Skip to main content

What's coming up?

2018-02-19 - A chat about confession evidence
2018-02-26 - Alibis

Popular posts from this blog

We find the defendant....

"We find the defendant...innocent!  [whisper]  I mean, not guilty!" If you’ve ever heard the jury foreman give a jury’s decision, you’ll notice that they never say the defendant is “innocent.” Instead, they’ll conclude that the defendant is “not guilty.” Although the terms may sound interchangeable, “not guilty” and “innocent” actually mean two different things. “Not guilty” is a legal conclusion, whereas “innocent” means the person didn’t commit the crime. For example, think of O.J. Simpson. In a court of law, he was found “not guilty” of killing his ex-wife – but if you ask the majority of Americans , they’ll tell you he’s not innocent. Here, we’re going to talk a bit about the distinction between the two conclusions – and why it matters to psychology and law researchers*. When we say that “not guilty” is a legal decision, we mean that it’s a decision based on criteria described by laws – namely in the U.S., if the prosecutor can convince the jury of the defendant’s...
5 comments
Read more

Thinking about the law like a psychological scientist

Before psychological scientists design studies and collect data, we need something to study. That is, we need questions to answer. For researchers like us, specialists in psychology and law*, these questions are usually related to the legal system. But where specifically do we get our ideas? In some cases, they are the result of applying our scientific knowledge and training to a topic; in others, we see an event or case and want to know more about it. Kitty Genovese's murder inspired a program of social psychology research One place we get our ideas is from real-life events, like criminal cases. Sometimes these are cases  that are reported widely by the media; sometimes they are cases we encounter in the course of our work. Cases that seem to defy common sense make us ask questions about how they could have happened. A prominent example of a crime inspiring research is the infamous murder of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese. Kitty was murdered in 1964 in Queens, New York in a b...
Post a Comment
Read more

When investigations go wrong – in science and policework

A story of both a wrongful conviction and scientific fraud We’ve talked about many of the ways police investigations can go wrong, including mistaken eyewitness identifications , memory errors , and false confessions . Often, when people imagine police investigations running afoul, they imagine egregious cases in which police plant evidence or physically torture suspects to get them to produce confessions they know are false. Although situations like that do occur, mistakes in investigations require no intentional wrongdoing. A detective doesn’t need to be trying to get a false confession, for instance, in order to get one ( as our guest writer Fabi Alceste has written about) . Errors happen often without the investigators realizing anything has gone wrong. Similarly, when people imagine bad scientific research happening, they often imagine scientists fabricating data or committing outright fraud. Scientific fraud is a problem, but it’s quite rare. However, there are many questio...
5 comments
Read more