Expert evidence pertaining to battered women: The impact of gender of expert and timing of testimony.

O pensamento contrafactual e a percepção de crimes. Revisitando Macrae, Milne e Griffiths (1993)...

“…Mostrando a literatura que homens e mulheres julgam um mesmo crime com um extremismo diferente (e.g., Kanekar & Sekasaria, 1993;Schuller & Cripps, 1998;Sousa, Mateus & Lopes, 1993) Face a este padrão, levanta-se-nos, de imediato, uma outra questão que se prende com o reduzido número de contrafactuais produzidos por listagem livre, por oposição ao elevado número de «outros pensamentos».…”

“…Dito de outra forma, existirão divergências actor-observador em termos da activação e do conteúdo dos contrafactuais produzidos em determinado contexto? Um outro aspecto de extrema importância e que tem sido menosprezado pelas investigações desenvolvidas na área, nomeadamente pelo estudo original de Macrae et al (1993), prende-se com o papel da variável «sexo dos participantes», previsto na literatura sobre Psicologia Legal (e.g., Kanekar & Seksaria, 1993;Schuller & Cripps, 1998;Sousa, Mateus & Lopes, 1993), o qual se traduz num diferente extremismo do julgamento efectuado por parte de elementos do sexo feminino e de elementos do sexo masculino.…”

Expert Testimony

“…For example, early research examined the question of whether expert testimony influenced juror judgments of guilt. Trial simulation studies demonstrated that when jurors heard expert testimony presented by the defense, they were more likely to return defense verdicts than were jurors who did not hear expert testimony (e.g., Schuller and Cripps, 1998). In contrast, jurors who heard expert testimony presented by the prosecution were more likely to convict the defendant than were jurors who did not hear prosecution expert testimony (e.g., Brekke and Borgida, 1988).…”

“…For example, expert testimony has greater influence on jury decisions when it appears early rather than late in the trial (Brekke and Borgida, 1988;Schuller and Cripps, 1998). There is some speculation that early presentation is advantageous because it allows the expert evidence to serve as a framework for understanding other trial evidence.…”

Lay perceptions of an expert witness in a sexual discrimination in the workplace case

“…Whilst Hodgson and Pryor (1984) showed that undergraduate mock jurors hearing the same closing arguments rated a female attorney as 'less expert' than a male attorney, some studies have found support for a stereotypical correspondence between expert's sex and case type. Swenson, Nash, and Roos (1984) and Schuller and Cripps (1998) found female experts to be more convincing than male experts, for example, in cases involving child custody and battered woman syndrome respectively. Similarly, McKimmie, Newton, Terry, and Schuller (2004) found evidence for the importance of 'gender domain congruency' in a task where mock jurors were asked to award damages for a case involving commercial fraud in either a male (automobile) or female (cosmetics) domain.…”