Effects of Word Replacement on Juror Perceptions and Guilt Ratings During a Criminal Trial

This research was performed with the aim of improving the body ofknowledge on juror perceptions during criminal trials. Three juries were formed of men and women at least 18 years old. The juries witnessed key excerpts of a criminal trial, either edited or unedited for content and then placed in a room for deliberation. Deliberations were videotaped and the juries had up to 45 minutes to return a verdict. Two juries viewed the content-edited trials, removing all instances of the word "rape". One of these juries was told of the editing, the other was not. After all juries had returned a verdict, each individual juror was asked to take an exit survey inquiring about their particular perceptions of the trial, and their personal conviction of guilt or lack thereof. All juries returned a verdict of 'not guilty' , however the exit surveys showed that more than 50% of the jurors that viewed the un-edited trial had an abiding conviction of guilt but rendered a not guilty verdict based on a lack of physical evidence. The content-edited conditions, however, had only 3 people between them that believed the defendant to be guilty of the crime of rape. 3 Effects of Word Replacement Effects of Word Replacement on Juror Perceptions and Guilt Ratings During a Criminal Trial "Innocent until proven guilty. " This is the mantra upon which the American legal system rests. When cases are brought to trial before a judge and jury, it is with the expectation that any defendant will be tried before a jury of their peers, that evidence will be presented for both sides and that the men and women that will ultimately decide the fate of one person will be impartial observers. Jurors are expected to objectively listen to the facts presented during the trial and deliberate until they are absolutely certain of their verdict, bearing in mind that the State has the burden of proof. However, researchers have begun to ask if it is truly possible to always have an impartial jury; a jury that will use logic and reason rather than emotion and prejudice to return a verdict. Recent research suggests that an impartial jury may be more a rarity than the norm. In fact, one Canadian juror was quoted as saying that for certain cases, the mindset becomes "Guilty until proven innocent" (Vidmar, 1997). One of the factors working against the formation of an unbiased jury may be the occurrence of moral hypervigilance and disgust sensitivity. Jones and Fitness (2008) explored the effects of these phenomena as seen in a trial setting. Moral hypervigilance was defined by Jones and Fitness (2008) as a syndrome in which people may alter their behavior to varying degrees in order to avoid moral transgressors while disgust sensitivity was defined as a lowered threshold for disgust in reaction to moral offenses. According to the research, both of these phenomena influenced reported guilt ratings and juror-provided suggestions for sentencing (Jones & Fitness, 2008). Jones and Fitness found that individuals who were determined to be morally hypervigilant were biased towards conviction as well as longer sentences for the accused and were more likely to attribute 'evilness' to the defendants. Moral hypervigilance and disgust 4 Effects of Word Replacement sensitivity are, undoubtedly, extreme syndromes that are not attributes ofthe average juror. However, a similar and more common occurrence is that of generic prejudice. Generic prejudice can seriously affect the outcome of criminal trials, something that has been shown by the research of Neil Vidmar in 1997. As defined by Vidmar, generic prejudice exists in cases where the jury cannot be impartial simply due to the nature of the crime being tried. While there have been several qualitative remarks made by those in the legal field, Vidmar's study is the first of its kind to gather objective data. He presents several statistics to display the increasing number of sexual victims and jurors who display rape empathy for the victims. He also notes that even persons who have not been victims, 110r had any close contact with victims of a sex crime, tend to react to defendants with distrust and general disfavor. Wiener, Arnot, Winter and Redmond (2006) further refined the idea of generic prejudice so as to set it apart from other types ofjurybias and investigated instances of generic prejudice as they occurred in sexual assault cases and homicide cases. Their results indicated moderate to strong evidence that generic prejudice was coloring juror opinions in sexual assault cases. In a recent rape case in Nebraska (see Nebraska v. Safi, 2006), the attorneys for the defense claimed that rape is a legal conclusion, and therefore it cannot be said as a statement of fact in a courtroom until so decided by a jury. The result of their argument was a blanket gag order forbidding the words "rape" and "sexual assault" to be used during the criminal proceedings. This order was put in place prior to trial and without the knowledge of the jury. Although the reasoning behind this argument seems sound from a purely legal standpoint, the alleged victim claimed that the gag order was a violation of her first amendment rights. While the gag order in place during this particular trial may have been a bit extreme, further investigation is necessary to determine whether or not such an omission in the courtroom could 5 Effects of Word Replacement help the legal community find a better way to avoid such issues as generic prejudice for sexual abuse trials. Furthermore, such an omission may also provide some barrier against juries making decisions based on emotion rather than fact. There have been dozens of studies designed to examine the workings ofjuries and what factors affect juror decision making, but none have explicitly studied how perceptions and guilt rating will be affected when the categorical name of the crime being tried is banned from the criminal proceedings. Schmid and Fielder (1998), however, do investigate the differences in style of language used by prosecution a11d defense. Their research demonstrated that even without altering the vocabulary allowed in the courtroom, more extreme cases (such as a homicide case rather than a burglary case) elicited more abstract language usage. That is, attorneys needed to be more delicate and thoughtful in their language choices while describing particularly heinous crimes. Once the ban on the name of the crime being tried is considered, one can imagine the difficulty an attorney would have in trying to design an effective opening statement or closing argument. As this is the first study designed to specifically test such key vocabulary changes, it is very basic in nature. In this study, similar to all studies that involve jury simulations, we were limited in certain aspects and thus are prone to the same validity challenges as any study that involves a jury simulation. However, attempts were made to ensure that the mock trials were presented in as realistic a fashion as possible, a decision made based on research that indicates that more realistic trials do, in fact, lead to more valid results (Diamond, 1997). We have also included a period oftime for mock jurors to deliberate, another factor that has been ignored in many mock jury studies but that, after further review by Diamond (1997) did prove to be a factor not only in validity for studies, but in how such studies are viewed by the legal community. 6 Effects of Word Replacement Those that included deliberations do affect trial outcomes and are taken more seriously when presented in a courtroom as persuasive evidence. Weare using undergraduates as our mock jurors for this study and while some will challenge the decision to do so, Bomstein (1999) found no significant difference between undergraduates and members of the general community. In the future, however, to ensure ecological validity, we would suggest that undergraduates not be used to see if the results could be replicated with participants that more closely resemble the average jury pool.