The present study asked two important questions: Does prejudicial pretrial publicity produce bias which may impair juror objectivity and, if it does, can voir dire remedy its untoward effects? Subjects were 68 college undergraduates whose political attitudes had been assessed and who had or had not read case-specific pretrial publicity one week before viewing a murder trial. Trial proceedings took place at the University of Miami law school. Voir dire, trial viewing, and deliberations were conducted in UM's moot courtroom. As predicted, analyses revealed main effects for both voir dire and pretrial publicity such that pretrial publicity increased conviction rate and the extended voir dire decreased conviction rate, but the extended voir dire failed to reduce the specific prejudicial effect of pretrial publicity. These findings suggest that prejudgment of a general nature (e.g., confusion about legal concepts) may be neutralized by an extended voir dire but that prejudice specifically created by exposure to inflammatory news stories is not offset by an extended voir dire format. There is reason to believe, however, that with more time spent explaining case facts and with greater attention to individual jurors, voir dire could eliminate even the specific prejudice created by pretrial publicity.

The purpose of this study was to understand the media's impact when reporting on high-profile athlete's legal proceedings. Through the use of text analysis, the study examined whether sports journalists gave preferential treatment to "home-town heroes" in the Kobe Bryant case. The study also attempted to find differences and similarities between sports reporters and sports columnists with regard to positive and negative treatment of the case.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Ninety-eight empirical effects examining the impact of pretrial publicity (PTP) on perceptions of guilt were meta-analytically analyzed. As hypothesized, results suggested that anti-defendant PTP was associated with increased perceptions of defendant guilt, whereas pro-defendant PTP was associated with decreased perceptions of defendant guilt. Additionally, several moderator variables were examined. The results suggested that the size of the effect of PTP is dependent upon several variables, including the level of the analysis (jury-level vs. juror level), the type of crime involved in the case, the nature of the information provided to the participants in the control condition, the reality of the case used in the study, the delay between PTP exposure and the collection of the verdict preference, the medium of the PTP presentation, the publication status of the data source, and the outcome measure utilized.