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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Political Motive And Bail: The Effect Of Prosecutorial Strategies On Pretrial Decisions In Federal Terrorism Trials, Michael John Clanton Dec 2013

Political Motive And Bail: The Effect Of Prosecutorial Strategies On Pretrial Decisions In Federal Terrorism Trials, Michael John Clanton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to understand how prosecutorial strategies affect pretrial decisions in U.S. terrorism trials and how pretrial decisions in turn affect the disposition of those trials. This research builds off of the work of Smith and Damphousse (1996) which compared terrorism indictees to traditional federal offenders. They found that the use of explicit politicality as a prosecution strategy was a significant predictor of both disposition and the sentence length in terrorism trials. This study focuses on the question of whether the use of an explicitly political prosecution strategy impacts pretrial decisions in terrorism cases and whether …


Theoretical Underpinnings Of Jury Decision Making In Excuse Defense Cases, Christopher Sean Peters May 2013

Theoretical Underpinnings Of Jury Decision Making In Excuse Defense Cases, Christopher Sean Peters

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the typical criminal trial, a defendant is trying to prove he/she is not guilty because they were not the individual that committed the crime. However, another type of defense exists in which the defendant admits they were the culprit, but provides an excuse in an attempt to avoid criminal punishment. These so called "excuse defenses" include insanity, involuntary intoxication, age, and entrapment. In all cases, juries are required to determine whether the defendant had sufficient mental capacity to form the intent to commit the crime. Although jury decision making is a popular research area in psychology, relatively little has …