Educating Jurors about the Phenomenon of False Confessions with Juveniles PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Educating Jurors about the Phenomenon of False Confessions with Juveniles PDF full book. Access full book title Educating Jurors about the Phenomenon of False Confessions with Juveniles by Stephanie C. Burke. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Stephanie C. Burke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Confession (Law)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Expert witnesses may be used at trial to educate jurors about information beyond their typical scope of knowledge or to help them understand evidence. Previous research on expert witness testimony regarding false confessions is mixed, and no published studies to date have examined expert testimony specifically as it relates to juvenile false confessions. Given expert testimony on false confessions is occasionally prohibited at trial, other means of educating the public are also warranted. The present study investigated jury-eligible citizens' knowledge of false confessions and whether education, via an expert witness testimony video or a false confession TED Talk, improved the accuracy of, relative to a control video, jurors' knowledge and decision making regarding a vignette-based juvenile defendant who falsely confessed. Results revealed the 284 participants, recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and social media sites, had substantial knowledge of false confessions. Nonetheless, results of a 2x3 mixed factorial ANOVA indicated that, compared to the control video, both expert witness testimony and the TED Talk significantly improved jurors' knowledge. Although condition did not impact the verdict assigned to the juvenile defendant, the TED Talk led a greater proportion of participants to report it very likely the defendant falsely confessed, whereas the expert witness video led participants to have greater confidence in their confession decisions, compared to the control video. Along with study limitations, policy and practice implications on the use of expert witness testimony and ways of educating jury-eligible citizens about false confessions are discussed.
Author: Stephanie C. Burke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Confession (Law)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Expert witnesses may be used at trial to educate jurors about information beyond their typical scope of knowledge or to help them understand evidence. Previous research on expert witness testimony regarding false confessions is mixed, and no published studies to date have examined expert testimony specifically as it relates to juvenile false confessions. Given expert testimony on false confessions is occasionally prohibited at trial, other means of educating the public are also warranted. The present study investigated jury-eligible citizens' knowledge of false confessions and whether education, via an expert witness testimony video or a false confession TED Talk, improved the accuracy of, relative to a control video, jurors' knowledge and decision making regarding a vignette-based juvenile defendant who falsely confessed. Results revealed the 284 participants, recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and social media sites, had substantial knowledge of false confessions. Nonetheless, results of a 2x3 mixed factorial ANOVA indicated that, compared to the control video, both expert witness testimony and the TED Talk significantly improved jurors' knowledge. Although condition did not impact the verdict assigned to the juvenile defendant, the TED Talk led a greater proportion of participants to report it very likely the defendant falsely confessed, whereas the expert witness video led participants to have greater confidence in their confession decisions, compared to the control video. Along with study limitations, policy and practice implications on the use of expert witness testimony and ways of educating jury-eligible citizens about false confessions are discussed.
Author: Lindsey Peterson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Clinical psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 74
Get Book Here
Book Description
Adviser: Naomi E. Sevin Goldstein.
