Mock Juror Essay

Even though race salience in an influential variable for juror and racial bias, it seems unclear on how jurors prejudges the defendants to actually determine the sentencing and the verdict. The next article discusses on how pretrial information can make a huge difference in a mock juror’s sentencing. However, depending on the pretrial restrictions on the media, the pretrial publicity (PTP) may reach potential jurors, which may affect the jurors’ ability to objectively assess the evidence in the trial and to make an informed verdict. Hope et al. (2004) tested four hypotheses related to prejudicial trial publicity. Hope, Memon and McGeorge (2004) hypothesized that mock jurors that were exposed to negative PTP would cause an elevated rate in guilty verdicts. Hope et. al also hypothesized that exposure to PTP would cause an increase in distortion of a proper verdict as a result of increased
(2004) results showed that participants in the N-PTP condition had more guilty verdicts than those in the control condition. There was not any significant difference of confidence rating between the participants of N-PTP condition and the control condition. Distortion scores and prosecution bias were higher with the N-PTP participants than the control participants. With the juror appraisals of the defendant, N-PTP participants rated the defendant more negatively than the participants in the control group. Yet, with the in-trial evaluation task, there were not any significant differences between the participants in the N-PTP condition and participants in the control condition. The results suggest that the role of order effects dealing with the presentation of evidence can cause negative PTP and distortion for jurors. Exposure to negative PTP makes it difficult for jurors consider evidence occurring later in a trial. Hope et al. suggest that presenting evidence to jurors in a simultaneous and less sequential order may cease bias associated with pretrial