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So far Author Unknown has created 328 blog entries.

Does attorney attractiveness influence judicial decision-making? | Online Jury Research Update

March 23rd, 2024|

Physical attractiveness is one of the most common cues used when people make decisions about everything from employment (hiring, promotions, compensation) to education (grades, attention from teachers) to medicine (attention from doctors, healthiness, trustworthiness) to elections (electoral success)... Nicholas Waterbury (2024) examined the success of physically attractive non-government ("opposition") attorneys arguing against US government attorneys in U.S. federal court. A dataset was created of all orally argued cases at the US Courts of Appeals from 2017 to 2019 in which the US government was a party. The dataset included 1,067 unique cases, 930 unique opposition attorneys representing clients litigating against

How do jurors apply the presumption of innocence? | Online Jury Research Update

February 17th, 2024|

Jurors who fail to reserve judgment against a defendant until after they hear the evidence are neither fair nor impartial. A problem for jurors is that the legal presumption of innocence can be at odds with their beliefs, pre-evidence, about the factual innocence of any defendant put on trial. Jurors recognize that criminal defendants are on trial because police officers, prosecutors, and preliminary hearing judges or grand jurors believe them to be guilty. Jurors also gain information in voir dire that can bias them with respect to the factual innocence of a criminal defendant. A key question is whether the

Can jurors and judges disregard discredited information? | Online Jury Research Update

February 9th, 2024|

People, including judges and jurors, have a tendency to believe the information they receive. Taking information as true by default is referred to as the truth bias. Sometimes, the information people receive is discredited. When that happens, people are more likely to misremember as true a piece of information they have been told is false, than to misremember as false a piece of information they have been told is true (Pantazi, et al., 2020). Are judges and jurors, as legal fact-finders, able to disregard discredited information? Said differently, are judges and jurors able to set aside their truth bias and

2024 Litigation Resolutions for All Litigators

January 8th, 2024|

It’s that time of year again when we all make resolutions, stick to them for about two weeks, then go back to our typical pattern and practice. Let’s make this year different! In the spirit of correcting past problems and forging new habits, here’s a list of litigation resolutions – from case intake to closing argument – to put your trial strategy either back on track or to keep it on track. Initial Case Strategy “I resolve to start thinking about my jury story BEFORE discovery even starts.”  Too often we see trial teams begin thinking about their jury story

How are settlements perceived? | Online Jury Research Update

November 8th, 2023|

At times, settlement agreements are entered into evidence in jury trials or decision-makers become aware of prior settlement agreements. Are settling defendants perceived as responsible for alleged conduct or is settlement perceived more neutrally as a convenient (less costly, less time-consuming) resolution? Do settlements send different signals than those conveyed by allegations, complaints, verdicts or other case resolutions? Bregant and colleagues (2021) conducted two studies exploring how the lay public views settlement in terms of both the parties' reasons for settling and the defendant's inferred responsibility for the alleged conduct....

Is conviction less likely when evidence is circumstantial? | Online Jury Research Update

September 26th, 2023|

It has been argued that jurors often undervalue circumstantial evidence (fingerprints, DNA, etc.) and overvalue direct evidence (eyewitness identifications, confessions), even when the circumstantial evidence is more reliable than the direct evidence (Heller, 2006). A reluctance to impose liability on the basis of circumstantial evidence is referred to as the anti-inference bias. How much does the anti-inference bias affect verdicts in criminal cases? Zamir and colleagues (2017) conducted four experimental studies to test the scope of factfinders' aversion towards circumstantial evidence and found that... Teichman and colleagues (2023) examined the extent of the anti-inference bias in the decision-making of jurors,

What’s Your Backup Plan?

September 19th, 2023|

Four plays and out. The year of hype; the coverage; the expectations – and with one play it’s over. Doesn’t matter if you’re a football fan, a Jets fan, or an Aaron Rodgers fan. That’s not the way it should have ended. But was it a possibility? Come on – you’d have to be crazy to not think that Rodgers could get injured, and you’d need a backup plan. Watching Eli and Peyton Manning on their Monday Night Football show, it was pretty obvious that they thought it was laughable that Zach Wilson was the backup plan – obvious because

Are angry jurors more influential in deliberations? | Online Jury Research Update

September 19th, 2023|

It is not uncommon for jurors to express anger during deliberations. Does a juror's anger affect their influence on other jurors during deliberations? Are angry jurors either more or less persuasive than non-angry jurors? Salerno and Peter-Hagene (2015) investigated the differential effects of men and women's anger expression on social influence during mock jury deliberations. The researchers also compared anger expression to fear expression.....

How accurate are litigators at predicting case outcomes? | Online Jury Research Update

September 12th, 2023|

Research has found that an attorney's estimate of the probability of success is the most crucial variable in shaping decisions whether to litigate or settle a case in controversy (see, for review, Goodman-Delahunty et al., 2010; Jeklic, 2023). Unlike parties to a case -- who frequently exhibit an overconfidence about prevailing in court -- attorneys are expected and trained to be more objective in their predictions. Said differently, attorneys are expected not to have a 'myside' bias. How realistic are attorneys' case outcome predictions? Do attorneys forecast outcomes accurately or do they exhibit a myside bias not unlike the parties

Getting Back to Basics in Trial Planning

September 5th, 2023|

Imagine you are asked to build something – you don’t know if it’s a car, a house, a playground, or any of the other endless things it might be. To build it, you are given one tool at a time, but you are only given the barest of instructions on how to use that tool, you’re not told which part it actually builds, and the instructions are not given in the logical order that would make most sense. As the days go by, you begin to get a general idea of what you’re building, but because there are two