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Description: Pre-trial publicity may interfere with a defendant's Sixth Amendment right by producing bias in jury decisions. As such, it has been the focus of a plethora of experimental studies. The present research investigated the role of positive and negative pre-trial publicity containing information about the defendant's character. Participants viewed a photograph of a white businessman and read one of three sets of fictitious newspaper articles accusing him of murdering his wife. They then rated the defendant's guilt and recalled what they could about the trial. In the first study, negative pre-trial publicity about the defendant's character (e.g., greedy) was shown to increase ratings of guilt and to be associated with increased perceived guilt for an unrelated crime. Positive pre-trial publicity (e.g., generous) did not decrease ratings of guilt when compared to a neutral, crime-irrelevant condition. Negative factual information was recalled more often than positive information, and recall was greater in the negative pre-trial publicity condition. In a second study, the photograph of the defendant was of an African American businessman. In that study, positive pretrial publicity was shown to decrease ratings of guilt beyond that of the control condition. Negative facts were no more likely to be recalled than positive facts, and recall in the negative pre-trial condition was only marginally greater than in the positive pre-trial publicity condition. Differences in findings for the two races are interpreted with respect to aversive racism, stereotypes, and disfluency.
Suggested Citation:
Mannes, S. (2016). The impact of knowledge of defendant's
character present in pretrial publicity varies by defendant race. [Electronic Version]. Applied Psychology in Criminal Justice,
12(1), 36-53.
Keywords: pre-trial publicity, defendant character, race, disfluency
Date: May 17, 2016 | File Size: 1317.75 Kb | Downloads: 1514