This research investigated the effects of jury racial composition and accused race on Canadian mock jurors’ decision-making. Jury-eligible participants (N=473), assigned to either all-White or racially-heterogenous juries (N=63 juries comprised of 4-12 members), watched a video of a simulated first-degree murder of a police officer trial in which the accused (portrayed by a White, Black, or Indigenous actor) claimed self-defence. They then deliberated until they reached a verdict or were considered hung (after 60 minutes).

Individual pre-deliberation verdict analyses demonstrated an interaction between racial composition and accused race, B=-1.16, p=.032, OR=.31, such that jurors assigned to all-White juries were more likely to convict a White accused than an Indigenous accused, χ^2(2)=7.47, p=.024, whereas there were no significant differences among jurors assigned to racially-heterogenous juries. Examinations of post-deliberation verdict distributions revealed that racially-heterogenous juries were more likely to hang, and to assign not guilty verdicts, than were all-White juries.

Delays in the justice system are common, sometimes due to witness actions or investigation complications. It is important to understand how a delay, and the reason for this delay, might impact a witness’ perceived credibility and legal decisions. We explored this question in two studies with mock jurors. Study 1 investigated how delay (immediate, delayed) and contextual information (none, witness related, investigation related) impacted perceived credibility and legal decisions. Study 2 explored how delay (immediate, delayed), contextual information (witness related, investigation related), and crime type (physical assault, sexual assault) impacted perceived credibility and legal decisions. In Study 1, the witness’ reluctance to report the event at any delay had the greatest impact on credibility. Study 2, the combination of delay, contextual information, and crime type had the potential to impact perceived credibility. Any delay impacted legal decisions, in favour of the accused. Implications will be discussed.

Psychological assessments are regularly used to aid judges’ legal decisions that materially change people’s lives. As such, their quality is critically important. While several studies have examined these issues within the U.S., there are fewer investigations in other countries. The current work focuses on psychologists’ assessment practices in Australia in particular, given the substantively different legal rules governing the admissibility of expert evidence in the U.S. and Australia (Edmond, 2011; Neal & Martire, 2022). We report findings from 122 recent forensic evaluations by 61 Australian psychologists. Most referrals were risk-assessment related (63.8%), and most relied on assessment tools (84.4%; M=2.06 per evaluation). A wide variety of tools were used (83 distinct tools, some uniquely Australian but many not), and very few batteries were consistent. The tools varied greatly in their scientific quality, as they do in the U.S. Our materials, data, and analytic code are posted on OSF (https://osf.io/d4qjg/?view_only=afc84e2d6d4e4a9796319a40a1b296c7).

People struggle to accurately estimate how frequently they encounter specific events or features, falling prey to various cognitive biases. Yet, in many forensic disciplines, expert examiners use their experience and training, rather than objective base rates, to determine how often features in evidence occur. For example, fingerprint examiners (FEs) often draw on their subjective sense of how rare different fingerprint features are (minutiae) and place more weight on minutiae they believe are rare. To examine the variability in perceived minutiae base rates between FEs and across time for the same FE, we surveyed expert FEs at two time points (N₁ = 132; N₂ = 99). As expected, FEs estimates varied most for moderately common minutiae and their estimates tended to increase over time and if they had recently seen rare minutiae. These data are used to make practical recommendations aimed at improving consistency in FEs use of rarity in casework.