Law and Psychology Commons^™

Variations In Moral Decision Making: In Morally Ambiguous Scenarios, Riley N. Eaton, Victoria Kempton, Edward Lansing, Troy R. Welker

Aurora

People are tasked with making decisions that often come with consequences, whether it be for someone else or themselves. Due to this, there is an ambiguity in understanding what is “right” and “wrong” in a given scenario. However, limited research has examined how interpersonal relationships and intensity of the punishment may affect this decision-making process. This study examines the effect of interpersonal closeness and punishment intensity on moral decision-making, defined in terms of fairness and empathy. Participants (N = 54) from a midwestern university were randomly assigned to one of three interpersonal closeness conditions (close friend vs. close friend, close …

Trial By Character, Hillel J. Bavli

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

In this Article, I argue that courts regularly deviate from Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b), which prohibits character evidence—evidence of a defendant’s past misdeeds offered to prove that the defendant acted in conformity with a certain character trait on the occasion in question. These deviations undermine the fairness of a trial and the presumption of innocence. The Article addresses this problem in three ways. First, it explains how courts have misinterpreted Rule 404(b)—an error that I call the permitted-purpose fallacy—and how they have fortified this misinterpretation with a body of flawed principles and precedent. Second, it reports the results of …

Rape Myth Acceptance, Pretrial Publicity, And Decision-Making: An Examination Of Perceptions Of Victim Credibility And Perpetrator Guilt In A Real-World Sexual Assault Case, Lindsey Strouse

Student Theses

This study explores how the media narratives and political perspective of pretrial publicity (PTP) can influence jurors’ perceptions in sexual assault cases, raising significant concerns about justice in courtrooms. Specifically, it examines whether media framing of a real-life sexual assault case — through varying media narratives, with media that either challenges or endorses rape myths, and media source (liberal vs. conservative) — affects mock jurors’ rape myth acceptance (RMA), views of victim credibility, and judgements of perpetrator guilt. Participants first completed a RMA scale, then read mock news articles varying in media narrative and political affiliations (media source), followed by …

Brain Injury And Psychosocial Trauma: Outcomes Among Justice-Involved Individuals, Mahathi D. Kosuri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Justice-involved individuals experience disproportionately high rates of both traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and psychosocial traumas. However, these traumas have yet to be conceptualized together, leaving a chasm of research on how they interact and influence this population. The current study was the first to measure the effects of TBIs as well as psychosocial trauma among justice-involved men, within the context of executive functioning, history of justice involvement, and recidivism. A sample of men (N=95) from a private correctional facility were given the Ohio State University Traumatic Brain Injury Questionnaire (OSU-TBI-ID), the Lifetime Stressor Checklist- Revised (LSC-R), along with …

Bargaining In The Shadow Of The Truth: How Client Assertion, Perception Of Guilt, And Predictive Inaccuracy Influence Plea Recommendations, Anna D. Vaynman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past few decades, the largely hidden, secretive, and widely used system of plea bargaining has caught the fervent attention of scholars. The Shadow of the Trial model has been central to much of the plea-bargaining literature, despite significant critiques about its oversimplification. The model posits that defendants and their attorneys make plea decisions based largely on the estimated probability of conviction and the severity of the sentence to which the defendant could be exposed at trial.

The model, however, assumes that all actors are rational, equally risk averse, have no competing interests, and possess high predictive accuracy. It …

Reformation Within The Nation: Adapting The Nordic Rehabilitation And Reintegration Model To Positively Recondition The United States Criminal Justice System, Jessica Cornell

Helm's School of Government Conference - 2021-2024

An analytical and statistical based comparison of criminal sentencing, incarceration, rehabilitation and reintegration in the United States of America to those of the five countries which follows those of the Nordic Criminal Justice System.

