Legal Psych Exam 2

The group of prospective jurors is referred to as _____, and the process of questioning these people to determine who among them will serve on the jury is called _____.

Venire; voir dire

Cognizable refers to potential jurors being:

Acknowledged as sharing a particular characteristic setting them apart from other jurors

Luca has worked in a prison for 15 years and has been called to jury duty. He is to serve on a criminal case involving the shooting of a guard during a prison riot. Based on the definition of challenge for cause, Beau would be:

An unlikely juror

Bathsheba is a trial consultant hired to assemble a shadow jury in a high-stakes trial. She may ask the shadow jury to perform all of the following tasks EXCEPT:

Observe actual jurors in the deliberation room

A total of 24 White persons and six Black persons are called for jury duty. The trial is for armed robbery, the defendant is Black, and the prosecuting attorney uses peremptory challenges given to him to exclude six Blacks. What should the judge do, according to Supreme Court decisions?

Ask the prosecuting attorney to explain the grounds for each of his six decisions and determine if the attorney had grounds other than race

Among the traits noted as being associated with jurors' verdicts is how people tend to explain what happens to them, or how they answer the question: Are you mostly responsible for what happens to you? This trait is referred to as:

Locus of control

Certain characteristics of the defendant are often considered by jurors. For example, Beau is a known thug and gang member. He was on trial for the death of a priest that he ran over while evading police. In this case, it is likely that Beau will receive a verdict that would be _____ if he had killed a fellow gang member.

More harsh than

In the construction of memory, it is not uncommon to find that distortion may take place as we try to retrieve that memory. The following is NOT TRUE about this process:

Various sounds encoded when processing a memory are easy to retrieve

When jurors change their votes under the pressure from other jurors, even though they did not change their minds, this phenomenon is also referred to as:

Normative influence

The Manson criteria, emphasized by courts, consist of five factors to be taken into account when evaluating eyewitness identification accuracy. The following factor was clearly disproven by research:

The level of confidence the witness is exhibiting about their memory of the event

Mosser and Evans (2019) reported

The cognitive interview and the control interview performed similarly when a cognitive impairment task was performed

Bias-reducing instructions are used to assist eyewitnesses to be accurate in their identification of a suspect. An example of such instructions is telling the eyewitness that:

"the true criminal might not be in the lineup or photo spread"

Richards et al. (2015) reported empirical evidence for the "domestic discount" in capital cases.

False

Wade et al. (2010) reported that ____ -video participants were more likely to sign a statement than _________video and __________ participants.

See; told; control

Latoya has been going through an emotionally tough time after the separation from her long-term partner, and her psychotherapist suggested some hypnotic sessions. During these sessions Latoya has started vaguely recalling being fondled by her father as a baby while he was giving her baths. Memories of this type are referred to as:

Recovered memories

Patihis et al. (2014) reported strong agreement between clinical practitioners and the research scientists in regard to memory beliefs.

False

Lapses of attention are most likely to affect which stage of the process of memory work?

Encoding

We should be especially skeptical of allegedly recovered memories in the following cases, EXCEPT:

Memories of abuse came back as flashes of particular incidents

The repression hypothesis posits that traumatic memories can be maintained in the _____ for years, and the use of _____ techniques may be helpful in uncovering them.

Unconscious; relaxation and visualization

Negative pretrial publicity makes jurors more likely to see the defendant as _____. When studies assessed if the judge's instructions to disregard the negative publicity make a difference, they found that such instructions _____.

Guilty; do not remedy the situation

What is usually called jury _____ is actually a process of _____.

Selection; eliminating candidates from the jury pool

Even though the _____ is the best predictor of what kind of verdict the jury reaches in a case, different jurors evaluate and interpret the same evidence _____.

Strength of evidence; differently

According to Thompson et al. (2020), there was no difference between support of the death penalty prior to sentencing of the Boston Marathon Bomber and post sentencing the Boston Marathon Bomber among participants.

False

It turns out that the jury nullification option is a double-edged sword. Studies have showed that the nullification instructions allow juries to treat _____ offenders more leniently and _____ offenders more harshly.

Sympathetic; unsympathetic

A defendant is deemed "guilty" or "not guilty" during _____ of a capital murder trial.

Phase one

In Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008), the Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty should not be applied to rapists, even to child rapists, unless:

The victim died

Mistakes in the identification process typically occur

Both at the moment a crime is committed and during the investigation of a crime

A robbery occurs at a liquor store. The clerk identifies the defendant in a police lineup. The defendant claims he had been in the store earlier to get change, but had not robbed the store. If the defendant is telling the truth, the clerk's identification would reflect

Unconscious transference

The cognitive interview would not involve

Hypnotizing the victim

Last night Akina was robbed at gunpoint. When asked to describe the perpetrator, she found that all she could remember was the gun and not the way the perpetrator looked. Which of the best following describes this circumstance?

