Criminal defendants profering an alibi defense rely almost exclusively on person evidence (e.g., family and friends) to support their alibi, and are often unable to provide physical evidence as a form of support... Typically, alibis provided by close friends and family are less believable than alibis provided by strangers... The issue remains as to whether a motivated alibi witness such as a family member, even though less believable than other alibi witnesses, is worth proferring at trial... Eastwood and colleagues (2020) examined the effects of the relationship between a suspect and an alibi witness in two studies....

Attorneys use a variety of communication modalities to present expert testimony to jurors and judges, including telephonic, recorded, video-conferenced, in-person (in-court) and transcribed. Trow Jones (2023) examined the influence of in-person, telephonic and video-conferenced testimony modalities on jurors' judgments of an expert's credibility and the weight jurors assign to an expert's testimony when reaching verdicts....

One of jurors' most common tasks in a trial is to assess witness truthfulness... While everyday deception detection is poor, jurors might be especially well-placed to assess the truth of witness accounts... Does the adversarial nature of a trial ... allow jurors to be better at judging witness veracity?... Chalmers and colleagues (2022) conducted an extensive and comprehensive investigation into how jurors assess witness veracity. Chalmers and colleagues' research involved two trial reconstructions -- of a non-sexual assault and a rape case -- scripted with input from legal practitioners, performed by actors, and professionally filmed and edited. A total of

People are "contract formalists" (a) putting excessive weight on contracts' written terms (as compared to oral agreements), (b) believing that contracts are formed primarily through formalities such as signature and payment (even though contract law does not require such formalities), and (c) believing that a signed agreement obligates parties to abide by its terms (even when the agreement's terms go unread, the contract is unreasonably lengthy, or the terms are one-sided or unfair) (Wilkinson-Ryan, 2014; Wilkinson-Ryan and Hoffman, 2015). Said differently, people hold signees to a written contract's terms, even when the terms are buried in the fine print of

Incivility in the courtroom is a widespread phenomenon that has myriad causes and takes myriad forms. Attorney rudeness, hostility, intimidation, personal attacks, unnecessary combativeness, poor manners and overzealous advocacy are examples of "Rambo Litigation" that violates norms of both courtroom decorum and mutual respect, and yet frequently occurs. Incivility increases judges' stress (Miller et al., 2021) and causes negative emotions in observers (e.g., anxiety, anger, disgust, fear) (see, for review, Edwards, 2022). Are jurors similarly affected by attorney incivility and, if so, does attorney incivility influence jurors' verdicts? Edwards (2022) examined how attorney incivility in the courtroom affected jurors' emotions,

A LGBTQ+ panic defense is a legal strategy that asks jurors, directly or implicitly, to consider a victim's sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to explain a criminal defendant's violent reaction, including murder... Recent research has sought to identify characteristics of jurors that predispose them to finding a LGBTQ+ panic defense legitimate....

hile information nonprobative to the truth of a statement is not admissible in court, it nonetheless often is presented as a part of probative evidence. .. Research has found that when judging the truth value of a statement, people's sense of the truth is affected by nonprobative information. For example, people are more likely to say a statement is true when accompanied by a context-related photo than when no photo is present... This "truthiness" effect reflects the influence of information nonprobative of the truth on people's judgments of truth. Derksen and colleagues (2020) conducted two experiments exploring the role of

In 2015, the National Commission on Forensic Science (NCFS) affirmed that forensic examiners should draw conclusions solely from the physical evidence and not from any other evidence in the case. A suspect's criminal history, confession or alibi do not involve assessment of the physical evidence, and examiners are urged to be blind to such task-irrelevant information to prevent biasing their conclusions about the evidence. While over 70% of forensic examiners believe they can mitigate any bias from task-irrelevant case information simply by ignoring their expectations (Kukucka et al., 2017), scientific research overwhelming has found that knowledge of task-irrelevant case information

To prevent the biasing influence of information obtained outside the courtroom, courts often issue instructions to jurors that limit or prohibit certain activities during the trial and when deliberating. Despite these instructions, internet-based juror misconduct occurs. Carstens Namie (2019) examined the effectiveness of different types of judicial instructions about use of the internet and digital communications (e.g., social media, blogs, email, texting) on internet-based juror misconduct....

Experts differ both in their expertise and their interpersonal style. An expert can offer higher or lower quality evidence than other experts, and can have a more or less likeable style than other experts. How does likeability affect an expert's persuasiveness? Does a likeable expert make weak evidence more persuasive? Is strong evidence less persuasive when presented by a dislikeable expert? Is a dislikeable expert with strong evidence more persuasive than a likeable expert with weak evience? Younan and Matire (2021) investigated the impact of expert evidence quality and expert likeability on expert persuasiveness in two studies....