Effects of victim attractiveness, care and disfigurement on the judgements of American and British mock jurors*

For almost all crimes, the appearance and behaviour of the victim are legally irrelevant to a defendant's guilt or innocence. However, there is evidence that such extralegal victim characteristics can influence juror behaviour. This paper reports an experimental juror simulation which examined the effects on mock jurors' verdicts of three victim characteristics—facial disfigurement, precautiousness and physical attractiveness. Subjects were drawn from student populations in both the US and the UK. Under most experimental conditions, the defendant was less likely to be convicted when the victim took every reasonable precaution to avoid the crime than when the victim took no such precautions. The opposite effect resulted when the victim was both physically unattractive and facially disfigured prior to the crime. These results were interpreted in terms of Lerner's just world theory and the principle of comparative negligence. The degree of harm done to the victim was implicated as a key mediator of victim characteristic effects. The effects on verdicts were also related to subjects' verdict criteria (standards of reasonable doubt) and their perceived costs of committing the ‘Type II’ juridic error (i.e. acquitting a guilty defendant). Although several cross-cultural differences were obtained, the effects of the victim characteristics on subjects' verdicts were identical for the British and American samples

Earwitnesses: effects of accent, retention and telephone

Contains fulltext : 54671.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of accent, telephone and a relatively long retention interval (3 or 8 weeks) on speaker identification. Three-hundred and sixty participants heard the target's voice and were asked to identify the target by means of a line-up consisting of 6 voices. Half of the participants were given a target-present line-up and the other half a target-absent line-up. The results showed that 24% of participants correctly identified the target in the target-present condition (hits), whereas 50% of participants incorrectly identified a person as the target in the target-absent condition (false alarms). The speaker with the standard-accented voice was more often correctly recognized than the speaker with the non-standard-accented voice. No difference was found between identification accuracy after one, three or eight weeks and between the telephone and non-telephone conditions. It can be concluded that there is a relatively high probability that an innocent defendant is identified as the perpetrator, even in a procedurally correct voice line-up (in this experiment 8%). Furthermore, reliability may be drastically reduced when the perpetrator has a strong accent, unfamiliar to the listener. On the other hand, reliability of a voice line-up seems not to be affected by a presentation over the telephone, as well as by a retention interval of at least 8 weeks.12 p