Plea Bargaining
____ percentage of cases end up with a plea deal and never go to trial
96%
Haney used the ____ study/simulation to demonstrate the power of eyewitness testimony.
Loftus study
No eyewitness: 18% convicted
“credible” eyewitness: 72% convicted
“incredible” eyewitness: 68% convicted
Are trials an effective way to distinguish truth from falsity?
No
Because trials are ______, they institutionalize ____________ .
"Battles" (Adversarial)
Conflict / Disharmony
Does Hagedorn believe gang members are different from most other people?
No he does not
In accordance to the “Alford plea” when a defendant pleads guilty to a crime they can…
Maintain their innocence
One factor that can undermine the reliability of an eyewitness is the “ecology of crime,” which refers to how:
crime tends to be committed under circumstances meant to limit people’s ability to see criminals, make identifications, and gather information on the crime
Despite its limitations, a criminal jury is still an excellent example of what?
Democracy in action
Courts proceed with “narrow rules of standing," which means that:
You are prohibited from participating unless you have standing in the case (prosecution and defense) and these parties will decide what they want to share
Hagedorn argues that stereotyping is an all to normal process. What does this mean?
It is not a process reserved for consciously prejudiced persons but can influence anyone
Three positive consequences of plea bargaining are
Judicial efficiency
Predictable justice
Potential for “leniency”
What is "unconscious transference” and what is an example of it that Dr. Haney showed us?
Seeing someone somewhere else (including in photos before a physical lineup) and unconsciously transferring that memory of the person to a crime scene (or, being primed with photographs of a face, and then identifying that person in a later lineup because that face is familiar/recognizable)
example: Stanford study
How are jury verdicts viewed within the criminal justice system?
Sacrosanct (integral to due process)
They are very rarely questioned or scrutinized
One dimension of the institutionalized conflict within courts is its triadic structure which is referring to:
Two parties in opposition and the audience
Hagedorn utilized the term “gang frame” to describe _______
A way of stringing together questionable facts and stereotypes into a story that often resonates with jurors and can lead to a conviction if not effectively rebutted
The Cooper and Frye (2012) cases established this in plea bargaining:
Due Process
Records must be kept so that defendants can fight against any wrong doing
What did the Stanford eyewitness study show us about eyewitness testimony?
Neither certainty nor credibility necessarily equal accuracy
The outcome of a criminal trial reflects a relative advantage in lawyering as much as:
The incriminating nature of the evidence
What do the courts rely on that tend to make it hard for people outside these systems to understand what is going on?
Formal procedures and language (legal jargon)
One misconceived notion about gangs is that they are like a virus or disease spreading from one town to another. The truth is that _______________
They are often produced by similar conditions of poverty and racism in different towns/cities
These are the 7 negative consequences of plea bargaining:
Overcharging
Degradation of defendants’ rights
Statistical norm becomes practical mandate
Upward push on sentencing
Fiction of overwhelming guilt
Changing consequences of “conviction”
Masks the magnitude of the problem of failing to control crime
These are the 5 remedies to eyewitness testimony that Dr. Haney discussed in lecture:
1. Standardize photo and physical lineup procedures
2. Take video/audio recordings of the witnesses Q&A
3. Permit or require expert testimony at trial
4. Broaden grounds for exclusion
5. Use patterned jury instructions on unreliability
(require the judge to inform the jury about the difficulty of eyewitness testimony and its unreliability)
What are some ways that the trial process drastically limits the jury’s democratic potential?
Unrepresentativeness (e.g., death qualification)
Lack of training or clear instructions
Ignorance of consequences
The legal system is dominated by a retrospective focus. What does this mean?
We are looking at the past and making decisions about what happened in the past (i.e., decisions establish precedent).
This focus is dominated by legal categories (like our categories of homicide where we are looking at the different states of a person in the past)
Hagedorn and Haney both believe that the criminal justice system decontextualizes criminal behavior and attributes causal significance primarily to the people engaging in the criminal act. The term that Dr. Haney gave this phenomenon is ________________
Institutionalized fundamental attribution error