TY - JOUR
T1 - Criminal Stereotypes of Muslim and Arab Americans and the Impact on Evaluations of Ambiguous Criminal Evidence
AU - Avery, Joseph J.
AU - Oh, Dongwon
AU - Feldman, Lauren
AU - Cooper, Reuven
AU - Cooper, Joel
N1 - Funding Information:
joseph j. avery is a Resident Fellow in the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. dongwon oh is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Psychology at New York University. lauren feldman is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. reuven cooper is at the Rabbinical College of America. joel cooper is a Professor of Psychology at Princeton University. This research was partially supported by a grant to Avery from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy; he was supported by the Department of Defense (through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program) and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
PY - 2022/1
Y1 - 2022/1
N2 - In the US legal system, jurors may make good-faith efforts to construe and apply facts and law, but extralegal considerations are difficult to avoid, and under some circumstances lay constructions of liability and criminality may be vulnerable to bias. We explore whether stereotype effects in juries’ decision-making are sensitive to the stringency of the burden of persuasion. This article represents an important addition to the growing field of experimental jurisprudence and empirical legal studies, as it uses a novel computational method to visualize a stereotype of a specific criminal subtype. More importantly, it tests the intersection of the stereotype with legal conclusions for different standards of proof. For the less-stringent criminal standard— probable cause, which typically is used in a grand-jury setting—the stereotype mattered to the outcome, with the clear implication that lax standards may leave room for jurors to improperly consider extralegal factors like race and ethnicity.
AB - In the US legal system, jurors may make good-faith efforts to construe and apply facts and law, but extralegal considerations are difficult to avoid, and under some circumstances lay constructions of liability and criminality may be vulnerable to bias. We explore whether stereotype effects in juries’ decision-making are sensitive to the stringency of the burden of persuasion. This article represents an important addition to the growing field of experimental jurisprudence and empirical legal studies, as it uses a novel computational method to visualize a stereotype of a specific criminal subtype. More importantly, it tests the intersection of the stereotype with legal conclusions for different standards of proof. For the less-stringent criminal standard— probable cause, which typically is used in a grand-jury setting—the stereotype mattered to the outcome, with the clear implication that lax standards may leave room for jurors to improperly consider extralegal factors like race and ethnicity.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85135268430&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85135268430&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1086/717848
DO - 10.1086/717848
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85135268430
SN - 0047-2530
VL - 51
SP - 177
EP - 208
JO - Journal of Legal Studies
JF - Journal of Legal Studies
IS - 1
ER -