Forensic Psychology For Dummies (115 page)

Such confusions and misunderstandings can have serious consequences. Research shows that the impact of legal jargon increases the likelihood of a defendant being found guilty when the charges are presented in archaic legal language. Jurors are less likely to find the defendant guilty when the instructions are translated into everyday language.

Other matters also make things difficult for jury members and so put psychological pressures on them:

How complex the trial is, especially if it lasts more than six months. In these cases, jurors can have great difficulty in understanding the judge’s instructions.

Low educational achievement of jurors. Not surprisingly, people of a higher educational level can make more sense of what’s going on in court.

Willingness (or not) of specific jurors to accept authority and adhere to the instructions given because of aspects of their personality. People concerned to present a good impression are more likely to follow instructions.

Pre-existing beliefs about how courts work and what goes on within them. These ideas often draw on fictional accounts and also reduce a juror’s ability to act in accordance with real legal frameworks. Such jury members may act on what they believe is common sense far more readily than observing the niceties of legal requirements.

Various attempts have been made to help lawyers and judges work more effectively with juries, including:

Carefully analysing the instructions to juries to take account of the educational level required to make sense of them.

Giving written instructions to jurors.

Presenting instructions to jurors before they hear the evidence.

Repeating instructions to the jury.

Providing special verdict forms for the jury to complete.

Supplying diagrams and illustrations that lead the jury step by step through the evidence to reach a decision.

Animated, computer-based illustrations have even been tried, for example, to help a jury understand what forms of self-defence are legally acceptable. But the power of legal precedence and accepted rituals puts a strong break on the acceptance of such innovations. In addition, the legal problem exists that, if instructions to juries differ from accepted practice, the way is opened for an appeal.

Also, research isn’t clear that any of the attempts listed inevitably improve jurors’ understanding of what they need to do and how they should reach a verdict, because every case has unique qualities and what may be helpful in one case may hinder in another. Most experts believe, however, that a lot of room still exists to improve how juries are helped to reach decisions.

Dealing with inadmissible evidence

At an early stage of the court process, an attempt is made to decide what evidence the jury is to be allowed to hear (see my earlier description of the
voir dire
stage). Most typically, information about a defendant’s previous crimes is kept out of court by the defence (if at all possible, although in the UK, changes in the law are making this more difficult for the defence to do). Their argument is that the person should be tried only for the crime currently before the court, and not for previous misdemeanours. The defence claims that facts about previous offences will
prejudice
the jurors, that is, lead them to make decisions in advance of, and probably ignoring, crucial facts of the case.

The influence of such prejudicial information is certainly very powerful. I carried out a simple study in which a set of actions were described that were ambiguous and could perhaps imply a crime (or not). I had two sets of instructions, which differed only in one simple aspect. In one condition the protagonist was described as having just come out of prison, in the other he was described as just coming home from work. People were given just one description and asked whether the person was guilty or not. An overwhelmingly larger number of people decided that the protagonist was guilty when a hint was included that he’d been in jail. Although they were not aware of it, people used the information about the protagonist’s criminal background to reduce the ambiguity in the direction of criminality.