A Call To Dismantle Systemic Racism In Criminal Legal Systems, Cynthia J. Najdowski, Margaret C. Stevenson

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Objectives: In October 2021, APA passed a resolution addressing ways psychologists could work to dismantle systemic racism in criminal legal systems. The present report, developed to inform APA’s policy resolution, details the scope of the problem and offers recommendations for policy and psychologists to address the issue by advancing related science and practice. Specifically, it acknowledges the roots of modern-day racial and ethnic disparities in rates of criminalization and punishment for people of color as compared to White people. Next, the report reviews existing theory and research that helps explain the underlying psychological mechanisms driving racial and ethnic disparities …

Metaphysics & Morals In Canadian Criminal Justice: A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Conflict Between Neuroscience And Retributive Folk Psychology, Sarah Greenwood

LLM Theses

The retributive justification of Canadian criminal law contains several assumptions about human nature that conflicts with what neuroscience has established regarding human behavior and the function of rationality. Interdisciplinary discourse on this conflict between law and neuroscience has unnecessarily implicated the free will debate and is further stagnated by epistemic cultural differences between the two disciplines. To avoid these roadblocks, this thesis applies the methodological principles of pragmatic philosophy. Rather than asking which description of human nature is true, pragmatic inquiry focuses on the difference either would make in practice. This analysis reveals that retributive folk psychology in practice causes …

Recognizing The Need For Mental Health Reform In The Texas Department Of Criminal Justice, Kara Mchorse

St. Mary's Law Journal

The ways in which mental health care and the criminal justice system interact are in desperate need of reform in Texas. The rate of mental illness in Texas is higher than the current state of mental health care can provide for. While state hospitals were once the primary care facilities of those with mental illness, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) has taken on that role in the last few decades; and when the criminal justice system becomes entangled with mental health care, it often leads to “unmitigated disaster.” If Texas continues to allow the TDCJ to act as …

Tattoos And Criminal Behavior: An Examination Of The Relationship Between Body Art And Crime, Daniel D. Dajani

Student Theses

This thesis investigates the relationship between having tattoos and crime. A review of past research concerning tattoos, crime and other forms of deviancy demonstrates that a relationship exists to some extent. This thesis gathers new data concerning tattoos and crime and adds to the knowledge base by examining the alterations in the correlation and what may be causing said alterations. This thesis utilized the survey method and participants were recruited via a mix of in-person and online strategies. We aimed to garner participation from a varied group of respondents that would ensure data relevant to the study would be produced …

Implicit Bias In Daily Perceptions And Legal Judgments, Keith B. Maddox, Samuel R. Sommers

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In today’s demonstration, we explored the audience’s positive and negative associations with blacks and whites. The demonstration is an adaptation of the Implicit Association Test (www.projectimplicit.net), a computer-based task designed to explore mental connections between various concepts. Participants were presented with a list of concepts (stereotypically black and white names, pleasant and unpleasant concepts) in a column down the middle of a screen along with the response categories (black/white or Pleasant/Unpleasant) along the left and right sides. When reading a word, participants were asked to categorize it by slapping the knee (left or right) that corresponds to the category displayed …

People With Secrets: Contesting, Constructing, And Resisting Women’S Claims About Sexualized Victimization, Rose Corrigan, Corey S. Shdaimah

Catholic University Law Review

What do sexual assault victims and women charged with prostitution have in common? Both are processed through a criminal justice system where legal actors assess their claims of victimization and either provide or deny resources and recognition in response to those claims. Ideal victim theory posits that not all victims’ claims are treated equally due to static factors such as personal characteristics or case facts. Professor Corrigan and Professor Shdaimah present the Arena of Intelligibility, an original analytical tool developed from their empirical data, to more effectively explain case outcomes for women affected by sexual crimes.

The Arena explains criminal …

Free Will Is No Bargain: How Misunderstanding Human Behavior Negatively Influences Our Criminal Justice System, Sean Daly

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims ofintimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth. While the situation that gave rise to the battered womens movement in the 1970s is often presumed to …

Online Mental Disability Law Education, A Disability Rights Tribunal, And The Creation Of An Asian Disability Law Database: Their Impact On Research, Training And Teaching Of Law, Criminology Criminal Justice In Asia, Michael L. Perlin, Heather Ellis Cucolo, Yoshikazu Ikehara

Articles & Chapters

Two professors at New York Law School (NYLS) and the director of the Tokyo Advocacy Law Office are engaged in initiatives with the potential to have major influences on the study of law, criminology, and criminal justice: the creation of a Disability Rights Tribunal for Asia and the Pacific (DRTAP), and expansion of NYLS’s online mental disability law program (OMDLP) to include numerous Asian venues.

