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Full-Text Articles in Social Justice
Examining The Role Of Evidence-Based Suspicion In Racial Disparities In Wrongful Convictions, Jacqueline Katzman
Examining The Role Of Evidence-Based Suspicion In Racial Disparities In Wrongful Convictions, Jacqueline Katzman
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
There are clear racial disparities in the rates of wrongful convictions, with Black exonerees disproportionately represented among the population of those exonerated, in DNA and non-DNA exonerations alike (National Registry of Exonerations, 2022; Innocence Project, 2022). This racial disparity also exists for those exonerees who were wrongfully convicted, at least in part, because an eyewitness mistakenly identified them. For decades, when eyewitness scholars explored racial bias, they focused on the cross-race effect or own-race bias among eyewitnesses, a bias positing that witness performance suffers when a witness is asked to make an identification of a cross-race face (Lee & Penrod, …
The Influence Of Prosecutorial Overcharging On Defendant And Defense Attorney Plea Decision Making: Documenting And Debiasing The Anchoring Effect, Stephanie Aurora Cardenas
The Influence Of Prosecutorial Overcharging On Defendant And Defense Attorney Plea Decision Making: Documenting And Debiasing The Anchoring Effect, Stephanie Aurora Cardenas
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Strategic overcharging, a practice that some prosecutors readily employ to threaten defendants with excessively severe sentences, undermines the Sixth Amendment right to trial by coercing defendants to plead guilty rather than face penalties disproportionate to their alleged misconduct. Legal scholars and psychologists have long suggested that strategic overcharging may elicit powerful anchoring effects that bias defendants’, but not attorneys’ evaluations, of the plea offer. The current research sought to examine (a) the extent to which mock defendants and legal professionals were susceptible to the anchoring bias, (b) elucidate the mechanism underlying susceptibility to the anchoring effect in plea contexts, and …