Guided Response: Review several of your colleagues’ posts and respond to at least two of your peers. In your responses, ask your fellow classmates some follow-up questions or provide suggestions. You may want to ask your classmates to clarify some things, identify some potential issues they may want to consider, and provide them with some suggestions for the study. Continue to monitor the discussion forum until 5:00 p.m. MST on Day 7 of the week and respond to anyone who replies to your initial post.
Guided Response: Review several of your colleagues’ posts and respond to at least two of your peers. In your responses, ask your fellow classmates some follow-up questions or provide suggestions. You may want to ask your classmates to clarify some things, identify some potential issues they may want to consider, and provide them with some suggestions for the study. Continue to monitor the discussion forum until 5:00 p.m. MST on Day 7 of the week and respond to anyone who replies to your initial post.
When people think about the phenomena of false confessions they either consider the detectives who ask the questions and could possibly coerce the suspect into confessing, or they think about the suspect who is falsely admitting to committing the crime they actually didn’t commit. However, how much information is known about the other side of the law and how they could possibly be biased towards the defendant in their court room? I’m talking about jurors; the ones who decide the fate of a person being convicted. My question is what do jurors believe or know about police interrogations and false confessions? Do jurors come in with prior beliefs and bias’ before they even hear the evidence? We know very little about what the jurors come into court and what they actually understand about the process before the case ends up in court. MY hypothesis is that many jurors don’t understand how interrogations really work and aren’t aware how high the rate is on false confessions. Additionally, I believe jurors enter the court room already deciding how the feel about the defendant based on their own beliefs and principles. This study is important because we know plenty about how police may cause a false confession, but we don’t know a lot about the other side. I think it would be important to know the outcome because then we can educate potential jurors about the rate of false confessions. “In a survey of potential jurors, Chojnacki et al. (2008) demonstrated that an overwhelming majority of respondents did not believe they knew enough about interrogation tactics and confessions to make informed judgments about confession evidence in criminal trials” (Leo & Liu, 2009). Therefore, I believe that my hypothesis will ultimately be correct in saying that jurors are not aware of how police may interrogate a suspect which in return can result in a false confession. This study will be a non-experimental research as I can’t control any of the variables and I will rely on my own interactions and observations.
200 individuals with mixed men and woman who are eligible to serve on a jury from ages 21 to 50 are given a questionnaire online about their understanding of the interrogation process and any beliefs and bias’ they may have prior to an investigation. The results I expect to find is that over half of participants have the wrong idea about how interrogations work and aren’t truly aware of the rate of false confessions in the United States alone. At the end of the questionnaire I would also ask if they believe jurors should be more educated about interrogation tactics and the rate of false confessions.
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