Lecture One Flashcards
Psychology and law in Everyday
- “Womb to Tomb”
- As soon as we’re born we have legal papers, etc
Law
- Perspective
- Tells you what you should do - Certainty
- Clear rulings are rendered - Adversarial methods
- Are used to get at the “truth” - Hierarchical
- Lower courts are bound by higher courts
Psychology
- Descriptive
- Tells you what you should actually do - Probability
- Conclusions are based on statistical probability - Experimental methods
- Are used to get at the truth - Empirical
- Ideas depend on supporting data, never bound by prior studies
Three ways Psychology and Law interact
- Psychology in law
- Psychology and the law
- Psychology of the law
James Cattell
- Asked students to recall the weather one week prior, poor recall
Alfred Binet
Studied questioning with kids, free recall most accurate
William Stern
Studied the role of emotional arousal on eyewitness, gun/physiological stress
Julian Varendonck
Showed the frailties of children’s memory
Hugo Munsterberg
Urged lawyers to consider eyewitness reliability (bad rep in lawyer community)
Factual innocence
The accused didn’t in fact commit the crime
Legal innocence
The accused committed the crime but did not have a proper legal defence
Most Exonerations
- Severe violent offence
- Lengthy sentence (25 years) average sentence in Canada is 6 months
- Contested trial
“Normal” Criminal Cases
- Non-violent offences
- Most non-custodial, less than 6 months in jail
- Guilty plea
Primary Effects of Wrongful Convictions
- Loss of liberty
- Physical and sexual assault in prison
- Institutionalization
-Legal consequences
Secondary Effects of Wrongful convictions
- Impact on families
- Impact on victims
- Impact on public
Causes of wrongful convictions
- Eyewitness misidentification
- Jailhouse informants
- Poor scientific and forensic evidence
- Noble cause corruption (ENDS-JUSTIFIES-MEANS behaviour)
- Prosecution or police engage in misconduct to ensure a conviction - Tunnel vision
Tunnel vision
Tendency to focus on one suspect of explanation, and to filter evidence to support only that belief
Confirmation Bias
a) selective attention
b) selective interpretation
c) selective memory