Author: Lawrence S. Wrightsman
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 0803945558
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 179
Get Book Here
Book Description
When the prosecution introduces confession testimony during a criminal trial, the effect is usually overwhelming. In fact, jurors' verdicts are affected more by a confession than by eyewitness testimony. While eyewitness studies are massive in numbers, the topic of confession evidence has been largely ignored by psychologists and other social scientists. Confessions in the Courtroom seeks to rectify this discrepancy. This timely book examines how the legal system has evolved in its treatment of confessions over the last half century and discusses, at length, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision regarding Arizona v. Fulminante which caused a reassessment of the acceptability of confessions generated under duress. The authors examine the causes of confessions and the interrogation procedure used by the police. They also evaluate the process for determining the admissability of confession testimony and provide excellent research on jurors' reactions to voluntary and coerced confessions. Social scientists, attorneys, members of the criminal justice system, and students will find Confessions in the Courtroom to be an objective and readable treatment on this important topic. "In this short volume, the authors seek "to describe and evaluate what we know about confessions given to police and their impact at the subsequent trial." It is a comprehensive review of the social psychological literature and legal decisions surrounding confessions. One of the primary strengths of the manuscript is the interplay between social science and law fostered by the authors' clear understanding of the boundaries between these disciplines and appreciation of the substantive areas they share. . . . [The authors] have produced a comprehensive and imminently readable legal and psychological treatise on confessions, valuable for established scholars and for students." --Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice
Author: Kelsey S. Henderson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 123
Get Book Here
Book Description
False confessions are one of the leading causes of wrongful conviction in the United States. Confession evidence can be extremely damaging in the criminal courtroom, and jurors are more willing to convict based on the presence of a confession than eyewitness evidence and character testimony (Kassin & Neumann, 1997). However, to date, no research has examined whether jurors notice variations in the quality of confession evidence based on whether the confession is consistent (high quality) or inconsistent (low quality) with the crime facts. In our pilot study, mock jurors were questioned about their verdict after reading a trial vignette in which a suspect's account did or did not match the facts of the crime. Jurors did not view the confession differently or render largely different decisions based on whether the confession was consistent or inconsistent with other evidence. Researchers have suggested that expert testimony could help educate jurors on the dangers and causes of false confessions (Leo & Liu, 2009). Past research has also shown that the expert testimony can cause jurors to become more skeptical or sensitize jurors to variations in evidence. In the current study, jurors read a trial in which we varied the presence of expert testimony, whether the defendant confessed, and whether that confession was consistent with other trial evidence. The expert testimony did not sensitize jurors to variations in the confession's quality; instead, jurors were not affected by the expert testimony and were unable to spot a bad confession on the basis of inconsistencies.
Author: Andrew Christian Pollack
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Confession (Law)
Languages : en
Pages : 63
Get Book Here
Book Description
A substantial amount of research has been dedicated to understanding how and why innocent people confess to crimes that they did not commit. Unfortunately, false confessions occur even with the best possible interrogation practices. This study aimed to examine how different types of false confession (voluntary, compliance, and internalization) and the use of jury instructions specific to confessions influences jurors' verdicts. A sample of 414 participants read a criminal trial case summary that presented one of four reasons why the defendant falsely confessed followed by either the standard jury instruction for confessions or a clarified version. Afterwards, participants completed several items assessing the perceived guilt of the defendant, their attitudes on confessions in general, and their opinions on jury instructions. Although the three confession reasons did not differ among one another, jurors who were given no explanation for the false confession tended to more harshly judge the defendant. Further, the clarified jury instructions did not influence the participants' judgments. Future research should focus on how expert witness testimonies affect verdicts regarding each type of false confession reason and whether the media may influence a juror's knowledge of factors that could provoke false confessions.
Author: Christina M. O'Donnell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Confession (Law)
Languages : en
Pages : 324
Get Book Here
Book Description
Most false confessors will plead, or will be found, guilty at trial in the U.S. DNA exonerations indicate that false confessions are the second leading cause of wrongful conviction. Jurors have an incomplete understanding of the factors that affect confession evidence. This study sought to sensitize mock jurors to factors that can increase or decrease the strength of confession evidence, by way of a novel set of modified ("enhanced") jury instructions. The enhanced instructions combined best-practice standard ("general") criminal case instructions with empirical findings about factors occurring before, during, and after an interrogation that impact confession reliability. Participants (N= 314) read a weak or strong murder trial transcript online, followed by general or enhanced jury instructions. The key evidence in the trial was the defendant's confession, gathered by police using either coercive (weak case) or appropriate (strong case) tactics. The cases differed in 11 key details. For example, in the weak case, police employed coercive tactics, such as lying about the existence of incriminating evidence against the suspect, whereas in the strong case, the police ensured the suspect's sobriety prior to the interview and recorded the interview in its entirety. Altogether, 64% of the general instruction group convicted the defendant in the weak case and 74% in the strong case--a 10% difference that was not statistically significant. In contrast, 60% of the enhanced group convicted the defendant in the weak case and 78% in the strong case--an 18% difference that was significant. The enhanced instruction participants were 1.47 times more likely to render a guilty verdict in the strong case than the weak case compared to the general instruction participants. This is the first study to demonstrate that jury instructions can sensitize jurors to confession evidence, without making them more skeptical about confession evidence in general. However, 30% of participants who considered the confession to be involuntary still convicted the defendant, and the enhanced instructions did not lower convictions for involuntary confessions. Implications are discussed for educating jurors and legal professionals about confession evidence.
