Campus Units
Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE)"
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Accepted Manuscript
Publication Date
10-2020
Journal or Book Title
Forensic Science International
Volume
315
First Page
110433
DOI
10.1016/j.forsciint.2020.110433
Abstract
Forensic testimony plays a crucial role in many criminal cases, with requests to crime laboratories steadily increasing. As part of efforts to improve the reliability of forensic evidence, scientific and policy groups increasingly recommend routine and blind proficiency tests of practitioners. What is not known is how doing so affects how lay jurors assess testimony by forensic practitioners in court. In Study 1, we recruited 1398 lay participants, recruited online using Qualtrics to create a sample representative of the U.S. population with respect to age, gender, income, race/ethnicity, and geographic region. Each read a mock criminal trial transcript in which a forensic examiner presented the central evidence. The low-proficiency forensic examiner elicited a lower conviction rate and less favorable impressions than the control, an examiner for which no proficiency information was disclosed. However, the high-proficiency examiner did not correspondingly elicit a higher conviction rate or more favorable impressions than the control. In Study 2, 1420 participants, similarly recruited using Qualtrics, received the same testimony, but for some conditions the examiner was cross-examined by a defense attorney. We find cross-examination significantly reduced guilty votes and examiner ratings for low-proficiency examiners. These results suggest that disclosing results of blind proficiency testing can inform jury decision-making, and further, that defense lawyering can make proficiency information particularly salient at a criminal trial.
Copyright Owner
Elsevier B.V.
Copyright Date
2020
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Crozier, William E.; Kukucka, Jeff; and Garrett, Brandon L., "Juror appraisals of forensic evidence: Effects of blind proficiency and cross-examination" (2020). CSAFE Publications. 76.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/csafe_pubs/76
Comments
This article is published as Crozier, William E., Jeff Kukucka, and Brandon L. Garrett. "Juror appraisals of forensic evidence: Effects of blind proficiency and cross-examination." Forensic Science International 315 (2020): 110433. Posted with permission of CSAFE.