The Trial as Psychological Stimulus
The information input that is produced from a trial can be broken into 9 units (for a criminal trial) that normally appear in order:
1) Indictment- a statement of the charge against the defendant,
naming the crime that he/she is accused of
2) Defendant's plea - the response to the indictment, may vary from pleading guilty, not guilty or guilty to a lesser charge
3) The prosecution's case begins with an opening statement by the prosecuting attorney, general outline of what prosecution intends to prove
4) The defense presents its opening statement, summarizes evidence that will be used for denying the allegations
5) The major part of the trial is the testimony given by witnesses. Discredited witnesses can be very influential in juror decision-making, as found by Hatvany and Strack, 1980. They discovered that, although jurors generally dealt with discredited witnesses logically, they would also exhibit tendencies to overcorrect their judgment.
6&7) closing arguments are presented after the witnesses, made by the defense and then prosecution, in that order.
8) Finally, the judge informs the jurors what their task consists of during deliberation and what procedures they should employ in reaching a verdict, such as to regard the defendant as innocent until proven otherwise and that the burden of proof is on the prosecution.
9) The judge also tells the jurors all the possible verdicts from which they will choose one.
All items constitute all the jury has to work with in making its decision. As internal sources, the juror uses factual knowledge, such as the juror's beliefs that may not necessarily be true (the beliefs about the effects of a particular weapon). S/he also uses strategic knowledge, which includes information-processing strategies that determine how the data are organized to form a mental product that can be used to make a decision.
The Jury's Task
The input at the beginning of the jury task is a group of jurors who already have a verdict preference. Each juror should have already completed initial predeliberation verdict decisions.
Each task:
1) Selection of a foreman
2) Review the evidence and instructions, the center of the deliberation process
3) Identity juror verdict preferences, use of secret or open polling procedures
4) Check whether a verdict rendering quorum has been reached, i.e., enough jurors have reached a decision (unanimous or majority), if this is reached the deliberation process is finished
5) Assess progress toward consensus, if no consensus can be reached, jury may be deadlocked and not able to reach a verdict, normally occurs when individuals are not changing their preferences across several polls
-if this occurs, the judge may read the jury a dynamite charge instruction that encourages the jury to try to reach a decision, but if the jury remains deadlocked, it is declared hung and dismissed, the trial a mistrial.
6) Request additional instructions, occurs when verdict is impeded by disagreement or confusion concerning the law or the evidence of the case
INFORMATION-PROCESSING DEMANDS
The information-processing demands model suggests the juror should resemble a judgment machine. It is an idealistic model and psychologically unrealistic in at least two ways:
ORDER - The juror's decision making tasks are performed in a certain order and after the judge has instructed the jury.
And
COMPLETION - All of the processing tasks should be completed during
deliberations.
The Seven Components of Information-Processing
1. ENCODING - The juror acts as a tape-recorder, suspending any judgment or evaluation until all evidence has been presented and the proper instructions have been given on how to evaluate and what to judge.
*Problem: jurors experience selective attention, forgetting, inferential embellishment, reorganization
2. ESTABLISH JUDGMENT CATEGORIES - Each verdict may be thought of as a category defined by a list of criterial features specifying the identity, mental state, circumstances, and actions that bear on the verdict choice. (see the verdict categories figure)
*Problems: the juror experiences interference from erroneous descriptions of verdict categories presented in TV, movies, media.
3. SELECTING EVIDENCE - Some trial input should not be accounted for as evidence when reaching a decision. In a criminal procedure, the following should be excluded from consideration:
- the fact that the defendant was indicted.
- the attorneys' opening statements and closing arguments. the attorneys' behavior and questions.
- the judge's behavior and comments of any facts in the case.
- items of evidence declared inadmissible by the judge.
4. CONSTRUCTION - Taking all the information presented during the course of the trial and creating a coherent story with respect to the defendant, the crime he or she is accused of committing, and the possible events surrounding the crime.
6. INFERENCE - After the construction and evaluation tasks, the
juror has been drawing inferences with respect to the identity, intentions, and actions of the suspect. The juror evaluates the fit of the case, represented as the final output of the story construction stage, into each of the possible verdict categories.
7. VERDICT - This evaluation of goodness-of-fit can be characterized as a feature matching test in which each feature of the verdict category is compared to the attributes of the case story structure.
THE STORY MODEL
The story model maintains the basic features of ideal jury analysis. However, unlike the information-processing model, this model takes into account what really happens in the minds of jurors during an actual legal proceeding. These cognitive processes are explained in the three stages of the story model.
1. STORY CONSTRUCTION STAGE - The construction of one or more plausible accounts, with respect to the comprehension and organization of evidence, describing "what happened" at the time of events testified to during trial.
2. VERDICT-CATEGORY STAGE - Each verdict alternative is represented as a category with defining features and decision rule specifying their appropriate combination.
3. STORY CLASSIFICATION STAGE - The juror's decision takes the form of a classification in which the best match between story features and verdict category features is determined. The application of standard-of-proof and presumption-of-innocence also occurs in this stage.
Empirical Support
After subjects watched realistic filmed trials, they were instructed to talk aloud as they weighed the evidence in reaching a verdict decision. What was found was this "talk aloud" exhibited a story structure characterized as causal event chains having a hierarchical episode structure.
Positives for the Story Model
It acknowledges that there is important constructive and inferential processing during trial comprehension.
It addresses a problem identified as significant by legal and psychological experts by providing a plausible psychological account of the linkages between events in each unique legal case that must be specified before inferences about guilt may be made.
It receives support from jury research, political science analysis, juror's accounts of their experiences during trials, and other work.
Jury Decision Rule
Hastie, Penrod, & Pennington. (1983). Inside the Jury (pp.15-36).
Various experiments concerned with jury decision rule and size
In an experiment on mock juries using college students, the jurors were presented with a 45-mm tape recording of a rape case and allowed to deliberate for a minimum of thirty minutes (Davis et al., 1975). The jury size was six-person versus twelve-person, and the decision rule was unanimous versus two4hirds majority (4 out of6 jurors or 8 out of 12).
Outcome:
Unanimous juries took longer to reach a verdict, and more polls were taken during a deliberation. Unanimous jurors also believed that their jury's verdict was correct with greater confidence than did majority rule jurors.
Definitions:
Deadlock: when the jury is split in half on a decision and neither side will give way.
Hung Juries: the jury members could not agree on a verdict.
An Experiment by Foss, 1981.
College student subjects in a study at West Virginia University listened to a fifteen-minute audio taped summary of a murder trial and then deliberated in twelve-member juries for up to two hours. Fourteen juries were instructed to deliberate to a unanimous consensus and fourteen to a ten-out-of twelve majority.
Outcome:
Unanimous juries required more time to complete deliberation. In unanimous juries you get more disagreement among jurors across the course of deliberation. Jurors also converged on their final verdict more quickly in majority rule juries as compared to unanimous juries. Also unanimous rule juries were more likely to deadlock than were majority rule juries; 6/14 versus 0/14 hung juries.
Decision rules have three clear effects
1. Hung or deadlocked final decisions states are more common in unanimous than in majority decision conditions.
2. Unanimous rule juries tend to take more time and more polls compared to majority rule juries before rendering a verdict.
3. Overall satisfaction is higher in unanimous rule than in majority rule conditions. The lower satisfaction ratings for majority rule juries are produced by holdout jurors, who never join the verdict-rendering majority faction.