An Examination of Mock Jurors’ Judgments in Familiar Identification Cases

Mock Jurors’ Perceptions of Eyewitness Evidence: The Role of Familiarity with the Defendant, Race of the Defendant, and Eyewitness Confidence

“…Although 57% of participants in Study 1 believed that familiar identifications are more accurate than stranger identifications and 72% agreed that familiar identifications following many exposures between the eyewitness and the defendant are more accurate than familiar identifications following a single exposure, the familiarity manipulation did not influence mock jurors' judgments of eyewitness accuracy and defendant guilt. Pica and colleagues (2018) replicated the study conducted by Vallano et al (2018) with a Canadian sample (Study 1). They predicted that seeing the defendant many times prior to the crime (as opposed to once or never) would result in more guilty verdicts.…”

“…Despite the common occurrence of familiar identifications, person familiarity in the forensic context lacks a formal definition. Multiple definitions have been proposed, reflecting the familiarity continuum (Pezdek & Stolzenberg, 2014); i.e., starting at a mere belief of prior exposure to the defendant regardless of whether it actually occurred (Vallano et al, 2018), moving onto any prior contact with the defendant before the crime occurred (e.g., Sheahan et al, 2017), and ending with a prior relationship with the defendant (Pica et al, 2018). The absence of a single official definition of familiarity can be attributed to its numerous characteristics (e.g., duration, magnitude, frequency, quality, recency).…”

“…Past studies have most commonly operationalized familiarity in terms of the amount of exposure that existed between the witness and the defendant prior to the crime (e.g., Lindsay et al, 1986;Pica et al, 2018;Pozzulo et al, 2014;Sheahan et al, 2017;Vallano et al, 2018) with longer durations of exposure or greater number of exposures describing higher levels of familiarity. It is only logical that researchers have been inclined to define familiarity in this way.…”

“…Thus far, studies manipulating the number of eyewitness' exposures or interactions with the defendant prior to the crime found little evidence of jurors' sensitivity to familiarity in their decision-making. Defining high familiarity as 'many' exposures or interactions (Vallano et al, 2018;Pica et al, 2018), or six exposures (Pozzulo et al, 2014) was not enough to influence jurors' decisions. However, seeing the defendant eight times prior to the crime (Sheahan et al, 2017) might have come across as more indicative of familiarity, thereby resulting in stronger perceptions of the defendant's guilt.…”

“…As discussed above, Vallano et al (2018) examined the effect of the amount of prior exposure (i.e., never seen, seen once, seen many times prior to the crime) on jurors' judgments of eyewitness accuracy and defendant guilt in Study 1; however, in Study 2, they aimed to strengthen the familiarity manipulation with contextual details concerning the recency of that exposure. The eyewitness was described as having seen the perpetrator a few hours (i.e., recent exposure) or a few months (i.e., past exposure) before the crime occurred.…”