The effect of hearsay witness age in a child sexual assault trial.

This study investigated the effect of a hearsay witness on perceptions of an alleged victim in a sexual assault trial. Male and female participants read a fictional criminal court case summary involving a sexual assault, in which a 7-, 16-, or 25-year-old hearsay witness testified on behalf of a 6- or 15-year-old alleged victim. The prosecution case included the testimony of 1 primary witness: the alleged child victim, a hearsay witness, or a clinical psychologist. A post hoc control group had no primary witness. The hearsay witness led to as much support of the alleged victim as the child and the expert witness and more support than the control group. Women were consistently more supportive of the alleged victim than men. A 3-way interaction of age of hearsay witness, age of alleged victim, and sex of participant was discussed in terms of the effect of these factors on how mock jurors use hearsay testimony in a child sexual assault trial. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Jurors' perceptions of hearsay in child sexual abuse cases.

The authors examined jurors' perceptions of child victims who testified in court and adult witnesses who repeated children's hearsay statements. Data were collected from criminal courts in 2 major U.S. cities (42 juries and 248 jurors). After deliberating in child sexual abuse trials, jurors completed a detailed questionnaire concerning their perceptions of the main child victim involved in the case and the adult who spoke with the child prior to trial about abuse and who testified about what the child disclosed (the adult-hearsay witness). In all trials, a child victim and adult-hearsay witness testified. Results are discussed in relation to trial outcome, child credibility, and adult-hearsay witness credibility. Implications for use of hearsay evidence in child abuse cases are also addressed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Foreword: Hearsay testimony in trials involving child witnesses.

Allowing hearsay testimony in child abuse cases represents a dramatic and controversial change to the legal system, yet little scholarly and empirical work has been devoted to the topic. This special theme issue contains 12 articles written by psycholegal scholars from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. It is organized to address 3 basic issues that should be of interest to psycholegal. researchers, as well as police officers, judges, lawyers, and other members of the legal community. (a) How often is hearsay testimony used? How is it used in comparison to other innovations designed to protect the psychological welfare of the child witness? (b) How accurate is hearsay testimony? Is it as accurate as the child's own account? (c) Do jurors believe hearsay testimony? How much weight do or should jurors give to hearsay testimony? Two critical commentaries, one legal and one psychological, follow these articles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Child hearsay statutes: At once over-inclusive and under-inclusive.

Special child hearsay statutes allow for the admissibility of demonstrably reliable but otherwise inadmissible children's hearsay. These statutes were among other child witness innovations that proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s to redress the proof problems that arise in child sexual abuse prosecutions. The author argues that the special child hearsay statutes are at once over-inclusive and under-inclusive: over-inclusive in that child sexual abuse prosecutions typically include the testimony of the child witness and multiple hearsay witnesses; and under-inclusive in that they allow for the admissibility of children's hearsay in child abuse cases but may require the child declarant to be the child victim, excluding the hearsay statements of other child witnesses, and typically do not apply to the hearsay statements of children who witness crimes other than child abuse, like domestic violence. She proposes reforms to remedy these deficiencies in the special child hearsay statutes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The believability of children and their interviewer's hearsay testimony: When less is more.

Hearsay testimony from children's interviewers is increasingly common in sexual abuse trials, but little is known about its effects on juries. In 2 studies, the authors examined college students' perceptions of 3 types of hearsay testimony (an actual interview with a child or an adult interviewer providing either the gist of what that child had said or a verbatim account of the interview). Interviewers were rated as more accurate and truthful than the children. The interview was rated as higher quality, and children's statements, including their false statements, were sometimes rated as more believable in the interviewer gist hearsay condition. Mock jurors reacted differently to various types of hearsay testimony, and interviewer gist testimony may favor a child's case. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Does expert psychological testimony inform or influence juror decision making? A social cognitive analysis.

The authors examined whether expert testimony serves an educational or a persuasive function. Participants watched a simulated sexual abuse trial in which the child witness had been prepared for her testimony (i.e., she was calm, composed, and confident) or unprepared (i.e., emotional, confused, and uncertain). The trial contained different levels of expert testimony: none, standard (i.e., a summary of the research), repetitive (i.e., standard testimony plus a 2nd summary of the research), or concrete (i.e., standard testimony plus a hypothetical scenario linking the research to the case facts) testimony. Repetitive testimony bolstered the child's testimony, whereas concrete and standard testimony did not. Concrete testimony sensitized jurors to behavioral correlates of sexual victimization; standard and repetitive testimony desensitized jurors to these correlates. Implications for the use of procedural innovations in sexual abuse trials are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Court testimony of child sexual abuse victims: Emerging issues in clinical assessments.

