Prof. Richard Kemp1
1UNSW Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Richard is a cognitive and forensic psychologist who works to apply research in human memory and perception to aspects of the legal system. His research interests include, face recognition, identity verification, eyewitness memory, police interviewing, jury decision making, forensic science evidence, forensic mental health and judicial wellbeing. Richard has undertaken research in collaboration with a variety of partner organisations, including police and government agencies and banks and financial service providers. He has provided expert evidence in a number of significant court cases. He has been awarded over $6 million in research funding and has over 140 journal publications.
Abstract:
We present four papers drawn from Law and Experimental Psychology which explore what we know, what we don’t know and what we need to know about jury decision making.
Juries are an important component of many justice systems that help preserve public confidence in the law. However, jurors have no legal training and are required to make life-changing decisions while working in the context of complex legal rules and unfamiliar procedures.
In this symposium we explore how experimental psychologists have responded to the need for research to inform the development of evidence-based policies to support jury decision making, and how the emergence of this research might present challenges for the legal system.
The first paper describes how the legal system places blind faith in the ability of juries to follow complex instructions, and asks how the law should respond to the results of psychological research which tests these assumptions and lifts the lid on jury deliberation. This is followed by three presentations from the psychological sciences. The first of these employs a novel technique that allows experimental manipulation of jury deliberation to test whether juries can self-correct and recover from errors. The next paper presents research investigating how misinformation about sexual violence impacts juror memory and decision-making, and whether judicial directions can mitigate these effects. The final paper explores whether special provisions to support vulnerable witnesses such as the use of a canine companion, may have unexpected impacts on jurors’ evaluations of the witness’s evidence.