Weapon focus event

Lulu was the sole witness to a crime. After witnessing the crime, she talked with her husband and her co-workers about what she saw. These discussions potentially can taint her memory of the crime event for it can

Introduce post-event information that may alter her memory for the original event

A line-up procedure in which the police officers administrating the line-up and the eyewitness making the identification are both unaware of the potential suspect would reflect

A double-blind procedure

Six-year-old Corey is a witness to a crime, and he has been asked to view a lineup. Unfortunately, the true perpetrator is not in the lineup. Researchers would predict that Corey, as compared to adults,

Would be more likely to make a false positive error

Thomas is the victim of a crime, and he has been called down to the police station to view a lineup. After some thought, he chooses the fourth person from the left. The detective administering the lineup says, "Good, we thought that was the one." What is likely the result of this confirming feedback?

Thomas feels more comfortable about his identification

Thirty year old Lucia was in a study in which she was asked questions about the abuse she suffered when she was a very young child (this abuse was well documented by medical reports that Lucia has not seen). Lucia insists that she did not experience abuse. Which of the following could explain why Lucia is not reporting this well-documented abuse?

All of these responses are possibilities

Kaden is viewing a lineup with simultaneous presentation. He had told police that the person he saw commit the crime is white with light color hair. When presented with six white people in his lineup, he chooses the person who has the lightest color hair in the group. How would we best characterize this judgment?

It is a relative judgement

April displays conventional values, with relatively inflexible viewpoints, generally identifying with authority figures and finding weakness to be intolerable. One might consider her personality to be that of:

Being authoritarian

The judge has assembled a group of prospective jurors and is asking them to raise their hand if the answer is "yes" to the following question. She asks, "Do any of you have an opinion at this time as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant?" The judge sees that no one has raised a hand, so she accepts all as jurors. Did the judge make a good decision?

The judge did not make a good decision as asking yes/no questions is not a good way to uncover jurors' biases

Salerno et al. (2015) assert the use of the gay-panic provocation defense significantly influenced verdicts among all participants.

False

Jury nullification acknowledges that while the public trusts jurors to resolve the facts and apply the law in a given case, they also expect them to _______

Represent the conscience of the community

Malia is a prospective juror in a case in which there has been a lot of pre-trial publicity. Malia maintains that despite the fact that she has heard of the defendant and is aware of some of the negative publicity, she will be impartial. Should Malia be believed and chosen as a juror?

No, people do not always recognize the extent of their biases, or they may not be willing to admit them

Chandler is a prospective juror who is currently undergoing voir dire. The defense attorney asks them, "What experiences have you had in your life that caused you to believe that a person was being discriminated against because of the color of their skin?" What kind of question is this?

An open-ended question

What have researchers found regarding jurors' abilities to understand the judge's instructions?

Many jurors are unable to understand the judge's instructions

Espinoza et al. reported higher _________verdicts for low SES undocumented Mexican defendants compared to counterparts

Guilty

According textbook readings, which of the following would be most likely to yield guilty verdicts from jurors?

Prosecution evidence presented in story order and defense evidence presented in witness order

Daryl Atkins was convicted of abducting and killing a male in Virginia and was sentenced to death. He successfully appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute the mentally disabled. Which of the following is the best statement of the outcome of this case?

A jury determined that he was mentally disabled, and he was sentenced to life in prison

A jury must decide whether a defendant, already judged guilty, should receive the death penalty. The defendant raped, murdered, and then mutilated the victim. This fact could argue for the application of the death penalty. This is an example of a(n) _______________ factor.

Aggravating

During jury selection in cases in which the prosecutor seeks a death penalty, prospective jurors are required to answer questions about their attitudes toward capital punishment. This procedure is called _______.

Death qualification

Jayden, Jamal, and Dwayne, all Black males, committed crimes that are surprisingly similar. Jayden murdered a Black female, a 40-year-old administrator on a suburban college campus. Jamal murdered a White female, a 22-year-old student on a city college campus. Dwayne murdered a Black female, a 36-year-old professor on a city college campus. Given these details, who is more likely to be sentenced to death?

Jamal

According to the lecture materials, the U.S. federal government and 40 U.S. states allow the use of the death penalty as a form of punishment.

False