Computational Modeling of Decision Making by Prosecutors and Jurors in Criminal Justice

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The potential for wrongful convictions has spurred interest among prosecutors, courts, and others in improving decision-making in the criminal justice system, in part to prevent wrongful convictions. To study this issue, this project will examine how prosecutors and jurors weigh evidence and other aspects of a crime when deciding whether a suspect is guilty. The project will use an experimental approach to test how prosecutors and jurors view various issues that arise during a criminal investigation and trial, factors which may implicate the decision to find a defendant guilty. Consequently, this project will examine what can go wrong in a criminal case, how those errors occur, and why errors are so difficult to correct.The project will incorporate an experimental design and computational models that have successfully investigated decision making in other contexts, as this approach breaks down many kinds of complex decisions into underlying cognitive steps and for analyzing the impact of key variables on each of those cognitive processes. First, the project tests how the description of a crime affects the weight that potential jurors give to the evidence against someone accused of that crime. Second, the study examines how early evidence that a defendant is guilty can trigger a tendency to discount subsequent evidence favorable to the defendant. Finally, the project tests whether jurors and professional prosecutors harbor similar or different cognitive biases, which can serve as a guide to the kinds of errors that are most likely to occur under time pressure, stress, or other conditions that distract attention or deplete cognitive resources. This high-throughput design is compatible with statistical modeling that isolates the effects of the individual variables and their potential interactions on decisions about the guilt or innocence of someone accused of a crime. The study includes real jurors and professional prosecutors as research subjects, making it possible to compare decision making by legal actors that play critical, but distinct, roles in the criminal justice system.