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POLICE & CRIME
Jurors take the stand "No jury can declare a man guilty unless it's SURE.” What goes on in the mind of a juror or behind the closed doors of the jury room is one of the mysteries of our legal system. While works like the classic 1957 film Twelve Angry Men, starring Henry Fonda as the dissenting and ultimately persuasive juror number eight, may give a dramatic insight into the workings of a jury, what influences jurors in the courtroom is the subject of research by Charles Sturt University (CSU) academic David Mallard.
CSU researcher Dr David Mallard is concerned the legal system expects a superhuman effort from jurors. During a trial, a jury maybe told by a judge to disregard evidence deemed inadmissible testimony because it fails to meet the tough rules of evidence. The legal system assumes a jury is able to disregard the evidence and the jurors go on to reach a verdict on the basis of all the other evidence they hear during the trial. “I am interested in whether jurors will be able to disregard inadmissible testimony when they are instructed to, or whether the way our memory works will make the task of putting certain information aside too difficult,” said Dr Mallard, a lecturer in Psychology in the CSU School of Social Sciences and Liberal Studies in Bathurst, NSW. The psychologist suspects that the task a judge may ask the jury to do when ruling evidence is inadmissible maybe made more difficult if the inadmissible testimony is closely related or connected to admissible evidence. In the first in a series of studies entitled Disregarding inadmissible testimony: Does who said what matter?, Dr Mallard examined whether it is more difficult for jurors to disregard inadmissible testimony when the witness who said it also provided admissible evidence.
Can jurors rely on their memories to sort through what was admissible and what was inadmissible evidence in a trial? The CSU academic presented a summary of a murder trial to 163 mock jurors on the web. Some were told a wiretap confession by the accused was ruled admissible. Others members of the jury were informed the confession was inadmissible. Within each of these conditions, some jurors were told that the witness who presented the wiretap evidence also described a threatening letter sent by the accused to the victim while other jurors heard about the letter from a different witness. A final category of jurors did not hear about the wiretap confessions at all. The study indicated that the presentation of admissible evidence by the same witness did not influence jurors’ ability to disregard the inadmissible wiretap. In other words, the effect of the inadmissible testimony was the same regardless of whether or not the wiretap witness provided admissible evidence. Dr Mallard presented his research to a Psychology and Law International, Interdisciplinary Conference at Edinburgh in Scotland in 2003. He is planning further studies, including whether inadmissible testimony is more difficult to disregard when the testimony fits closely with a story the juror has constructed in an attempt to understand what actually happened at the crime scene. “I hope that the findings of these studies will tell us about what jurors are capable of doing in terms of processing the information they receive. Many of the requirements the legal system places on jurors requires them to be almost super human. I believe we need to examine whether the psychological evidence supports the notion that jurors can do these things and if it doesn’t then we need to find procedures that will make the demands placed on them more reasonable,” Dr Mallard observed. “The findings might help us identify which items of inadmissible evidence are most likely to be harmless. It could also indicate how jurors organise and think about information during a trial, which might be of interest to lawyers interested in the implications for trial tactics." ends
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