Experts are important witnesses in a high percentage of civil and criminal trials. Jurors use multiple criteria to judge the credibility of expert testimony...
Increasingly, courts are allowing jurors to submit questions for witnesses during trial. Hannaford-Agor and Connelly (2006) of the National Center for State Courts report that a national survey of 8,066 trials found that jurors were permitted to submit questions for witnesses in 14% of criminal trials and 18% of civil trials. Heuer and Penrod (1994) conducted a national field experiment to explore the effects of juror submitted questions for witnesses...
Witnesses are confronted frequently in cross-examination with complex and leading questions that contain multiple parts, negatives, double-negatives, advanced vocabulary and legal terminology. Witnesses have difficulty deciphering and answering such questions accurately. Ellison and colleagues (2010) investigated whether instructing witnesses about attorneys' cross-examination questioning techniques could improve the accuracy of answers witnesses provide. Numerous adult witnesses watched ...
Jurors differ in whether they believe damage awards are excessive, a litigation crisis exists, and tort reform is necessary. Such litigation crisis beliefs often influence both liability verdicts and punitive damage awards, though not always...
A defense claim that a confession is false is difficult for jurors to understand and accept. Costanzo and colleagues (2010) surveyed 461 surrogate jurors from 7 different cities in the U.S. about false confessions, the ability to discern true from false confessions, permissible interrogation tactics, likely rates of false confessions for different crimes, and expert testimony on police interrogations....
Civil trials usually prohibit discussion of, and so are silent about, payment of attorneys' fees by litigants. Silence about attorneys' fees is not equivalent to jurors being unaware of them...
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...