Pretrial publicity and juror age affect mock-juror decision making

Abstract

We explored the effects of pretrial publicity (PTP) and juror age on decision making and source memory. Mock jurors read news articles containing negative PTP, positive PTP, or unrelated stories. One week later they viewed a murder trial, made decisions about guilt, and completed a source memory test. We found that only positive PTP had a significant effect on older jurors' verdicts and impressions (positivity effect); while only negative PTP had a significant effect on younger jurors' verdicts (negativity effect). PTP and juror age had significant effects on accurate source memory judgments (accurately attributing trial information to the trial) with older jurors and those exposed to PTP being less accurate. Only PTP had a significant effect on jurors' critical source memory errors (misattributing information in the PTP to the trial or both the trial and the PTP) with those exposed to negative PTP making more of these errors than jurors in the other PTP conditions.

Keywords:

• age
• juror decision making
• memory
• pretrial juror bias
• cognitive distortions

Notes

1. These data were collected from the clerks of court of Manatee, Sarasota, and Pasco counties. These data represent the proportion of jurors who sat on criminal juries in these counties during 2004, 2005, and 2006 that were age 60 years or older.

2. We chose The Academy for Lifelong Learning to recruit our older mock-juror sample from because these older individuals resided in the same communities as our younger participants and attended the same university. Also, students of the academy are active seniors who fit the description of older adults who would be likely to sit on juries and not automatically opt out of jury service at age 70. In the state of Florida at age 70 individuals can request to be permanently removed from the Clerk of Courts jury selection list.

3. Although the effect of P-PTP on younger jurors' verdicts and guilt ratings did not reach statistical significance, the verdict frequencies and mean guilt ratings were in the correct direction – towards not guilty. Ruva and McEvoy (2008) found that for similarly aged jurors P-PTP had a smaller effect than N-PTP on guilt measures (negativity effect). Therefore, the finding of a nonsignificant effect of P-PTP on younger jurors' verdicts and guilt ratings in the current study is not surprising. In addition, the percentage of younger jurors voting not guilty after exposure to P-PTP were similar across both studies (69% vs 74%) as were the effect sizes (V = 0.23 vs 0.27), but the cell sizes in the Ruva and McEvoy study were twice that of those in the current study (26 vs 53). All of this suggest that the nonsignificant results for the younger jurors exposed to P-PTP may be due a lack of power in the current study.

4. The cover story explaining that purpose of the current study was to determine the stability of emotional responses could have created demand characteristics that could have affected emotional responses to the PTP. That being said, if present these demand characteristics should be consistent across PTP and age conditions, and therefore cannot explain the age differences in emotional reactions to the PTP or trial.