Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Reconciling Experimental Incoherence With Real-World Coherence In Punitive Damages, Theodore Eisenberg, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Martin T. Wells

Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Experimental evidence generated in controlled laboratory studies suggests that the legal system in general, and punitive damages awards in particular, should display an incoherent pattern. According to the prediction, inexperienced decisionmakers, such as juries, should fail to convert their qualitative judgments of defendants' conduct into consistent, meaningful dollar amounts. This Article tests this prediction and finds modest support for the thesis that experience across different types of cases will lead to greater consistency in awards. Despite this support, numerous studies of damage awards in real cases detect a generally sensible pattern of damage awards. This Article tries to reconcile the …

Implicit Racial Attitudes Of Death Penalty Lawyers, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Sheri Lynn Johnson

Defense attorneys commonly suspect that the defendant's race plays a role in prosecutors' decisions to seek the death penalty, especially when the victim of the crime was white. When the defendant is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death, it is equally common for such attorneys to question the racial attitudes of the jury. These suspicions are not merely partisan conjectures; ample historical, statistical, and anecdotal evidence supports the inference that race matters in capital cases. Even the General Accounting Office of the United States concludes as much. Despite McCleskey v. Kemp, in which the United States Supreme Court …

The Effects Of Intent: Do We Know How Legal Standards Work?, Theodore Eisenberg, Sheri Lynn Johnson

Sheri Lynn Johnson

No one knows how the intent standard works in racial discrimination cases, though many have speculated. To test the speculation, this study examines how the intent standard actually operates. Its findings cast doubt on whether we really know how any legal standard functions.

Probing "Life Qualification" Through Expanded Voir Dire, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson, A. Brian Threlkeld

Sheri Lynn Johnson

The conventional wisdom is that most trials are won or lost in jury selection. If this is true, then in many capital cases, jury selection is literally a matter of life or death. Given these high stakes and Supreme Court case law setting out standards for voir dire in capital cases, one might expect a sophisticated and thoughtful process in which each side carefully considers which jurors would be best in the particular case. Instead, it turns out that voir dire in capital cases is woefully ineffective at the most elementary task--weeding out unqualified jurors. Empirical evidence reveals that many …

Expert Testimony In Capital Sentencing: Juror Responses, John H. Montgomery, J. Richard Ciccone, Stephen P. Garvey, Theodore Eisenberg

Stephen P. Garvey

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Furman v. Georgia (1972), held that the death penalty is constitutional only when applied on an individualized basis. The resultant changes in the laws in death penalty states fostered the involvement of psychiatric and psychologic expert witnesses at the sentencing phase of the trial, to testify on two major issues: (1) the mitigating factor of a defendant’s abnormal mental state and (2) the aggravating factor of a defendant’s potential for future violence. This study was an exploration of the responses of capital jurors to psychiatric/psychologic expert testimony during capital sentencing. The Capital Jury Project is …

The Emotional Economy Of Capital Sentencing, Stephen P. Garvey

Stephen P. Garvey

You often hear that one reason capital jurors condemn capital defendants is that jurors don't empathize with defendants. And one reason they don't empathize is that the process of capital sentencing is rigged against empathy. Using data from the South Carolina segment of the Capital Jury Project, I try to examine the role emotion plays in capital sentencing. Without entering here all the important and necessary caveats, I find that the self-reported emotional responses jurors have toward capital defendants run the gamut from sympathy and pity at one extreme, to disgust, anger, and fear at the other. What causes these …

But Was He Sorry? The Role Of Remorse In Capital Sentencing, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells

Stephen P. Garvey

What role does remorse really play in capital sentencing? We divide this basic question in two. First, what makes jurors come to believe a defendant is remorseful? Second, does a belief in the defendant's remorse affect the jury's final judgment of life or death? Here we present a systematic, empirical analysis that tries to answer these questions. What makes jurors think a defendant is remorseful? Among other things, we find that the more jurors think that the crime is coldblooded, calculated, and depraved and that the defendant is dangerous, the less likely they are to think the defendant is remorseful. …

Jury Responsibility In Capital Sentencing: An Empirical Study, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells

