Each year approximately 10,000 children testify in the U.S., most often in criminal court about sexual abuse. Research has found that defense attorneys often ask child witnesses complex questions. Evans and colleagues (2009) investigated the effect of complex questions by the defense and prosecution on jurors' verdicts in felony child abuse cases...
Present day social norms cast a negative light on those who hold racist attitudes, and these norms influence how white Americans respond when placed in situations in which race is openly and directly addressed. In two studies, Sommers and Ellsworth (2000, 2001) found that when race is made salient in a criminal case...
Sexual harassment can occur via electronic media as well as comments made face-to-face. Berkley and Kaplan (2009) investigated jurors reactions to sexual harassment occurring face-to-face and by email...
Jurors in personal injury cases must quantify a plaintiff's pain and suffering when awarding noneconomic damages. Plaintiff attorneys typically request that jurors award these damages either by suggesting a lump sum or by using a per diem calculation. McAuliff and Bornstein (2010) examined whether a per diem request or a lump sum request produces the largest jury awards for pain and suffering...
Jurors anchor damage awards on amounts requested by plaintiff attorneys. Most often, the more a plaintiff attorney requests, the more jurors award, even if jurors are offended by the size of the plaintiff attorney's request. Chapman and Bornstein (1996) had different groups of jurors hear a request for damages for either $100, $20,000, $5 million or $1 billion for the very same case and injuries...
Many jurors expect to hear scientific evidence in criminal cases. Shelton (2008) surveyed a jury pool to learn what percentage of jurors expected to hear scientific evidence in different types of criminal cases...
The study of the influence of inadmissible evidence on jurors, and admonitions to disregard it, has spanned more than 30 years. Steblay and colleagues (2006) conducted a comprehensive review of this research, and examined 175 different tests of the effects of instructions to disregard inadmissible evidence that were reported in 48 different studies...
Daubert and other cases decided in the 1990s (e.g., Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 1993; General Electric v. Joiner, 1996; Kumho Tire v. Carmichael, 1999) require that judges base admissibility decisions for forensic scientific evidence on its scientific validity as opposed to relying entirely on its general acceptance in the professional community. Research shows that judges do not fully understand the Daubert factors, admitting evidence that is scientifically flawed and excluding evidence that is valid...
Noneconomic damages are often valued through per diem requests to juries. A per diem request assigns a monetary value to a small unit of time (e.g., $15 per hour, $240 per day) and then multiplies that value by the number of units (e.g., hours, days, weeks, months) in which injury is or will be sustained to yield a figure for pain and suffering. Laughery and colleagues (2001) studied per diem requests to compensate a victim for pain and suffering for the remainder of the victim's life due to a consumer product accident...
Reasonable doubt instructions are the cornerstone of decision-making in criminal cases, and possibly the most important instruction provided to jurors. Ellsworth (1989) found that jurors were very clear on the notion that they had to be convinced "beyond a reasonable doubt" but, at the same time, none of the jurors were able to define what reasonable doubt meant. Kramer and Koening (1990) compared reasonable doubt understanding for jurors who had served jury duty and those who had been called but had never served...