Lawyers frequently advise defendants against apologizing, because apologies can be interpreted as admissions of guilt, which could be leveraged into defendants paying more money in settlement and/or at trial. Robbennolt (2010) conducted research comparing plaintiffs' responses to apologies with attorneys' responses...
Jurors who favor the death penalty have different religious beliefs than those opposed to the death penalty. Miller and Hayward (2007) studied which juror religious beliefs are related to death penalty sentencing recommendations by having nearly 1,000 death-qualified mock jurors make sentencing decisions to a lengthy summary of an actual capital murder trial...
An oft-stated opinion is that civil jury verdicts are largely immune to appellate revision. Eisenberg and Clermont (1999) studied whether civil jury trial verdicts are revised less often on appeal than bench trial verdicts. All federal civil trial appeals between ...
Vinson and colleagues (2008) investigated how well juror demographics could predict punitive damage awards in three (real) high-stakes civil cases: a smoker's personal injury claim against a tobacco company; a class action lawsuit about a weight loss drug against a pharmaceutical company; a real estate developer's claim to rebuild a building destroyed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks against an insurance company...
Attorneys frequently ask witnesses leading and complex questions in cross examination that contain multiple parts, negatives, double-negatives, advanced vocabulary and legal terminology. Many of these questions demand a yes or no response. Ellison and colleagues (2010) explored the extent to which witnesses can answer leading and complex questions accurately...
In criminal cases, the defense sometimes argues that the defendant was arrested and tried because of his or her race. This race card strategy seeks to make race salient in order to sway attitudes and beliefs of jurors or judges so as to find the defendant not guilty. Hart and colleagues (2007) investigated the effectiveness of the race card strategy in jury trials...
The severity of sexual harassment is an important judgment affecting jurors' liability determinations and their damage awards. Wayne and colleagues (2001) found that jurors make an overall assessment about the severity of sexual harassment based on three factors...
Criminal defendants can show a range of emotions during trial: remorse, anger, even no emotion at all. MacLin and colleagues (2009) investigated whether a defendant's facial expression affects jurors' verdicts...
Settlement decisions are difficult to make. Cases go to trial and parties sometimes fail to achieve a more favorable result than could have been achieved by accepting an adverse party's demand or offer. Kiser and colleagues (2008) studied settlement decision error rates in 2,054 California cases that were tried before a jury or a judge...
Jury instructions are designed to instruct jurors in the law. Considerable research has examined how well jurors understand jury instructions. In a review of this research literature, Elwork and Sales (1985) found...