Stephen P. Garvey

The law allows executioners to deny responsibility for what they have done by making it possible for them to believe they have not done it. The law treats members of capital sentencing juries quite differently. It seeks to ensure that they feel responsible for sentencing a defendant to death. This differential treatment rests on a presumed link between a capital sentencer's willingness to accept responsibility for the sentence she imposes and the accuracy and reliability of that sentence. Using interviews of 153 jurors who sat in South Carolina capital cases, this article examines empirically whether capital sentencing jurors assume responsibility …

Forecasting Life And Death: Juror Race, Religion, And Attitude Toward The Death Penalty, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells

Stephen P. Garvey

Determining whether race, sex, or other juror characteristics influence how capital case jurors vote is difficult. Jurors tend to vote for death in more egregious cases and for life in less egregious cases no matter what their own characteristics. And a juror's personal characteristics may get lost in the process of deliberation because the final verdict reflects the jury's will, not the individual juror's. Controlling for the facts likely to influence a juror's verdict helps to isolate the influence of a juror's personal characteristics. Examining each juror's first sentencing vote reveals her own judgment before the majority works its will. …

Virginia's Capital Jurors, Stephen P. Garvey, Paul Marcus

Stephen P. Garvey

Next to Texas, no state has executed more capital defendants than Virginia. Moreover, the likelihood of a death sentence actually being carried out is greater in Virginia than it is elsewhere, while the length of time between the imposition of a death sentence and its actual execution is shorter. Virginia has thus earned a reputation among members of the defense bar as being among the worst of the death penalty states. Yet insofar as these facts about Virginia's death penalty relate primarily to the behavior of state and federal appellate courts, they suggest that what makes Virginia's death penalty unique …

The Merciful Capital Juror, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey

Stephen P. Garvey

We examine the role of mercy in capital sentencing along three dimensions. We first explain why mercy is a philosophically problematic virtue, and second, why it presently holds an ambiguous status within constitutional doctrine. Finally, we draw on interviews with jurors who served on capital cases in order better to understand how the behavior of merciful jurors compares to the behavior of their less merciful counterparts. Among other things, we find that merciful jurors tend to be better educated and to attend religious services regularly. We also find that merciful jurors are, as one might reasonably expect, more apt to …

The Deadly Paradox Of Capital Jurors, Theodore Eisenberg, Stephen P. Garvey, Martin T. Wells

Stephen P. Garvey

We examine support for the death penalty among a unique group of respondents: one hundred and eighty-seven citizens who actually served as jurors on capital trials in South Carolina. Capital jurors support the death penalty as much as, if not more than, members of the general public. Yet capital jurors, like poll respondents, harbor doubts about the penalty's fairness. Moreover, jurors--black jurors and Southern Baptists in particular--are ready to abandon their support for the death penalty when the alternative to death is life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, especially when combined with a requirement of restitution. Support for the …

Xenophilia In American Courts, Kevin M. Clermont, Theodore Eisenberg

Kevin M. Clermont

Foreigner! The word says it all. Verging on the politically incorrect, the expression is full of connotation and implication. A foreigner will face bias. By such a thought process, many people believe that litigants have much to fear in courts foreign to them. In particular, non-Americans fare badly in American courts. Foreigners believe this. Even Americans believe this. Such views about American courts are understandable. After all, the grant of alienage jurisdiction to the federal courts, both original and removal, constitutes an official assumption that xenophobic bias is present in state courts. As James Madison said of state courts: “We …

Courts In Cyberspace, Theodore Eisenberg, Kevin M. Clermont

Kevin M. Clermont

No abstract provided.

Trial By Jury Or Judge: Transcending Empiricism, Kevin M. Clermont, Theodore Eisenberg

Kevin M. Clermont

Pity the civil jury, seen by some as the sickest organ of a sick system. Yet the jury has always been controversial. One might suppose that, with so much at stake for so long, we would all know a lot about the ways juries differ from judges in their behavior. In fact, we know remarkably little. This Article provides the first large-scale comparison of plaintiff win rates and recoveries in civil cases tried before juries and judges. In two of the most controversial areas of modern tort law--product liability and medical malpractice--the win rates substantially differ from other cases' win …

Explaining Death Row's Population And Racial Composition, John H. Blume, Theodore Eisenberg, Martin T. Wells

