Examining legal authoritarianism in the impact of punishment severity on juror decisions

Abstract

Recent Supreme Court decisions point to an increased reliance on juries to determine a defendant's sentence. Evidence is mixed on whether jurors are more likely to convict when the potential punishment is mild. The current study examined this issue, as well as the impact of legal authoritarianism (LA) (Kravitz, D. A., Cutler, B. L., & Brock, P. 1993. Reliability and validity of the original and revised legal attitudes questionnaire. Law and Human Behavior, 17, 661–677. doi: 10.1007/BF01044688), on jurors’ decisions. An ethnically diverse sample of participants completed the individual difference measure prior to viewing a videotaped, reenacted criminal trial. We manipulated the severity of the punishment the defendant would receive if convicted. Results indicated LA moderated the effect of punishment severity on verdict. Specifically, at higher levels of punishment severity, civil libertarians convicted less, while legal authoritarians convicted more. That is, the severity-leniency effect held for civil libertarians, but not for legal authoritarians. As juries become more responsible for determining a defendant's sentence, attorneys should be aware of the defendant's potential sentence and use voir dire to identify jurors who are higher on LA.

Keywords:

• legal authoritarianism
• juror sentencing
• moderation effects

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In Oklahoma, unitary trials are common except for murder and repeat offenders (Iontcheva, 2003).

2. We used a summed scale for RLAQ in accord with Kravitz et al. (1993) and because there was only one missing value for one participant.

3. Both dichotomous (guilty vs. not guilty) and continuous (measured 0–100) measures of guilt were assessed. After examining regression diagnostics, the continuous measure demonstrated evidence of non-normality. We attempted to transform this variable using both square root and natural log transformations. However, neither transformation was successful. Therefore, we presented the results of the dichotomous verdict measure for our main analyses. Importantly, however, the results for the main and interactive effects were substantively similar regardless of which dependent variable was used.

4. We collapsed the moderate and high severity conditions and reran all analyses with this new dichotomous variable (i.e. low vs. moderate/high severity conditions). The results did not differ between the two-group vs. the original three group independent variables.