Trial Delay as a Source of Bias in Jury Decision Making

Reviews research on how the passage of time may change a jury, noting that recent research on social cognition has explored how memory functions as human beings note, store, and recall information about other people and events. Classic work on attitude change has demonstrated how emotional needs motivate people deliberately to reconstruct the past to justify their decisions and behavior. Recent research on the biasing effects of attitudes on memory has also shown how people misrecall past information to make it more consistent with current attitudes and beliefs. It is concluded that there is good reason to believe that jurors may change during an extended delay between a verdict of liability and an assessment of damages. When a decision on damages is delayed for 2 yrs, this decision will likely be quite different from the same decision that would have been reached immediately after the original verdict. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)