Effects of Pre-Trial Publicity and Jury Deliberation on Juror Bias and Source Memory Errors

We examined the effects of exposure to pre‐trial publicity (PTP) and jury deliberation on juror memory and decision making. Mock jurors either read news articles containing negative PTP or articles unrelated to the trial. They later viewed a videotaped murder trial, after which they either made collaborative group decisions about guilt or individual decisions. Finally, all participants independently attributed specific information as having been presented during the trial or in the news articles. Exposure to PTP significantly affected guilty verdicts, sentence length, perceptions of defendant credibility, and misattributions of PTP as having been presented as trial evidence. Jury deliberation had significant effects on jury verdicts, perceptions of defendant credibility, source memory for trial items, and confidence in source memory judgements, but did not affect sentences or critical source memory errors

Explaining the development of false memories.

We review six explanatory dimensions of false memory in children that are relevant to forensic practice: measurement, development, social factors, individual differences, varieties of memories and memory judgments, and varieties of procedures that induce false memories. We conclude that, despite greater fidelity to real-world false memory contexts, recent studies fail to use known techniques that separate mere acquiescence from memory changes. Acquiescence and memory interact in interrogation through a dynamic process of construing both questions and memories. Fuzzy-trace theory Is verbatim-gist distinction offers an explanation for how this construal process can transform acquiescence into false memory. Acquiescence and false memory are further exacerbated by individual differences in cognition, personality, and social factors. To avoid such effects, interviewers should not encourage children to consider, imagine, or interpret alternative versions of events, especially with repeated specific questions rather than open-ended free recall. The goal of interviews should be not only to separate truth from falsity, but also to separate the fuzzy truth, the construal of questions and gist memories, from the verbatim "just-the-facts" truth required for the administration of justic

From the Headlines to the Jury Room: An Examination of the Impact of Pretrial Publicity on Jurors and Juries

Pretrial publicity (PTP) encompasses all media coverage of a case occurring prior to trial (Greene & Wade, 1988; Studebaker & Penrod, 1997). Importantly, substantial PTP that is prejudicial and anti-defendant in nature can bias jurors’ opinions of the defendant’s character and increase the likelihood of a guilty verdict (see Steblay, Besirevic, Fulero, & Jimenez-Lorente, 1999 for review). Over the past decade, there have been dramatic changes in how the media covers, and the public follows, criminal and civil cases (e.g., blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, YouTube, and Internet news sources), which has increased the public’s access to case information and removed geographical boundaries. This chapter begins by providing a summary of important court decisions involving PTP, as well as the American Bar Association’s ethical rules for the dissemination of pretrial information. The second section of this chapter explores the amount and type/slant of PTP found in various media sources and the changing media landscape. The chapter then turns to reviewing the social science research and mechanisms through which PTP influences jurors’ decisions. The chapter then examines the effectiveness of current remedies available to address PTP. The chapter concludes with future directions for PTP research and policy implications