Quantifying the effects of pretrial publicity on jurors' judgments

The present study explored two main questions: Can jurors disregard pretrial publicity? And if jurors cannot disregard pretrial publicity, to what extent does it affect juror decision making? Participants (49 male and 71 female) listened to an audiotaped trial and were assigned to one of four conditions: They were either exposed to the critical evidence as PTP (PTP condition), as an admissible videotape (Video condition), as descriptive testimony given by a witness (Discussion condition), or they were not exposed to the critical evidence (Control condition). After hearing the audiotaped trial, participants were then asked to render a verdict in the case (guilty v. not guilty) on three different charges, rate their confidence in their verdicts, rate the probability of the defendant's guilt on each charge, make sentence recommendations, rate their confidence in their sentence recommendations, and report their attitudes about the defendant's character. Verdicts, sentence recommendations, and confidence judgments were not affected by pretrial publicity. However, results suggested that pretrial publicity may have an impact when judging the defendant's personality characteristics.