Biases In Trials Involving Defendants Charged With Multiple Offenses1

Seven Penrod

41 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Applied Social Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Jury Decision Making Processes Legal processes and jurisprudence Deception detection and forensic psychology

Abstract

Under federal and state laws, a defendant who has been charged with more than one offense can be tried for all the offenses in a single “joined” trial. It was predicted that the probabillty a defendant would be convicted would increase as a function of the number of joined offenses. Legal theories, research on memory, and social psychological models of information integration and attribution led to three hypotheses as to why this bias might occur: (1) confusion of evidence, (2) accumulation of evidence, and (3) inference of a criminal disposition. Subjects read and judged written trial summaries presented as joined or single trials. In Study 1, joinder resulted in higher rates of conviction and in confusion of evidence. In Study 2, the conviction results were replicated, and subjects judging joined trials also rated the evidence as more incriminating and made negative attributions about the defendant. These ratings were strongly related to judgments of guilt. A sequential judgment process was also found to affect jurors' judgments.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

References

1975Design and Analysis: A Researcher's Handbook 1972Causal schemata and the attribution process 1976Contemporary Developments in Mathematical Psychology 2004Life of the mind: The interface of psychopharmaceuticals, domestic economies, and social abandonment 1980Progress in social psychology 1973Group decision and social interaction: A theory of social decision schemes.2014Cognition and Social Behavior 1979A critical review of the jury simulation paradigm: The case of defendant characteristics.

Cited by

2007Team Cognition 1984Social inference processes in juror judgments of multiple-offense trials.1985When crimes are joined at trial.1999Relationship Between Pretrial Publicity and Trial Outcomes 1984Order effects in multiple decisions by groups: A demonstration with mock juries and trial procedures.1988The effects of impeachment evidence and limiting instructions on individual and group decision making.

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.