Body-worn camera (BWC) footage is expected to be objective, thereby improving transparency. But can other information about an incident affect how people perceive BWC footage? In two experiments, we examined the effects of officer-generated misinformation and outcome information on people’s memory for an event. Participants viewed BWC footage and/or read an officer’s report containing misleading information. Some participants learned the officer was punished, some that the citizen was arrested. Participants then answered questions exploring their memory for the facts, the extent to which they relied on the officer’s misinformation in judging who was at fault, and their impressions of the officer and civilian. Even when participants saw the BWC footage, their conclusions were consistent with the officer’s misinformation. Moreover, participants’ attitudes toward police predicted their interpretation of the footage, suggesting BWC footage is unlikely to be perceived objectively. We explain our results in terms of misinformation effects and confirmation bias.
Objectives: Firearms experts traditionally have testified that a weapon leaves "unique" toolmarks, so bullets or cartridge casings can be visually examined and conclusively matched to a particular firearm. Recently, due to scientific critiques, Department of Justice policy, and judges' rulings, firearms experts have tempered their conclusions. In two experiments, we tested whether this ostensibly more cautious language has its intended effect on jurors (Experiment 1), and whether cross-examination impacts jurors' perception of firearm testimony (Experiment 2). Hypotheses: Four hypotheses were tested. First, jurors will accord significant weight to firearm testimony that declares a "match" compared to testimony that does not (Experiments 1 and 2). Second, variations to "match" language will not affect guilty verdicts (Experiment 1). Third, only the most cautious language ("cannot exclude the gun") would lower guilty verdicts (Experiment 1). Fourth, cross-examination will reduce guilty verdicts depending on specific language used (Experiment 2). Method: In two preregistered, high-powered experiments with 200 mock jurors per cell, participants recruited from Qualtrics Panels were presented with a criminal case containing firearms evidence, which varied the wording of the examiner's conclusion and whether cross-examination was present. These variations include conclusion language used by practitioners, language advised by government organizations, and language required by judges in several cases. Participants gave a verdict, rated the evidence and expert in all conditions. Results: Guilty verdicts significantly increased when a match was declared compared to when a match was not declared. Variation in conclusion language did not affect guilty verdicts nor did it affect jurors' estimates of the likelihood the defendant's gun fired the bullet recovered at the crime scene. In contrast, however, a more cautious conclusion that an examiner "cannot exclude the defendant's gun" did significantly reduce guilty verdicts and likelihood estimates alike. The presence of cross-examination did not affect these findings. Conclusion: Apart from the most limited language ("cannot exclude the defendant's gun"), judicial intervention to limit firearms conclusion language is not likely to produce its intended effect. Moreover, cross-examination does not appear to affect perceptions or individual juror verdicts. Public Significance StatementThis study addresses mounting legal concerns regarding the overstated conclusions experts reach using firearms comparison, one of the most commonly used forensic disciplines in criminal cases. Bradley D. McAuliff served as Action Editor.
Via "contamination," false confessions usually contain accurate and nonpublic details, and details that are inconsistent with the case facts (Garrett, 2010). In two studies (N 1 = 476; N 2 = 364), we replicated previous findings that inconsistent confessions yield fewer guilty verdicts than accurate confessions (Henderson & Levett, 2016;Palmer et al., 2016). The source of the details in a confession (interrogator vs. suspect) also influenced guilt decisions: when details were introduced by the suspect, participants were more confident in his guilt than when the interrogator introduced the details. Exploratory analyses revealed that although consistency and source of confession details affected memory for crime facts, memory did not influence verdict decisions as much as participants' causal attributions for the confession. Consistency and source influenced whether participants attributed the confession to the suspect's guilt or something other than guilt (e.g., coercion), which in turn affected guilt judgments and confidence.
Bait questions-where an investigator questions a suspect about the existence of hypothetical evidence-are a widely employed interviewing tactic. We examined whether these bait questions are a vehicle for misinformation to enter a criminal case, leading mock jurors to misremember the evidence. Adapting the misinformation effect paradigm, participants read a police report describing several pieces of evidence, then watched a police interview including bait questions that provided misleading information about the collected evidence. In Studies 1 and 2, participants' memory for evidence they were misled about was significantly less accurate than control evidence. Indeed, participants came to believe the hypothetical evidence proposed in the bait questions actually existed. In Studies 3 and 4, participants read warnings-varying in their specificity-about the misleading bait questions. These warnings were ineffective at mitigating the misinformation effect. Bait questions may, therefore, be a source of error in juror's decision-making, leading to wrongful convictions.
Now more than ever, people have access to police footage, yet people still disagree about what some footage depicts. This is not surprising given that research on attention, perception, and memory demonstrates that motivations, biases, and context shape what people see and remember. However, we do not know whether people are attuned to the fact that their understanding and memory of observed criminal encounters may be biased. Moreover, we do not know how people think about laypeople’s and police officers’ ability to view such events objectively. We examined these beliefs by asking participants to imagine that they themselves, an average American or an average police officer, viewed a criminal event live, with police body-worn camera (BWC) footage or with surveillance footage. Participants provided ratings for each observer’s susceptibility to bias. Importantly, we found a bias blind spot (Pronin, Lin, & Ross, 2002) for people’s ratings of themselves and—depending on participants’ attitudes toward police—police officers. People denied that biases would influence their own and officers’ inferences and memory for a criminal encounter, but they did not give the average American the same benefit. Moreover, participants rated officers as being the least biased after they watched their BWC footage, demonstrating that people perceive BWCs to be an extension of what officers see. We explore the implications our results have for policies concerning BWC footage and disagreements that may arise when people assume that they and police are more objective than others.
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