NCJ Number
174410
Journal
Law and Human Behavior Volume: 22 Issue: 3 Dated: June 1998 Pages: 257-271
Date Published
1998
Length
15 pages
Annotation
The possibility that death penalty attitudes influence juror conceptions of criminal intent was investigated by showing mock jurors the filmed murder of a convenience store clerk and evaluating the inferences they drew from the evidence.
Abstract
Data were collected using a pretrial questionnaire, a summary of the actual criminal case, the videotaped crime, videotaped closing arguments, and a posttrial questionnaire. The centerpiece of the mock trial was the videotaped evidence taken by a surveillance camera in the convenience store. The posttrial self-administered questionnaire asked for individual verdicts, a sentencing decision (life imprisonment or death penalty) from jurors who voted for first-degree murder, and responses to questions that tapped juror recall of the factual evidence. Results showed jurors who favored the death penalty tended to read criminal intent into the defendant's actions, while jurors who opposed the death penalty were less likely to do so. Specifically, jurors who favored the death penalty were more likely than those who opposed the death penalty to infer from the videotape that the defendant intended to murder his victim, that his specific actions indicated premeditation, that the defendant's substance abuse did not mitigate his actions, and that the defendant would be a future threat to society. Death penalty attitudes also appeared to affect several social judgments related to inferences about the defendant's mental state at the time of the killing, although these attitudes did not affect memory for specific trial facts. Data on the relationship between death penalty attitudes and juror judgments of the defendant's intent further illuminated the disparity in evidence evaluation between death-qualified and excludable jurors. 27 references, 15 footnotes, and 3 tables