Abstract
Defendants often provide accounts that minimize their responsibility for the accused offense. Jurors attribute responsibility to defendants and decide legal outcomes based on the given account. The current research examined the effects of accounts (i.e., excuse, justification, denial, and no explanation) and the defendant’s remorse display (i.e., remorseful, remorseless) on mock jurors’ judgments. Participants acquitted the defendant in the denial condition most often and recommended the most lenient punishment in the justification condition. The remorseful defendant was found guilty more frequently than the remorseless defendant in the no explanation and (marginally) excuse conditions. Limitations and future research are discussed.
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Notes
While a true control condition (i.e., no account) would be ideal, it would not be realistic to have a defendant who testified but gave no account whatsoever. However, to come as close to a “no account” control condition as possible, we created a condition in which the defendant says he did not kill the victim but offers no explanation.
We also ran a series of ordinal regression analyses, but, because the most extreme verdict was rarely chosen, we were forced to collapse the “second degree murder” and “voluntary manslaughter” categories to be able to model interaction effects. Results from these analyses on a three-category ordinal variable were essentially the same as the ones obtained with logical regression for a dichotomous guilty–not guilty variable.
The believability data summarized in Table 3 refer to the perceived believability of the defendant. Note that this variable is distinct from the previously analyzed perceived believability of the defendant’s account, though the two variables are correlated, r = .68, p < .001.
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Jehle, A., Miller, M.K. & Kemmelmeier, M. The Influence of Accounts and Remorse on Mock Jurors’ Judgments of Offenders. Law Hum Behav 33, 393–404 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-008-9164-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-008-9164-6