Electronic recordings presented to jurors at trial often are accompanied by a written transcript to aid understanding of what is said. Transcription of electronic recordings is challenging even for professionally trained transcribers. The transcriptions of even highly trained professional transcribers disagree frequently and vary significantly from each other...Zhang (2022) examined how juror decision-making is affected by the way dubious words are presented in transcripts of degraded covert forensic audio recordings....

Transcripts exert a strong influence on jurors' perceptions of electronic recordings, even when the transcripts are demonstrably inaccurate, misleading or downright implausible. Zhang(2022) examined how giving jurors a transcript of an electronic recording before, with, or after they listen to the recording affects their understanding of what was said on the recording. A total of 281 jury-eligible mock jurors listened to 20 short audio recordings adapted from an actual case. Mock jurors were divided into four groups based on when they were given transcripts for the audio recordings: (1) transcripts given before each audio recording, (2) transcripts given with each

Historically, Republicans and Democrats have differed in their views about crime. Recently, Republicans and Democrats have changed their views of crime, law enforcement and the seriousness of various offenses. Robert W. McGee and colleagues (2022) explored the relationship between political party affiliation and jurors' attitudes toward a variety of specific criminal offenses. More than 500 jury-eligible, young, educated adults of varying backgrounds, genders, religions, ethnicities and political persuasions were asked to grade how serious they considered 75 specific crimes....

Computer-generated animations, which recreate or illustrate an alleged sequence of events, are increasingly being used by lawyers to accompany witness testimony. Visual aids such as computer-generated animations are designed not only to depict events, but also to influence jurors' beliefs about those events. Rempel and Burke (2022) examined the effect of visual aids on juror beliefs about a criminal defendant's testimony in a second-degree murder case that was based on a real civil case in Los Angeles County...

When recounting traumatic events, victims often cry, although not always in the courtroom. In the courtroom, some victims are stoic while others are emotional. The 'emotional witness effect' is a phenomenon in which listeners are affected by the emotional manner in which an alleged victim recounts what happened to them. For example, distressed female rape complainants (i.e., those crying or sobbing) are perceived by psychologists, police officers, judges and students to be more credible than controlled or neutral rape complainants (Nitschke et al., 2019). Do jurors similarly find alleged rape victims who cry to be more credible? do jurors respond

When testifying, witnesses can sound sad, angry, fearful, disgusted, happy or neutral, and exhibited emotions affect jurors' judgments of witness trustworthiness. Emotions affect acoustic properties of voices (e.g., pitch, breathiness, hoarseness, resonance, speech rate, etc.). Researchers find that speakers exhibiting varying acoustic properties to be differentially trustworthy. Voices also carry stereotypical information about a speaker's race and gender, both of which also can impact perceptions of trustworthiness even when no visual cues are available. Forde-Smith and Feinberg (2023) investigated the credibility of witnesses of different races and genders when conveying a variety of emotions. The researchers had 548 mock jurors

Under the doctrines of contributory negligence and comparative negligence, the trier-of-fact -- most often a jury -- is responsible for apportioning responsibility for harm between multiple negligent actors. Votruba (2019) explored how jurors approach complex negligent tort cases in which responsibility can be attributed to multiple negligent actors, including a negligent plaintiff. Over 200 mock jurors read a vignette about a car accident that was constructed to allow attributions of responsibility for the accident to multiple causes including bad luck, road and weather conditions, the defendant and/or the plaintiff. Jurors read that....

While racial biases are often an uncomfortable topic to discuss in voir dire, jurors at least know whether they harbor explicit racial biases. By contrast, implicit racial biases lie outside of conscious awareness and so jurors often explicitly deny or reject in voir dire that they are racially biased when they nevertheless are influenced by implicit racial biases. Social science research has begun to identify those individuals who are more likely and those who are less likely to harbor implicit racial biases. Much of this research has focused on implicit racial bias against Blacks. Greenwald and Krieger explored how various

Gender is at the heart of many legal cases, including employment cases alleging gender discrimination and family law custody disputes between a mother and father. Unlike most jurors, trial court judges have substantial subject-matter and decision-making expertise to serve as a buffer against decisions reflecting their personal gender ideologies (e.g., traditional, non-traditional). Are trial court judge decisions less likely to exhibit gender bias than decisions of jurors? Miller (2019) compared the decision-making of 619 trial court judges in a state (69% of all trial court judges in the state) to 500 members of the public of jury-eligible age. Both groups

n the interests of cost and trial efficiency, criminal defendants accused of involvement in the same crime, conspiracy or transaction can be tried together rather than separately. The bar for serverance is high and defendants are frequently tried together. Wilford and colleagues (2018) tested whether trying two defendants together increased conviction rates using separate mock juror samples, one of which involved jury-eligible community members who watched a video of a murder trial -- adapted from an actual criminal case and filmed in a moot courtroom -- that included openings, closings, both prosecution and defense witness testimony, and judicial instructions that