The influence of jailhouse informant testimony on jury deliberation.

Abstract

This study investigated the impact of jailhouse informant testimony on mock juries. In addition to allowing for jury deliberations, individual judgments (as measured in most prior research) were examined. Two hundred ninety-one undergraduates, in fiveto six-member mock juries, heard a fictional murder trial summary in one of three conditions: jailhouse informant testified after receiving an incentive, jailhouse informant testified after receiving no incentive, or no jailhouse informant testimony. Participants made predeliberation judgments, deliberated on a verdict, and made postdeliberation judgments. The primary results showed that there were more guilty verdicts for juries that heard jailhouseinformant testimony than for those that did not hear such testimony. This relationship was fully mediated by perceptions of the defendant (e.g., sympathy for and credibility of). In addition, jury deliberations often produced a change in verdict; those who gave an initial guilty verdict were more likely to switch to not guilty after deliberation. Finally, cognitive network analyses showed that jailhouse informant testimony was the focus of jury deliberations for both guilty (viewed the testimony as reliable) and not guilty (viewed the testimony as unreliable) verdicts. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of how jailhouse informant testimony can influence jury deliberations in both a positive and negative way.

Mock Juror Perceptions of a Male or Female Adult Rape Victim Crying in the Courtroom

“…However, only by directly comparing the two can we determine if a non-stereotypical response for male victims (i.e., crying) helps or hinders their case in comparison to female victims, who are expected to cry (Nitschke et al, 2019). The present results add to the EVE literature by demonstrating that crying was viewed similarly for male and female rape victims, notwithstanding societally defined gender role expectations (Birnbaum, 1983; Brody, 1997; Brooks, 2011; Cretser et al, 1982; Goodey, 1997; Hutson-Comeaux & Kelly, 2002; MacArthur, 2019; Peter et al, 2001; Wrede & Ask, 2015). However, stereotypical expectations of rape victims may account for increases in the defendant credibility related to victim gender, insofar as participants were skeptical to see a male victim due to existing rape and gender schemas (e.g., Depraetere et al, 2020).…”

“…The three measures of credibility, believability, and honesty were not created to measure a legal definition of witness credibility. Rather, they were measured and combined in line with previous research that has successfully used these measures to investigate perceptions of legal victimization cases (e.g., Golding et al, 2020;Golding, Neuschatz et al, 2022;Le Grand et al, 2022). Means and standard deviations for the primary dependent variables are presented in Table 1.…”

“…These findings regarding mediation are in line with some prior research on mediation in the psychology and law literature. For example, Golding et al (2020) and Golding, Neuschatz, et al (2022) found that perceptions of a victim and/or defendant mediated the direct relationship between independent variables and verdict in cases of sexual assault and murder. The mediation model findings extended previous work on the emotional victim effect by demonstrating that the rise in victim credibility associated with the EVE does extend to case verdicts.…”

“…The lower credibility of a male rape victim who cries in court may be due to jurors being aware that males typically cry less than women on average (Jellesma & Vingerhoets, 2012; van Hemert et al, 2011; for reviews see Bekker et al, 2001; Vingerhoets & Bylsma, 2016). In addition, jurors might feel that a male would not cry in court because it is perceived as contrary to a masculine sex-role stereotype (Brooks, 2011; Goodey, 1997; MacArthur, 2019; Peter et al, 2001). Along those lines, Bederian-Gardner and Goldfarb (2014) found that mock juror participants expected male child rape victims to show more anger than female child victims but expected more sadness from female child victims.…”