Accents often make it hard for jurors to understand what witnesses, attorneys, and judges are saying. Difficulty in understanding non-native speakers of English affects jurors' assessment of those speakers' credibility. Lev-Ari and Keysar (2010) studied the impact of accent on speaker credibility in two experiments...
Jurors are given jury instructions, and may use those instructions as they see fit during deliberations. Some juries discuss the instructions extensively, while other juries do not. How much time do jurors spend discussing jury instructions? With the cooperation of the Wyoming courts...
Baldus and colleagues (2001) analyzed 317 capital murder cases tried by jury in Philadelphia from 1981 to 1997. The researchers compared death sentence rates of juries with 4 or fewer blacks (below the median number of blacks for Philadelphia) to juries with 5 or more blacks (above the median number of blacks for Philadelphia)...
Every day attorneys must make decisions to settle a case or take it to trial. These decisions are made with error, and research shows that this error depends on the type of case being litigated (e.g., medical malpractice vs. products liability, presence vs. absence of punitive damages, etc.)...
Civil plaintiffs and defendants are often thought to be equally capable of valuing and winning cases, and equally capable of making mistakes. Said differently, decision errors in case valuation are thought to be no different for plaintiffs and defendants because it is believed that: (1)plaintiffs and defendants are equally adept in predicting trial outcomes, (2) plaintiffs will win about 50% of the cases that proceed to trial, and (3) plaintiffs and defendants will be equally mistaken in their predictions of a trial's outcome. Researchers have investigated whether mistakes in case valuation, and the cost of those mistakes, are evenly distributed
Kiser and colleagues (2008) studied the role of 998 offers in plaintiff and defendant decisions to settle or go to trial in 847 California cases. These researchers found that when a 998 offer was made, mistaken decisions to go to trial increased, although...
Jurors are instructed in criminal cases to presume a defendant innocent and place a burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt on the prosecution. Even after receiving jury instructions, jurors struggle with these concepts. With the cooperation of the Wyoming courts, Saxton (1998) gave questionnaires to jurors when they were discharged from service on actual trials...
Jurors often perceive circumstantial evidence as weak evidence, rather than an alternative way to prove a fact. Strawn and Buchanan (1976) found that, despite instructions to the contrary,...
The difference between direct and circumstantial evidence is difficult for jurors. Tiersma and Curtis (2008) tested how well California's 2006 jury instruction (CACI No. 202) allowed jurors to identify direct and circumstantial evidence...
Borckardt and colleagues (2003) examined how jurors perceive eyewitnesses to a car accident when trivial details in one of the eyewitnesses' testimony are discredited. Jurors were presented contradictory testimony from two eyewitnesses to a car accident...