Dr Thea Gumbert1
1UNSW/CSU, Australia
Biography:
Dr Thea Gumbert is a practising psychologist, medico-legal report writer and expert witness in criminal trials in NSW. She has extensive experience working with perpetrators and survivors of sexual violence. She completed an interdisciplinary Doctor of Philosophy through the UNSW School of Law and the Charles Sturt University School of Psychology, examining how jurors understand and utilise evidence in sexual assault trials, and their application of burden of proof instructions.
A range of prevalent legal misconceptions can exert influence upon jury decision making, promoting a double-edged risk of miscarriages of justice via both unsafe convictions and unjustified acquittals. These issues may be particularly salient in cases of sexual offences, in which jurors may hold firm beliefs about the availability and conclusiveness of medical and forensic evidence, which are often at odds with the limited or ambiguous evidence they may face. Quantitative and qualitative findings are presented from a series of doctoral research studies, in which mock-jurors exhibited profound misunderstandings about the law, and inaccurate applications of legal standards and judicial instructions, which informed both convictions and acquittals in a sexual assault trial. Areas of misconception included inconsistent and legally-incorrect interpretations of the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard, application of the “silence penalty” and reversing onus of proof for defendants who do not testify, misgivings about reliance on oral testimony of complainants, and incorrectly interpreting certain features of evidence as proxies for reasonable doubt. Implications are discussed for criminal trials, with recommendations for further research and potential law reform.