No description available.

Past literature has indicated that jury instructions are not written in ways that result in optimal juror comprehension, and can be improved through various ways of simplification. Prototypes of the insanity defense have also been found to influence juror decision-making. Additionally, individual factors such as attitudes toward and myth endorsement of the insanity defense can influence verdict. The following study explored these effects of jury instruction format, insanity defense consistency, and participant factors on jury understanding and decision-making. Three hundred and eighty jury eligible community members were recruited online for this study. Participants were first asked questions pertaining to attitudes and myths about the insanity defense. Afterwards, each participant read one of two vignettes (an insanity defense consistent case and an insanity defense inconsistent case), and then read one of three jury instructions (traditional, simplified, or flow-chart versions). The participants then reached individual verdicts and answered factual questions about the insanity defense and their perceptions on the defendant. Results indicated that simplified instructions increased participant knowledge over the traditional and flow-chart instructions, but did not influence verdict selection overall. Consistency, myth endorsement, attitudes, and perceptions of the defendant were also all found to contribute to the verdict. These results contribute to the current research on comprehension of jury instructions, especially in the context of an insanity defense case, and may provide additional information for attorneys to consider during the voir dire process.

No description available.

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.