Evaluating witness testimony: Juror knowledge, false memory, and the utility of evidence-based directions

Eyewitness evidence is often important in criminal cases, but false or misleading eyewitness evidence is known to be a leading cause of wrongful convictions. One explanation for mistakes that jurors are making when evaluating eyewitness evidence is their lack of accurate knowledge relating to false memory. This article examines lay beliefs relating to memory and ways in which they diverge from expert consensus. It identifies ways in which current directions provided to jurors in this area are likely to be deficient in influencing juror knowledge and in helping them apply that knowledge in a case context, and develops criteria that can be used to assess the likely effectiveness of directions. A new evidence-based training direction is designed based on these criteria, and tested in a mock jury study (N = 411). Results suggest that the proposed direction is more effective than a basic direction in influencing juror knowledge and facilitating the application of that knowledge to case facts.

The Impact of Juror Knowledge of Deductibility and Defendants' Tax Rates on Punitive Damages Awards: Experimental Evidence

The US Tax Code allows corporate defendants to treat punitive damages as a deductible expense. Legal scholars argue that tax-unaware jurors fail to recognize that deductibility significantly reduces defendants' after-tax punishment, leading to an under-punishment problem. They propose that explicitly informing jurors about tax-deductibility could mitigate this problem. We conduct an experiment to test this claim. Compared to a control group of jurors who are told nothing about taxes, jurors who learn about tax-deductibility award higher damages when the defendant's effective tax rate (ETR) is low, but not when ETR is high. Our results highlight the cost of tax avoidance (low ETRs) for firms in a previously unexamined setting. Our findings suggest that allowing jurors to consider tax-deductibility leads to higher damages only under a narrow set of circumstances, offering limited support for the under-punishment hypothesis. Our results should be of interest to scholars in accounting, law, and public policy.