority's wishes? Waters and Hans (2008) investigated jurors who dissent from the majority on juries, and distinguished dissenters who hang the jury from dissenters who acquiesce to the majority opinion to allow a jury decision against the dissenter's individual wishes...

In the sentencing phase of capital cases, jurors frequently hear about a defendant's history of child abuse and alcohol abuse. The defense offers this evidence in mitigation. Stevenson and colleagues (2010) investigated whether jurors used a defendant's child abuse and alcohol abuse as mitigating factors, aggravating factors, or ignored the evidence. Over 370 death-qualified jurors...