STATE OF CONFUSION

State of Confusion

State of Confusion

This paper is based on Tanya Tucker's case study. It is significant to note that in addition to the general lack of comprehension of instructions in the penalty phase of capital cases, the confusion does not seem to be evenly distributed, or to have a neutral impact (Tanford, 2006). Although jurors have trouble with all these concepts, they seem to have more trouble understanding the concept of mitigating (the evidence that should be used in support of a statute that is self confusing on the matter of legal rights regarding Tanya's suit thus aggravating circumstances. There are several possible explanations for this confusion. For example, in cases where the terms are not defined, jurors may rely on their personal knowledge of the terms. Because aggravating is a term we use more often than mitigating in our daily lives, it may be more familiar to jurors (Tanford, 2007).

Studies have also examined the mediators of this pro-prosecution bias in joined trials. As noted previously, courts have acknowledged three possible sources of prejudice in a joined trial: (1) confusion in relating the evidence to the charges, (2) the accumulation of evidence across the charges, and (3) jurors inferring that the defendant has a “criminal disposition” because he or she is being tried for multiple crimes. As early studies merely demonstrated that joining offenses increased convictions and did not address how joining offenses altered juror evaluations that lead to verdicts, researchers such as Sarah Tanford and Steven Penrod began to examine empirically whether various attributes of the joined trial, such as charge similarity, evidence similarity, and judicial instruction, increase jurors' confusion about which evidence relates to which charges, their accumulation of evidence across charges, and their tendency to draw inferences about the defendant's criminal disposition (Horowitz, 2008).

After ...