Defendant remorse is generally accepted as a mitigating factor in capital murder sentencing in the legal system. The current study addressed whether verbal and nonverbal expressions of defendant remorse are perceived as remorseful by mock jurors. Moreover, this study investigated the associations of defendant behaviors and mock juror need for affect on sentencing decisions. Participants watched...

Prior research has shown that within a racial category, people with more Afrocentric facial features are presumed more likely to have traits that are stereotypic of Black Americans compared with people with less Afrocentric features. The present study investigated whether this form of feature-based stereotyping might be observed in criminal-sentencing decisions. Analysis of a random sample of i...

In this study, we examined how manipulations of likeability and knowledge affected mock jurors' perceptions of female and male expert witness credibility (n = 290). Our findings extend the person-perception literature by demonstrating how warmth and competence overlap with existing conceptions of likeability and knowledge in the psycholegal domain. We found that experts high in likeability, kno...

We examined blame attribution as a moderator of perceptions of hate crimes against gay, African American, and transgender victims. Participants were 510 Texas jury panel members. Results of vignette-based crime scenarios showed that victim blame displayed significant negative, and perpetrator blame significant positive, effects on sentencing recommendations. Also as hypothesized, victim and per...

During the last two years, several major developments in federal sentencing have taken place. It all started in June 2000 with Apprendi v. New Jersey, in which Justice O’Connor, in dissent, termed a “watershed in constitutional law.” Prior to Apprendi, a judge would sentence a convicted drug trafficker to imprisonment using the preponderance standard of proof on the quantities of drugs seized. ...

A current commercial web-based JDSS in New York State criminal law assists hundreds of judges statewide with questions of sentencing, lesser included offenses, plea bargaining and statutory interpretation. Maintenance of this system’s rule base with respect to sentencing has revealed instances where interactions between statutes imply conflicting rules. Resolution of such conflicts requires a v...