Author: Nancy Andiloro
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Lauren J. Grove
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 70
Get Book Here
Book Description
Adolescents are at an increased risk for false confession compared to adults (e.g., Redlich & Goodman, 2003), yet police interrogate adolescents no differently (e.g., Cleary & Warner, 2016). While confession evidence tends to be highly persuasive to jurors (e.g., Kassin & Sukel, 1997), less is known about how jurors evaluate juvenile interrogations and confessions. In Study 1, undergraduate students read a lengthy or abridged (i.e., confession only) transcript of a real-world interrogation in which a suspect (described as either a juvenile or adult) falsely confessed to murder. Although age did not affect perceptions, participants who read the lengthier transcript perceived greater coercion--but also remained confident in the suspect's guilt. In Study 2, jury-eligible adults read the same lengthy or abridged interrogation transcript, either with or without expert testimony on age as a risk factor for false confession. Those who read the lengthier transcript again rated the interrogation as more coercive. Importantly, those who read both the lengthy transcript and expert testimony were least likely to misjudge the suspect as guilty (and vice versa), suggesting that expert testimony, in conjunction with a comprehensive video recording of the suspect's interrogation, may improve jurors' fact-finding accuracy. Implications for interrogation practices and trial procedure are discussed.
Author: G. Daniel Lassiter
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
ISBN: 9781433807435
Category : Confession (Law)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
Although it is generally believed that wrongful convictions based on false confessions are relatively rare - the 1989 Central Park jogger 'wilding' case being the most notorious example - recent exonerations of the innocent through DNA testing are increasing at a rate that few in the criminal justice system might have speculated. Because of the growing realization of the false confession phenomenon, psychologists, sociologists, and legal/law-enforcement scholars and practitioners have begun to examine the factors embedded in American criminal investigations and interrogations that may lead innocent people to implicate themselves in crimes they did not commit. ""Police Interrogations and False Confessions"" brings together a group of renowned scholars and practitioners in the fields of social psychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, criminology, clinical-forensic psychology, and law to examine three salient dimensions of false confessions: interrogation tactics and the problem of false confessions; review of Supreme Court decisions regarding Miranda warnings and custodial interrogations; and new research on juvenile confessions and deception in interrogative interviews. Chapters include well-recognized programs of research on the topics of interrogative interviewing, false confessions, the detection of deception in forensic interviews, individual differences, and clinical-forensic evaluations. The book concludes with policy recommendations to attenuate the institutional and social psychological persistence (and pervasiveness) of the various inducements and impediments that have informed law enforcement's interrogation techniques and the types of false confessions they encourage.
Author: Daniel S. Medwed
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108138675
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 441
Get Book Here
Book Description
For centuries, most people believed the criminal justice system worked - that only guilty defendants were convicted. DNA technology shattered that belief. DNA has now freed more than three hundred innocent prisoners in the United States. This book examines the lessons learned from twenty-five years of DNA exonerations and identifies lingering challenges. By studying the dataset of DNA exonerations, we know that precise factors lead to wrongful convictions. These include eyewitness misidentifications, false confessions, dishonest informants, poor defense lawyering, weak forensic evidence, and prosecutorial misconduct. In Part I, scholars discuss the efforts of the Innocence Movement over the past quarter century to expose the phenomenon of wrongful convictions and to implement lasting reforms. In Part II, another set of researchers looks ahead and evaluates what still needs to be done to realize the ideal of a more accurate system.
