Previous research has demonstrated that judicial instructions on the law are not well understood by jurors tasked with applying the law to the facts of a case. The past research has also shown that jurors are often confused by the instructions used in the sentencing phase of a capital trial. The current research tested the effectiveness of a…

Drug courts routinely rely on the threat of legal sanction to motivate drug-using criminal offenders to enter and complete community-based treatment programs. In light of the high failure rates among drug court participants, what is the effect of the threat of legal sanction on program retention and completion? A quasiexperimental research design…

This study is a quantitative analysis designed to compare two groups of factually innocent capital defendants: those who were exonerated and those who were executed. There are a total of 97 cases in the sample, including 81 exonerations and 16 executions. The primary objective of the authors is to identify factors that may predict case outcomes…

Although a common practice in many legal systems, plea bargaining (PB) tends to be held in low esteem by the public at large. In the present study, which was based on a survey of a national sample of Israeli respondents, a factorial design methodology was used to examine public attitudes toward varied PB scenarios. It was hypothesized that opening…

This article argues that the conclusions of previous research on the impact of sentencing guidelines may be misleading due to the cross-sectional methodologies employed in these studies. This study will suggest that a theoretically driven longitudinal analysis of mandatory guidelines offers a more appropriate way to study these policies.…