John H. Blume

Twenty-three years of murder and death sentence data show how murder demographics help explain death row populations. Nevada and Oklahoma are the most death-prone states; Texas's death sentence rate is below the national mean. Accounting for the race of murderers establishes that black representation on death row is lower than black representation in the population of murder offenders. This disproportion results from reluctance to seek or impose death in black defendant-black victim cases, which more than offsets eagerness to seek and impose death in black defendant-white victim cases. Death sentence rates in black defendant-white victim cases far exceed those in …

Probing "Life Qualification" Through Expanded Voir Dire, John H. Blume, Sheri Lynn Johnson, A. Brian Threlkeld

John H. Blume

The conventional wisdom is that most trials are won or lost in jury selection. If this is true, then in many capital cases, jury selection is literally a matter of life or death. Given these high stakes and Supreme Court case law setting out standards for voir dire in capital cases, one might expect a sophisticated and thoughtful process in which each side carefully considers which jurors would be best in the particular case. Instead, it turns out that voir dire in capital cases is woefully ineffective at the most elementary task--weeding out unqualified jurors. Empirical evidence reveals that many …

欠測値補定の診断手法としての多重代入法(高橋将宜), Masayoshi Takahashi

Masayoshi Takahashi

No abstract provided.

Depicting Estimates Using The Intercept In Meta-Regression Models: The Moving Constant Technique, Blair T. Johnson Dr., Tania B. Huedo-Medina Dr.

Blair T. Johnson

In any scientific discipline, the ability to portray research patterns graphically often aids greatly in interpreting a phenomenon. In part to depict phenomena, the statistics and capabilities of meta-analytic models have grown increasingly sophisticated. Accordingly, this article details how to move the constant in weighted meta-analysis regression models (viz. “meta-regression”) to illuminate the patterns in such models across a range of complexities. Although it is commonly ignored in practice, the constant (or intercept) in such models can be indispensible when it is not relegated to its usual static role. The moving constant technique makes possible estimates and confidence intervals at …

Meta-Analysis Of Type I Error Rates For Detecting Differential Item Functioning With Logistic Regression And Mantel-Haenszel In Monte Carlo Studies, Eva Van De Water Ph. D.

Eva Van De Water

Differential item functioning (DIF) occurs when individuals from different groups who have equal levels of a latent trait fail to earn commensurate scores on a testing instrument. Type I error occurs when DIF-detection methods result in unbiased items being excluded from the test while a Type II error occurs when biased items remain on the test after DIF-detection methods have been employed. Both errors create potential issues of injustice amongst examinees and can result in costly and protracted legal action. The purpose of this research was to evaluate two methods for detecting DIF: logistic regression (LR) and Mantel-Haenszel (MH).

To …

A General Framework For Infrastructure System Reliability Modelling And Analysis, Payam Mokhtarian, Mohammad-Reza Namazi-Rad, Tin Kin Ho, Mahmoud Efatmaneshnik

Payam Mokhtarian

An infrastructure system is inherently complex, with layers of both explicitly defined and hidden or subtle interfaces with other infrastructure systems and human users. High availability is desired, which implies stringent requirements on reliability and safety. Reliability analysis typically starts at component or sub-system level and aggregates through the system functional hierarchy. Because of the system complexity, incorporating occurrences of all possible interactions and scenarios is not always practical and failure data is often limited. Moreover, there are unobserved events among the sub-systems distributing either randomly or with temporal trend. To facilitate reliability analysis amid the complex environment and uncertain …

From Amazon To Apple: Modeling Online Retail Sales, Purchase Incidence And Visit Behavior, Anastasios Panagiotelis, Michael S. Smith, Peter Danaher

Michael Stanley Smith

In this study we propose a multivariate stochastic model for website visit duration, page views, purchase incidence and the sale amount for online retailers. The model is constructed by composition from carefully selected distributions, and involves copula components. It allows for the strong nonlinear relationships between the sales and visit variables to be explored in detail, and can be used to construct sales predictions. The model is readily estimated using maximum likelihood, making it an attractive choice in practice given the large sample sizes that are commonplace in online retail studies. We examine a number of top-ranked U.S. online retailers, …

Spectral Density Shrinkage For High-Dimensional Time Series, Mark Fiecas, Rainer Von Sachs

Mark Fiecas

The Cobden-Chevalier Effect: Evaluating The Causal Effect Of The Most Favoured Nation Clause In Presence Of Network Interdependence, Luca De Benedictis, Silvia Nenci

Luca De Benedictis