Professor Mona Lynch of the University of California, Irvine School of Social Ecology, and Professor Craig Haney of the University of California, Santa Cruz Department of Psychology, have published Capital Jury Deliberation: Effects on Death Sentencing, Comprehension, and Discrimination, 33 Law and Human Behavior 481 (2009). Here is the abstract:
“This study focused on whether and how deliberations affected the comprehension of capital penalty phase jury instructions and patterns of racially discriminatory death sentencing. Jury-eligible subjects were randomly assigned to view one of four versions of a simulated capital penalty trial in which the race of defendant (Black or White) and the race of victim (Black or White) were varied orthogonally. The participants provided their initial ‘straw’ sentencing verdicts individually and then deliberated in simulated 4–7 person ‘juries.’ Results indicated that deliberation created a punitive rather than lenient shift in the jurors’ death sentencing behavior, failed to improve characteristically poor instructional comprehension, did not reduce the tendency for jurors to misuse penalty phase evidence (especially, mitigation), and exacerbated the tendency among White mock jurors to sentence Black defendants to death more often than White defendants.”
Tags: Bias in jurors' decisionmaking, Bias in legal decisionmaking, Capital punishment, Cognitive processing of legal information, Criminal law information systems, Criminal procedure information systems, Empirical methods in legal communication studies, Empirical methods in legal informatics, Influence of deliberation on jurors' legal decisionmaking, Influence of deliberation on jurors' legal information processing, Jurors' decisionmaking, Jurors' legal information behavior, Jury deliberations, Jury instructions, Law and Human Behavior, Law and psychology, Legal decisionmaking, Legal information behavior, Psychology and law, Psychology and legal communication, Psychology and legal informatics, Racial discrimination in capital punishment