DRTAP seeks to create a sub-regional body (a Commission and eventually a Court) to hear violations of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This will explicitly inspire scholarship about issues such …

Introduction: Challenging The School-To-Prison Pipeline, Deborah N. Archer

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Simplify You, Classify You: Stigma, Stereotypes And Civil Rights In Disability Classification Systems, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

In this paper I consider the question of the extent to which sanism and pretextuality - the factors that contaminate all of mental disability law - do or do not equally contaminate the special education process, and the decision to label certain children as learning disabled. The thesis of this paper is that the process of labeling of children with intellectual disabilities implicates at least five conflicts and clusters of policy issues:

* The need to insure that all children receive adequate education

* The need to insure that the cure is not worse than the illness (that is, that …

Prisons Of The Mind: Social Value And Economic Inefficiency In The Criminal Justice Response To Mental Illness, Amanda C. Pustilnik

Faculty Scholarship

Can constructs of social meaning lead to actual criminal confinement? Can the intangible value ascribed to the maintenance of certain social norms lead to radically inefficient choices about resource allocation? The disproportionate criminal confinement of people with severe mental illnesses relative to non-mentally ill individuals suggests that social meanings related to mental illness can create legal and physical walls around this disfavored group. Responding to the non-violent mentally ill principally through the criminal system imposes at least 6 billion dollars in costs annually on the public, above any offsetting public safety and deterrence benefits, and imposes terrible human costs on …

Criminal Prosecution And Civil Remedies For Victims Of Sexual Offenses: Amendment Of The Rape Shield Law, Carol E. Jordan, Elizabeth S. Hughes, Mary Jo Gleason

Office for Policy Studies on Violence Against Women Publications

In 2003, the Kentucky Supreme Court adopted the amended KRS 412, effectively making the language of KRE 412 consistent with the analogous Federal Rule of Evidence 412. Now, as in federal court, the provisions of the Rape Shield Law apply in both criminal and civil cases to govern when and how evidence of a victim's alleged sexual behavior or sexual predisposition may be introduced. The article describes the intent of the original Rape Shield Law and the implications of its amended version in both civil and criminal cases.

Fundamental Retribution Error: Criminal Justice And The Social Psychology Of Blame, Donald A. Dripps

Vanderbilt Law Review

At least since the M'Naghten case of the 1840s,' Anglo- American criminal law has concerned itself closely, famously, and contentiously with the psychology of the accused. Another significant body of scholarship addresses the psychology of juries, and other valuable research has approached some of the rules of criminal evidence from the perspective of social and cognitive psychology. There has, however, yet to be a general investigation of what social cognition research might teach us about the criminal law's pervasive concern with blameworthiness.

This Article undertakes that investigation. It brings research on the psychology of social cognition to bear on the …

Stalking: Cultural, Clinical, And Legal Considerations, Carol E. Jordan, Karen Quinn, Bradley O. Jordan, Celia R. Daileader

Office for Policy Studies on Violence Against Women Publications

Crimes of violence against women are unique in their treatment by our culture and our system of legal justice. Both culturally and statutorily, victims of crimes which have historically been perpetrated against women, such as rape, domestic violence, and stalking have received significant focus. This article highlights cultural considerations and provides a statutory and case law analysis.

In Slime And Darkness: The Metaphor Of Filth In Criminal Justice, Martha Grace Duncan

Faculty Articles

An article such as this one, which seeks to examine the labyrinthine chains of meanings that we associate with illegal behavior, cries out for an interdisciplinary approach. Specifically, it demands a source that can reveal our unconscious as well as our conscious associations. Such a source is classical literature -- works of fiction that, by virtue of being read and loved through centuries and across continents, have proven their capacity to strike a responsive chord in their readers. Therefore, in Part II of this Article, I employ the classics, supplemented by occasional examples from contemporary fiction, history, and theology, to …

Psycholegal Research: Past And Present, Wallace D. Loh

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Psychology of Eyewitness Testimony by A. Daniel Yarmey, and Eyewitness Testimony by Elizabeth F. Loftus, and Social Psychology in Court by Michael J. Saks and Reid Hastie, and The Criminal Justice System and Its Psychology by Alfred Cohn and Roy Udolf

Sentencing: The Use Of Psychiatric Information And Presentence Reports, Rutheford B. Campbell Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

It has become apparent that the two disciplines of law and psychiatry have a common "interface" in the field of criminal justice. Commentators generally agree that the administration of criminal justice is greatly aided by psychiatrists and psychiatric data. That is not to say, however, that the meeting of the disciplines has been without incident or misunderstanding. Problems have arisen because of divergent attitudes and goals of the professions. Some commentators say that the concerns of the two disciplines are not the same; others claim that much of the problem lies in the over-estimation of the certainty and reliability of …