Juror perceptions of incentivized informant testimony

Abstract

Informants are an integral part of the American criminal justice system. However, relatively little research has been done on nearly all aspects of informant use, from how they are recruited and how they reach agreements to cooperate with law enforcement to how jurors evaluate their testimony in court. The present study focuses on this last area -juror perceptions of informants who testify. The limited research that exists on this topic has presented troubling conclusions: jurors may not be appropriately responsive to cues that could signal informant unreliability. In particular, jurors may fail to account for and properly weigh evidence that an informant is testifying for an incentive (such as a reduced prison sentence) when reaching a verdict. However, thus far, studies in this area have some limitations in case type, materials used, and statistical power. The objective of the current study is to advance in each of these areas and provide new evidence about the impact of juror perceptions of informant incentives. This study used a novel fact pattern, video stimuli manipulations, and a sample of 886 online participants to test the impact of informant incentives on juror judgments. It featured four conditions that vary the nature and size of the incentive reported by a jailhouse informant (i.e., no incentive, a vague leniency incentive, and small and large sentence reduction incentives), plus a control condition