Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons^™

Effects Of Joint Trials On The Proportion Of Guilty Verdicts Assigned To Defendants, Stacy Lyn Gall

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

When two or more people are alleged to have committed a crime together they are automatically tried together in a joint trial. Defendants can apply to have a joint trial severed into separate trials, but they are rarely granted. However, joint trials might be biasing against defendants in that they might have a greater likelihood of obtaining aguilty verdict than if they had separate trials. A review of the literature indicated that authors have several hypotheses why joint trials might be biasing, though there is no conclusive evidence that this is the case. This study used a mock juror paradigm …