The Simplification of Jury Instructions: Legal-Lay Interactions in Jury Trials

Jury Instructions on Witness Identification

Improving the Jury System: Reducing Jury Size

Within the last several years there has been increasing concern over the rising costs of California's legal system. Many within and outside of the legal community have focused their attention on the issues of caseload volume, delay and congestion within California courts as a result of the rising number of civil and criminal cases. These mounting concerns have spawned a growing movement for cou...

Enhancing fairness in DNA jury trials

Increasingly, a single forensic expert guides the jury through the DNA evidence; in five out of six DNA cases studied in New South Wales, this was the model (Findlay 2008). The presence of DNA evidence predicts convictions. Archival research revealed that juries were 23 times more likely to vote guilty in homicide cases and 33 times more likely to vote guilty in sexual assault cases when DNA ev...

Assessing the Readability of Capital Pattern Jury Instructions

FLEXIBLE CORRECTIONS OF JUROR JUDGMENTS Implications for Jury Instructions

The Flexible Correction Model (FCM, D. T. Wegener & R. E. Petty, 1997; D. T. Wegener, R. E. Petty, & M. Dunn, 1998) conceptualizes efforts at bias correction (i.e., attempts to remove influences that are perceived as illegitimate or unwanted) as guided by people's naive theories (perceptions) of the influences at work in that judgment setting. In this article, the authors present this model, di...