Prof. Richard Kemp1
1UNSW Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Richard is a cognitive and forensic psychologist who works to apply research in the fields of 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 his research in collaboration with a variety of partner organisations and has provided expert evidence in a number of significant court cases in Australia. He has over 140 journal publications which have been cited more than 10,000 times.
Abstract:
A common assumption among legal professionals is that juries are “self-correcting” – if one member makes an error then this will be noticed and corrected by fellow jurors. In this way it is thought that the jury as a whole is capable of following complex directions and procedures that might defeat an individual lay person. If true this suggests that even if problems do occur during deliberation – such as a juror misremembering complex evidence, engaging in erroneous reasoning or undertaking their own research, then this can be remedied by jury as a whole. However, there is no evidence to support this assumption, and testing it requires experimental investigation of the jury deliberation process. Very few researchers have studied deliberation, with most psychology studies only measuring individual participant decisions without any attempt to model the deliberation process. We will describe a new experimental method designed to allow us to study the impact of events which occur during deliberation and thus to test questions such as whether juries are self-correcting.
We will present the results of three studies which test jury self-correction and chart the development of our novel simulated video-based deliberation methodology. Results suggest that although jurors do engage in some error-correction, this may not be sufficient to reverse the damage done by the introduction of the error.
Jury researchers need to model and investigate the deliberation process. Our new method shows how this can be done, and we find that assumptions about jury self-correction may not be fully justified.