Jurors are often presented with some negative outcome (e.g., an injured plaintiff), and are asked to assess whether that outcome was foreseeable or preventable. Can jurors disregard outcome information, or does this knowledge bias their decisions?...

Jurors favor attractive defendants. A large body of research shows that attractive defendants are found guilty less often, and given lighter sentences when found guilty, than unattractive defendants (see, e.g., Burke et al., 1990; Mazzella and Feingold, 1994). The advantage of physically attractive defendants does not hold for all crimes...

Legal negligence rules hold auditors responsible for plaintiff losses only when the quality of the audit that is provided fails to meet standards of care. The standard of care is a minimum standard, and meant to be independent of the severity of the consequences of audit failure...

Ideally, jurors asked to render a verdict in a criminal trial make judgments of guilt or innocence based solely on the trial evidence, which is presumably diagnostic of guilt or innocence. Information diagnostic of guilt or innocence includes eyewitness accounts, physical evidence, and the existence of an alibi. How does information not diagnostic of guilt or innocence - a defendant's physical attributes or character - affect verdicts? Can such non-diagnostic evidence dilute information diagnostic of guilt?...

Parkinson (1981) studied the speech of male prosecutors and defense attorneys from courtroom transcripts. Successful prosecutors were...

Jurors are often questioned together as a group during voir dire. On occasion, jurors are questioned individually outside the presence of other jurors. Nietzel and Dillehay (1982) explored the effects of questioning jurors as a group or individually in 13 capital cases prosecuted in Kentucky...

Juries convict African-American defendants more often than White defendants for many crimes. Instances exist, however, when African-American defendants are treated less harshly by juries than White defendants. Poulson (1990) found that...

The law treats the determination of negligence and the awarding of damages as independent issues. Are jurors able to separate the issues of liability and damages in comparative negligence cases? Zickafoose and Bornstein (1999) conducted two studies examining how a plaintiff's partial negligence affects jurors' damage awards...

Eyewitness testimony is fallible. Mistaken eyewitness testimony is the leading cause of false convictions, accounting for more criminal convictions of innocent people than all other causes combined (see, for review, Wells et al., 1998). Lawyers' cross-examination skills often cannot overcome jurors' belief in an eyewitness...

When judging the legality of a search, any items that are discovered during the search should be irrelevant. Under the law, search legality is based only on information that police have prior to conducting the search, and whether or not such information meets the legal standard to conduct the search. Casper and colleagues (1988) examined jurors' attitudes toward police officers who had improperly searched an apartment...