So you're sorry? The role of remorse in criminal law.

The role of remorse in judicial decisions in the criminal justice system has been addressed in scholarship and remains controversial. The purpose of this qualitative research was to examine the views of sitting criminal judges on remorse, its assessment, and its relevance in their decision-making. After approval of the study design by the institutional review board, 23 judges were interviewed in an open-ended format. Transcriptions of these audio-recorded sessions were analyzed phenomenologically by the research team, using the method of narrative summary. The results showed that the judges varied widely in their opinions on the way remorse should be assessed and its relevance in judicial decision-making. They agreed that the relevance of remorse varied by type of crime and the stage of the proceedings. The indicators of remorse for some judges were the same as those that indicated the lack of remorse for others. All the judges recognized that assessment of remorse, as well as judicial decision-making in general, must be altered for defendants with mental illness. The judges varied in their views of the relevance of psychiatric assessments in determining remorse, although most acknowledged a role for forensic psychiatrists.

Age and disability biases in pediatric resuscitation among future physicians.

This study examined whether biases concerning age and/or disability status influenced resuscitation decisions. Medical students were randomly chosen to read 1 of 4 vignettes, organized in a 2 (age: infant vs school-age) × 2 (disability: preexisting vs no preexisting) between-subjects design. The vignettes described a pediatric patient experiencing an acute episode who required resuscitation. Following resuscitation, patients with existing disability would continue to have disability, whereas those without would develop disability. Participants indicated whether they would resuscitate, given a 10% chance of success. There was a significant main effect of disability: Medical students displayed a preference for resuscitating previously disabled children compared with previously healthy children when prognosis was held constant, F(1, 121) = 4.89, p = .03. This differential treatment of the two groups cannot easily be morally justified and poses a quandary for educators.

Audiovisual communication and therapeutic jurisprudence: Cognitive and social psychological dimensions.

The effects of audiovisual communications on the emotional and psychological well-being of participants in the legal system have not been previously examined. Using as a framework for analysis what Slobogin (1996) calls internal balancing (of therapeutic versus antitherapeutic effects) and external balancing (of therapeutic jurisprudence [TJ] effects versus effects on other legal values), this brief paper discusses three examples that suggest the complexity of evaluating courtroom audiovisuals in TJ terms. In each instance, audiovisual displays that are admissible based on their arguable probative or explanatory value - day-in-the-life movies, victim impact videos, and computer simulations of litigated events - might well reduce stress and thus improve the psychological well-being of personal injury plaintiffs, survivors, and jurors, respectively. In each situation, however, other emotional and cognitive effects may prove antitherapeutic for the target or other participants, and/or may undermine other important values including outcome accuracy, fairness, and even the conception of the legal decision maker as a moral actor.

Visual evidence.

Visual and other demonstrative evidence has become increasingly prevalent in American and other courtrooms in recent years. However, there have been relatively few experimental studies of the effects of this kind of evidence in legal settings. As a consequence, little is known about when and how it affects legal decision making. In this article, I survey the extant research, including studies of photographs, videos, computer animations, and PowerPoint displays. The research shows that visual evidence affects legal decisions in some circumstances but not in others. It also indicates that visual evidence sometimes enhances legal judgment by improving recall and understanding but sometimes impairs judgment by prompting undue emotional responses, cognitive and perceptual biases, and/or peripheral processing. The limitations of the research are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.

Emotions and attributions of legal responsibility and blame: a research review.

Research on the effects of emotions and moods on judgments of legal responsibility and blame is reviewed. Emotions and moods may influence decision makers in 3 ways: by affecting their information processing strategies, by inclining their judgments in the direction of the valence of the emotion or mood, and/or by providing informational cues to the proper decision. A model is proposed that incorporates these effects and further distinguishes among various affective influences in terms of whether the affect is provoked by a source integral or incidental to the judgment task, and whether it affects judgment directly (e.g., by providing an informational cue to judgment) or indirectly (e.g., by affecting construal of judgment target features, which in turn affects the judgment). Legal decision makers' abilities to correct for any affective influences they perceive to be undesirable and normative implications for legal theory and practice are briefly discussed.

New visual technologies in court: directions for research.

Litigation is being transformed by new visual communication technologies, including videoconferencing, PowerPoint, and computer animations. Yet the effects of these visual technologies on legal decision making are largely unknown. In order to understand better the most pressing issues surrounding technology in the courtroom, psychologists, lawyers, and representatives from technology companies and funding agencies attended a Research Conference on Courtroom Technology organized by the Federal Judicial Center. The goals of the conference were to identify issues raised by courtroom uses of new technologies that could be illuminated by empirical research and to suggest designs and methods for conducting that research. This paper emerged from that conference. The authors provide an overview of considerations that should guide research in this area, including a framework that takes into account features of the technology, the audience, and the legal strategy of the user of the technology. They outline a paradigm for conducting such research, illustrate it with several possible empirical studies of varying levels of experimental and conceptual complexity, and identify directions for subsequent research.