Law - Criminal 3-1 Module Three Assignment

PRETRIAL MEDIA COVERAGE AND JUROR IMPARTIALITY

Pretrial Media Coverage and Juror Impartiality:

A Review of the Literature

Melony Hadden

Southern New Hampshire University

CJ 485 Problem Solving for CJ Professionals

Instructor Kelli Kaelin

Pretrial Media Coverage and Juror Impartiality: A Review of the Literature Review of the Literature

For decades, the relationship between the media and the criminal justice system has been a concern for legal scholars, psychologists, and practitioners. At the heart of this concern is the question of whether jurors exposed to PTP can hear only what is presented in court and thus reach impartial verdicts. There is a large and growing body of peer-reviewed research demonstrating that pretrial media coverage can have measurable, often significant effects on decision-making and verdict outcomes. It is important to grasp the extent and modalities of this influence to guarantee a fair trial under the Constitution.

A widely cited study in this area is the meta-analytic study by Steblay, Besirevic, Fulero, and Jimenez-Lorente (1999), which combined the results of 44 empirical studies involving more than 5,700 participants. Their research showed that those who were read negative pretrial news about defendants were significantly more likely to evaluate them as guilty than those who were read minimal or no pretrial news. Such effects were especially high for murder, sexual abuse, and drug-related offenses, and were increased for actual jury samples compared with student samples. The fundamental study provided quantitative evidence of a link between media coverage and potential jurors' presumed guilt, giving empirical substance to concerns long held by lawyers.

Greene and Wade (1988) followed in this vein of research by analyzing how general pretrial publicity (pretrial coverage that isn't specific to the case at hand, but instead reflects crime and justice in general) affects juror decision-making. According to their research, mere exposure to general media coverage of crime could also trigger negative associations with defendants, even if they did not receive specific reports about their crimes. This discovery has important consequences because it suggests that juror prejudice can manifest more subtly and unconsciously, potentially undetectable during conventional voir dire. The priming effect described by Greene and Wade shows that exposure to the media – even to non-targeted information about a case – has the power to undermine the presumption of innocence that lies at the core of the adversarial legal system.

Ruva, McEvoy, and Bryant (2007) investigated the specific cognitive and memory processes that mediate the PTP effect and found that pretrial publicity affected jurors' verdict preferences and systematically distorted their memory of trial evidence. Jurors who saw the negative PTP were more likely to attribute information they obtained from the media to the evidence presented at trial. The source monitoring error is especially concerning because jurors' recall of such information may be unknowingly used in reaching their conclusions about the evidence, thereby compromising the integrity of fact-finding. The research indicates that judgmental instructions correcting these deeply ingrained cognitive errors may be ineffective.

In research on jury deliberations, this concern with the boundaries of judicial remedies was further explored. Ruva and LeVasseur (2012) analyzed 30 mock-jury deliberations and found that jurors exposed to negative pretrial publicity were significantly more likely to render verdicts consistent with the prosecution's story. Most importantly, jurors who were exposed to the PTP refused or could not follow judges' instructions to disregard pretrial information and seldom objected to their peers' inclusion of such information in the deliberations. This research contradicts the judicial doctrine that exposure to media coverage during the pre-trial phase can somehow eliminate or reduce pre-trial bias, and questions whether media exposure can ever be reversed by the deliberative process, thus affecting the lens through which jurors interpret all future evidence.

Surette (2015) has explored in depth the broader structural context of media and criminal justice, highlighting the systemic nature of the relationship among media, crime, and public perception. Surette argues that the media sets up and perpetuates specific storylines and narratives about crime and criminality that influence public perceptions even before any single trial. These stories are often highly sensationalist and emotionally charged representations of crime that often bear little resemblance to statistical realities of crime but have a significant impact on public perception of guilt and innocence. Jurors heavily influenced by these stories may have an existing mental framework that assumes guilt in perpetrators of crime, which may obscure their ability to judge a case based on the evidence.

There is empirical evidence of the impact of pretrial bias in the real world, as reported by Vidmar (2002), who reviewed a series of criminal and civil case studies of pre- and mid-trial prejudice. In high-profile cases, Vidmar found, the amount and nature of media exposure and the level of prejudice in the community were directly related, and sometimes juries were not impartial toward the defendant because of the volume of prejudice in the community. He had used a case-study approach to complement the experimental studies and explained the effects of PTP in real courtroom contexts, rather than in laboratory settings. Vidmar found that, in cases where media saturation occurred, current legal tools such as change of venue, continuance, and expanded voir dire were inconsistently and often insufficiently utilized.

Ruva and Guenther (2015) examined the interaction between pretrial publicity and jury deliberation and found that predecisional distortion mediated the PTP's influence. They found that anti-defendant publicity biased impressions of the defendant even before trial evidence was presented, and that these impressions remained during and after deliberation. Under the predecisional distortion model, if a person has made an initial judgment, they actively seek and interpret later information to support their initial thought, which is not much disrupted by the trial setting. Deliberation has been found not to remove pretrial bias consistently and could, under some circumstances, heighten the impact of PTP-exposed jurors on their peers.

