Source of article ComCon - Communication Consulting.

Some people involved in litigation have prior criminal convictions. Attorneys can ignore this information or “inoculate” against it by raising the issue and refuting it in some way. One strategy is to raise the issue of a person’s prior record in voir dire and ask jurors to overlook the prior record as they decide the current case. Reinard and Arsenault (2000) investigated whether asking jurors in voir dire to overlook a defendant’s prior criminal record was an effective means of encouraging jurors not to focus on the prior record…