Age and Functioning in the Legal System: Victims, Witnesses, and Jurors

Abstract

This chapter describes how, as the population of elderly citizens continues to increase in the United States, a greater number of older adults will become victims of crimes and later report their experiences to police, attorneys, and juries, and perhaps even attempt to identify the perpetrators. In fact, we already know that roughly 2 million elderly individuals become victims of crime each year. Likewise, older Americans will become disproportionately represented among accident victims, witnesses in civil and criminal trials, and juries. Therefore, aging has an impact on the legal system in myriad ways, from its role in generating situations subsequently litigated in the courts to the vagaries of memory among aging witnesses, to the role of age in juror judgments. In order to provide a context for understanding age-related declines in cognitive functioning, this chapter begins with a brief review of changes in the brain and their consequences for basic mechanisms of cognitive processing. Subsequently, the chapter considers specific age-related deficits in cognitive functioning that: (1) cause or contribute to incidents generating torts; (2) impair accuracy of testimony regarding these incidents; and (3) affect jurors’ processing of evidence and, thus, verdicts.

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