Prof. Richard Kemp1, Professor Jill Hunter1, Chelsi Williams1
1UNSW, Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Richard Kemp is an applied cognitive and Forensic Psychologist who seeks to apply cognitive science research to aspects of the legal system. Current research interests include jury decision making, the wellbeing of judicial officers, forensic science, identification evidence and eyewitness interviewing.
Abstract:
Trial by jury is a defining feature of Australian criminal justice and is the default method of determining guilt or otherwise in the prosecution of serious (indictable) offences. Jury decision making is an inherently collaborative process in which jurors, who possess no legal qualifications, navigate the law as provided to them by the trial judge, and discuss and weigh evidence before collectively reaching a verdict. However, despite decades of psychology research, we know almost nothing about what happens in the jury room. Most psychological research on jury decision making investigates decisions reached by individual mock-jurors, with few studies modelling deliberation and even fewer applying experimental methods to explore this process. This is a significant limitation because legal notions about the benefit of the jury system posit that deliberation by the members of the jury helps to trap and correct reasoning errors made by individual jurors. We present a direct test of the idea that juries are self-correcting, by testing the notion that the jury collectively can follow complex legal instructions which may defeat individual jurors. Our findings demonstrate mixed evidence in support of this idea and illustrate the need for further experimental research to investigate the processes that occur inside a deliberating jury.