The use of social media for pretrial publicity has greatly exacerbated the problems noted in previous studies. In a mock trial of a sexual assault case, Salerno et al. (2021) investigated whether social media-based pretrial publicity adversely affected the odds of a guilty verdict in the case. This study brought the PTP concept to the digital world by showing that social media-hosted, peer-provided, unstructured information can be a powerful means of juror bias. Unlike traditional media, social media content is unregulated, often anonymous, and algorithmically amplified, making it particularly hard for the court to observe or restrict. The results here highlight the need to adapt legal approaches to the unique features of digital information spaces.

Kerr, Kramer, Carroll, and Alfini (1991) examined voir dire as a means to alleviate prejudicial pretrial publicity, with results again confirming the disparate impact of various pretrial media frames. Their empirical research revealed that, although voir dire procedures can detect some obviously prejudicial jurors, they are not very good at screening out those whose prejudice is more subtle. Exposed jurors may feel they can be impartial, but may harbor unexpressed prejudices that creep into their minds throughout the trial. This study raises the question of whether the current procedural protections afforded to courts are sufficient to ensure defendants' Sixth Amendment rights in the medium of sound and image.

The weight of this combined research literature suggests a consistent, well-established trend: pretrial media (traditional or social) negatively affects juror impartiality and the outcome of a verdict toward conviction. Several processes at work interact, including priming effects, source memory failures, predictive distortions, and conformity pressures in deliberating groups. Other research also shows that current judicial mechanisms are ineffective and inconsistent. Thus, the gap between what the Constitution presumes of an impartial jury and the current realities of the information environment is considerable.

Identification of the Problem

Based on the literature review, the problem in the criminal justice system is the systematic violation of jurors' impartiality due to pre-trial media coverage, and verdicts that may not correspond to the evidence from the trial. Defendants in high-profile cases, especially violent crime, sex crime, and media-intensive cases, continue to be consistently impacted by a structurally compromised adjudicative process in which the presumption of innocence is violated before sentencing. This is a core issue of threats to the integrity of the criminal justice system and to the constitutional rights of the accused under the 6th Amendment.

One of the most important reasons is that the current judicial framework does not provide sufficient tools to neutralize pretrial bias once it has become part of public opinion. Even the most basic procedures—voir dire, judicial admonitions, continuances, and change of venue—are inconsistently used and have little effect in reestablishing a sense of fairness and impartiality among jurors affected by extensive pretrial publicity. The courts are still operating under the same procedures that prevailed in an era of limited media attention and are thus poorly suited to deal with the new, ubiquitous, and algorithmically enhanced media landscapes that define modern high-profile criminal trials. The lack of development and implementation of empirically validated and modernized remedies continues to create situations in which media coverage can become a quasi-determining factor in trial results, apart from evidence.

References

Greene, E., & Wade, R. (1988). Of private talk and public print: General pretrial publicity and juror decision making. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2(2), 123–135. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.2350020205

Kerr, N. L., Kramer, G. P., Carroll, J. S., & Alfini, J. J. (1991). On the effectiveness of voir dire in criminal cases with prejudicial pretrial publicity: An empirical study. American University Law Review, 40(2), 665–701.

Ruva, C. L., & Guenther, C. C. (2015). From the shadows into the light: How pretrial publicity and deliberation affect mock jurors' decisions, impressions, and memory. Law and Human Behavior, 39(3), 294–310. https://doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000117

Ruva, C. L., & LeVasseur, M. A. (2012). Behind closed doors: The effect of pretrial publicity on jury deliberations. Psychology, Crime & Law, 18(5), 431–452. https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2010.502120

Ruva, C. L., McEvoy, C., & Bryant, J. B. (2007). Effects of pretrial publicity and jury deliberation on juror bias and source memory errors. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 21(1), 45–67. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1254

Salerno, J. M., Phalen, H. J., Phalen, R. E., & Schweitzer, N. J. (2021). Effect of pretrial publicity via social media, mock juror sex, and rape myth acceptance on juror decisions in a mock sexual assault trial. Psychology, Crime & Law, 29(3), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2021.2018440

Steblay, N. M., Besirevic, J., Fulero, S. M., & Jimenez-Lorente, B. (1999). The effects of pretrial publicity on juror verdicts: A meta-analytic review. Law and Human Behavior, 23(2), 219–235. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022325019080

Surette, R. (2015). Media, crime, and criminal justice: Images, realities, and policies (5th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Vidmar, N. (2002). Case studies of pre- and midtrial prejudice in criminal and civil litigation. Law and Human Behavior, 26(1), 73–105. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013817310132

Vidmar, N., & Hans, V. P. (2007). American juries: The verdict. Prometheus Books.