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...
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.)...