NCJ Number
104758
Date Published
1987
Length
23 pages
Annotation
Survey and experimental research indicate that a witness's age affects jurors' perceptions of the witness's credibility and that adults perceive elementary schoolchildren as highly susceptible to adult suggestion and as less adept than older witnesses at recalling details of events.
Abstract
The survey gathered responses from 18 members of a Long Island, N.Y., parent group and 8 college students. The majority viewed children aged 5 to 9 as more suggestible than adults when an adult provided the suggestions. However, disagreement existed about children's memory skills and consistency. The first experimental study gathered views of 36 college students who read case summaries of a robbery in which the sole eyewitness was either the 6- or 10-year-old grandson of the victim or his 30-year-old son. A control group read an otherwise strong case that included no eyewitness, based on the victim's verbal report before he died. Subjects always gave guilty verdicts when the eyewitness was an adult, but their verdicts did not differ for the cases in which there was no eyewitness or a child eyewitness. The second experiment also used college students and focused on the influence of inconsistency in the eyewitness's account and on the effect of the defendant's possible sentence. Inconsistency reduced the credibility of the young child, but not the older child or an adult. However, guilty verdicts were unaffected by age. The communication/persuasion model appears useful for examining juror reactions to children's testimony. Data tables, figure, and 47 references.