Precious Little Guidance: Jury Instruction on Damage Awards

Jury instructions on damage awards are notoriously vague and ambiguous. As a result, awards are sometimes unexpected and seemingly illogical. In this article, the authors argue that jury instructions regarding damages are vague because the law of damages itself is purposefully ambiguous—allowing particularized justice across a variety of different circumstances. The authors review research on comprehension and application of substantive jury instructions related to damages and on procedural variations at trial (e.g., use of preinstruction, bifurcation, blindfolding jurors to various issues, special verdict forms, caps on damages, and instruction revision) that impact the substantive instructions that jurors receive from the judge. They comment on attempts at reforming jury instructions regarding damages and conclude that jurors’ decision making on this difficult and emotional issue could be made more predictable by careful reforms at the trial level

The Effects of Limiting Punitive Damage Awards

In response to concerns that jury awards in tort cases are excessive and unpredictable, nearly every state legislature has enacted some version of tort reform that is intended to curb extravagant damage awards. One of the most important and controversial reforms involves capping (or limiting) the maximum punitive damage award. We conducted a jury analogue study to assess the impact of this reform. In particular, we examined the possibility that capping punitive awards would cause jurors to inflate their compensatory awards to satisfy their desires to punish the defendant, particularly in situations where the defendant’s conduct was highly reprehensible. Relative to a condition in which punitive damages were unlimited, caps on punitive damages did not result in inflation of compensatory awards. However, jurors who had no option to award punitive damages assessed compensatory damages at a significantly higher level than did jurors who had the opportunity to do so. We discuss the policy implications of these findings

The Suggestibility of Older Witnesses

The present study compares younger and older adult witnesses’ susceptibility to misinformation. Previous research on the misinformation effect has not measured the relationship between the effect and individuals’ perceptions of their own memory abilities. Such perceptions, and general knowledge of one’s own memory processes, are referred to as “metamemory.” In order to examine the relationship between metamemory and the misinformation effect in the present study, participants also completed a questionnaire that assessed their perception of their memory functioning. Although older persons tend to perceive their memories as being faulty, the correlation between self-assessment of memory abilities and actual memory performance is relatively low (Zelinski, Gilewski, & Thompson, 1980). We therefore predicted that there would be a negligible relationship between participants’ self-assessed memory functioning and whether or not they were susceptible to misinformation, for both younger and older adults