Distinct brain mechanisms linked to evidence accumulation and crime-type bias in juror decisions

Efforts to explain jury decisions have focused on competing models emphasizing utility, narrative, and social-affective mechanisms, but these are difficult to distinguish using behavior alone. Here, we use patterns of brain activation derived from large neuroimaging databases to look for signatures of the cognitive processes associated with models of juror decision making. We asked jury-eligible subjects to rate the strength of a series of criminal cases while recording the resulting patterns of brain activation. When subjects considered evidence, utility and narrative processes were both active, but cognitive processes associated with narrative models better explain the patterns of brain activation. In contrast, a biasing effect of crime type on perceived strength of the case was best explained by brain patterns associated with social cognition.

Freedom Dreams: What Must Die in Music Therapy to Preserve Human Dignity?

This commentary was written on the week of September 28, 2020, as grand jury decisions on the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, United States, were publicly announced on news and media outlets. Six months after Breonna Taylor's brutal murder in Louisville, Kentucky (United States), justice for her life has not been actualized. The author reflects on this injustice and discusses its relationship to anti-Black violence and systemic oppression in music therapy culture and practice.

It’s All or Nothing: Consent, Reasonable Belief, and the Continuum of Sexual Violence in Judicial Logic

This paper discusses controversies over the reasonable belief in consent defence to sexual assault shared by many common law jurisdictions. The implementation of a ‘reasonable’ belief standard has been heralded as a safeguard against rape myth narratives that endorsed men’s unreasonable but ‘honest’ beliefs in women’s consent. This paper argues that judicial constructions of reasonable belief in consent continue to apply notions of reasonableness abstracted from the social context of women’s experience of sexual violence and disconnected from sociological insights which contextualise both the encounter and jury decisions. Using a feminist sociocultural analysis (Gavey, 2005; Kelly, 1988), the successful appeal in the case of R v Lennox (2018 Queensland, Australia), against his conviction by a jury is discussed. The reasoning in the Lennox appeal reveals that overriding judicial constructions of women as incredible in their communication of non-consent, and the prevailing legal dichotomies of consent, and credibility as ‘all or nothing’, undo the progressive potential of the standard of ‘reasonableness’ in consent law and reinforce the phallocentrism of legal discourse.

Examining the Influence of Cosmetics on Jury Decisions

Many studies have examined how defendant characteristics influence jury decisions, but none have investigated the effect of cosmetics. We therefore examined how cosmetics influence jury decisions for young and middle-aged female defendants. In Study 1, participants were more likely to assign guilty verdicts to middle-aged defendants than young defendants and when presented with cosmetics, male participants gave young defendants longer sentences and middle-aged defendants shorter sentences. In Study 2, however, we did not replicate the age or the cosmetics effects on jury sentences, suggesting that comparisons between defendants may have influenced jury decisions in Study 1. Further work is thus still needed, but our two well-powered studies (N = 1127) provide a first exploration into the influence of cosmetics on jury decisions.

The New Impartial Jury Mandate

Impartiality is the cornerstone of the Constitution’s jury trial protections. Courts have historically treated impartiality as procedural in nature, meaning that the Constitution requires certain prophylactic procedures that secure a jury that is more likely to reach verdicts impartially. But in Peña- Rodriguez v. Colorado, 137 S. Ct. 855 (2017), the Supreme Court recognized for the first time an enforceable, substantive component to the mandate. There, the Court held that criminal litigants have a Sixth Amendment right to jury decisions made without reliance on extreme bias, specifically on the basis of race or national origin. The Court did not provide a standard for determining when evidence of partiality is sufficient to set aside a verdict but made clear that an otherwise procedurally adequate decision may fall to substantive deficiencies. This Article advances a structural theory of the Constitution’s impartial jury mandate, focusing on the interplay between its ex ante procedural and ex post substantive components. The Article argues that the mandate has traditionally taken shape as a collection of procedural guarantees because of a common law prohibition on reviewing the substance of jury deliberations. Peña-Rodriguez tosses this constraint, allowing judges for the first time to review the rationales upon which jurors base their verdicts. The Article then offers a novel approach for applying substantive impartiality more broadly by looking to the Equal Protection Clause’s tiers of scrutiny. It concludes that ex ante procedural rules and ex post substantive review can operate in conjunction to tease out undesirable, impermissible forms of jury bias, while still allowing for desirable, permissible forms of jury bias.

Legal Issues in Intergroup Relations

An intergroup perspective in the legal context highlights the influence of group membership on the interaction between authorities and citizens. Social identity influences communication both in the field (e.g., police–civilian) and in the courtroom (e.g., juror deliberation). The research in the law enforcement context addresses trust in police officers, the communication accommodation between police and civilians, sociodemographic stereotypes impacting police–civilian encounters, the role of police media portrayals, and its influence on intergroup exchanges between police and civilians. Juries are inextricably influenced by group membership cues (e.g., race and gender), and differentiate those in the ingroup over the outgroup. The impact of stereotypes and intergroup bias is evident in the literature on jury decisions and the severity of punitive sentencing. These and other factors make the intergroup nature of the legal context significant, and they determine the interconnection between the parties involved. Specifically, the social identity approach brings focus to the biases, attributions, and overall evaluations of the perceived outgroup. The research indicates that diversity is necessary to alleviate the intergroup mindset, thereby encouraging a more interindividual viewpoint of those outgroup members.