You could, for example, hear the same shoplifting case with a well-spoken black woman in street clothes as the defendant, or an inarticulate white male in prison garb or any one of 16 other combinations. By combining an experiential learning opportunity with the ability to manipulate case characteristics, this program should serve as an invaluable tool for teaching about the role of extra-legal factors in the criminal process. Portney and Goldman combed through hundreds of pages of court transcripts in Boston and Chicago before writing the dialogues used in the software. In fact, we have leap-frogged the best research in the area. Now, in a new generation of studies of the criminal justice system, we'll have to re-do all the studies based on sentencing defendants in simulations where the case information is found only on paper.
Digital reality is a better medium than text for research on human judgment.
The software was developed with the help of Steve Cohen and Mitch Rosenbaum of Tuft's Curricular Software Studio. The program, which runs on a Macintosh with eight megabytes of RAM and a CD-ROM drive, will be available for Windows this summer. A World Wide Web version is also planned. Plans are underway to create new scenarios, including a version in which capital punishment is a sentencing option. The concept can also be applied to other kinds of experimental research.