Time spent in deliberations focusing on the defendant's actions and on the jury instructions affects decisions to award punitive damages...

Deliberations often lead to larger punitive awards than what jurors would award individually. Schkade and colleagues (2002) examined the size of punitive damage awards, finding that a severity shift occurs in deliberations...

Safer sex health educators encourage women to carry condoms. This health practice is legally hazardous to women who are victims of sexual assault. Hynie and colleagues (2003) studied whether knowing that a female victim of a sexual assault was carrying a condom influenced perceptions of her sexual intention and subsequent judgments of the sexual assault...

Recent research by Boccaccini and Brodsky (2002) finds that jurors expect criminal defendants who testify to be at least a little nervous, and are most likely to believe defendants...

Jurors discuss many topics when deciding on damages, including topics that parties to the litigation are not allowed to mention. Mott and colleagues (2000) interviewed 269 jurors from 36 civil cases concerning their deliberations, the strategies their juries used, and the factors considered in arriving at a collective damage award. Jurors reported discussing...

Voir dire is used to identify jurors that cannot be fair and impartial in a particular case, and can be conducted with the entire jury pool present, or with jurors brought in one-by-one. Urbszat (2005) recently conducted three studies examining the effectiveness of voir dire in identifying jurors with bias or prejudice...

Landstrom and colleagues (2005) studied jurors' reactions to live and videotaped eyewitness testimony. Three weeks after seeing a staged accident, 12 witnesses testified about the event. Jurors viewed the witnesses' testimony either live or on video. Live observers of the witnesses' testimony rated the witnesses' appearance in a more...

Overland (2003) examined whether plaintiff-oriented and defense-oriented jurors in personal injury cases against corporate defendants can be distinguished from each other based on their demographics and attitudes. Overland's research examines data from over 2600 jurors in mock trials conducted around the country in preparation of actual personal injury trials involving either automobile defects or prescription medicine side effects...

The definition of reasonable doubt provided to jurors can influence their verdicts. Horowitz and Kirkpatrick (1996) examined five definitions of reasonable doubt when the evidence against the defendant was either strong or weak...

Jurors do not always distinguish between highly qualified and less qualified experts, even when the difference in these experts' credentials is brought to their attention. Research by Cooper and colleagues (1996) looked at how the credentials of expert witnesses affect their persuasiveness...