Some steps between attitudes and verdicts

A Field Study of the Presumptively Biased: Is There Empirical Support for Excluding Convicted Felons from Jury Service?

“…Pretrial biases can take two forms: specific or general (Villiers ; Cammack ; Brown ; Ellsworth ; Kaplan and Miller ; People v. Wheeler ; Note ). While specific biases are those spawned by the attributes of a given case or defendant, general biases are unrelated to case features (Myers and Lecci ).…”

“…; Saks ). Studies demonstrate that juror demographics, attitudes, and personality traits seldom yield biases that accurately and uniformly influence juror decision‐making processes (Devine ; Bonnazoli ; Ellsworth ). These results have prompted some scholars to conclude that, “few if any juror characteristics are good predictors of juror verdict preferences” (Devine et al.…”

Predicting verdicts using pre‐trial attitudes and standard of proof

“…It is reasonable to expect that pre‐trial attitudes may influence interpretations of the standard of proof in a case. Conceptually, an attitude represents an ‘internal mental state that indicated a propensity or predisposition to respond in one manner or another’ (Ellsworth, , p. 48), and consequently is thought to remain relatively stable over time. By contrast, the standard of proof represents the threshold for reaching a decision in a case and may therefore shift according to factors such as case characteristics (Montgomery, ) and severity of penalty (Lundrigan, Dhami, & Mueller‐Johnson, n.d.).…”

“…In one of the few studies to address this mediation issue, Ellsworth () examined three mechanisms through which attitudes to capital punishment might affect a verdict. These were via a juror's evaluation of witness credibility, a juror's construction of the trial narrative and perception of ambiguous events, and finally via a juror's interpretation of the conviction threshold.…”

“…These were via a juror's evaluation of witness credibility, a juror's construction of the trial narrative and perception of ambiguous events, and finally via a juror's interpretation of the conviction threshold. Ellsworth (, p. 50) suggests that ‘because attitudes towards the criminal justice system come in a “bundle,” they will operate concomitantly to influence several aspects of a complex decision process to produce a bias towards one outcome’. In relation to conviction threshold as a mediator of attitudes, Ellsworth () hypothesized that those individuals favouring the death penalty would have a lower threshold for conviction than those opposed to it.…”