Presents a case study of a 15-yr-old female witness in a sexual abuse trial and describes how testimony during cross-examination was improved after S's mental age was assessed using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—Revised (WISC—R) and after she was coached during a mock trial. Clinical criteria should be developed for assessing children's competency to give testimony, and the needs of child sexual abuse victims should be recognized. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strengthening our child abuse response system

Medical professionals are often the people who see children first, whether in the safety of a private office, clinic or an emergency room. Your ability to recognize and understand the symptoms of child abuse and neglect, your readiness to report findings to the report line and your availability to provide expert witness testimony are critical to the effectiveness of the child abuse response system in Delaware.     

Child eyewitnesses: Seeing is believing.

Two studies examined perceptions of child and adult eyewitnesses' credibility. In Study 1, college students evaluated transcribed testimonies of 8-year-old and adult witnesses to a videotaped staged crime. Half were misinformed about the witness's age (i.e., either believing a child's testimony was provided by an adult or vice versa). Neither actual age nor ostensible age affected participants' evaluations. In Study 2, adults (N?=?85) viewed videotaped testimonies of 8-year-old, 12-year-old, and adult eyewitnesses. Half viewed 1 witness's testimony and then evaluated his or her credibility. The others viewed only a still frame of 1 witness, then imagined the testimony the witness had provided, and finally evaluated his or her credibility without having actually heard the testimony. Young children were judged more favorably when their entire testimony, rather than a still frame, was viewed. This was not true for the older eyewitnesses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Object constancy: The illusion of being seen.

Recent theoretical advances in the concept of object constancy have placed it in the context of the child's establishing a separate identity. Although these advances were partly the result of examining the child's growing abilities to evoke a mental image of the absent mother, constancy cannot be well understood as a type of mental representation. It more resembles an illusion, specifically the illusion that the mother is constantly available in her mirroring function. The child's sense of his or her own reality is born in the mother's affectively attuned mirroring, as nothing about the child is real for the child until first seen by the mother. The illusion of the constant object allows the child to construct a sense of his or her own separate reality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lessons from Akiki and Michaels on shielding child witnesses.

The author uses interdisciplinary research to assess the value of physical confrontation when children are witnesses and the procedures used in determining whether to shield a child witness. She concludes that the value of physical confrontation in the child witness context has not been fully appreciated. Shielding impairs a defendant's right to present a defense in that a criminal defendant may legitimately want to confront a child witness to show an absence of fear and not to intimidate the child witness into silence. Shielding also may facilitate lying by a coached child witness. She further concludes that in making the decision to shield or not shield, trial court reliance on the testimony of parents and therapists is misplaced. Instead, the shielding determination should at a minimum include an analysis of any case-specific need for physical confrontation and the trial court's personal examination of the child witness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of gender and age on psychologists' reporting of child sexual abuse.

Psychologists evaluated the seriousness of a child sexual abuse incident in written vignettes, and they responded as to whether or not they would report the incident to protective services personnel. Data analysis revealed a significant main effect for the child's age as well as a significant 3-way interaction among the child's age, the gender of the alleged perpetrator, and the respondent's gender. Both female and male respondents viewed a perpetrator of their own gender with a young victim of either gender as the most serious scenario. In this sample, a significantly higher percentage of female respondents claimed to have failed to report an instance of suspected sexual abuse in actual clinical practice than the male respondents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the social psychology of hearsay evidence.

The issue of using hearsay evidence in cases involving children's testimony is a difficult one for both the legal scholar and psychological researcher. At best, the psychological research done so far can be considered only a 1st step along a long path of future efforts. The author suggests a framework for future work on hearsay and highlights 2 issues: the fidelity issue, which centers on whether hearsay witnesses provide better or worse accounts of events than do child witnesses; and the calibration issue, which refers to whether jurors give appropriate weight to factors that indicate accuracy or error on the part of the hearsay witness. For each, the author describes specific issues that social and cognitive psychological research indicates are central or problematic ones. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

From child to witness to jury: Effects of suggestion on the transmission and evaluation of hearsay.

Two interlocking experiments simulated the transmission of hearsay from children to adult hearsay witnesses and from the hearsay witnesses to jurors. Thirty-one children (ages 5–6 years) each observed a janitor either clean or play with toys in a laboratory. Each child was interrogated about the janitor in either a neutral manner that elicited an accurate account or a suggestive manner that elicited an inaccurate account of what the janitor had done. In Experiment 1, adult "witnesses" (N?=?112) each observed one of these interrogations and then recounted what the child had said. In Experiment 2, a 2nd group of adults in the role of jurors (N?=?104) each heard the account of one of the hearsay witnesses then made judgments about what the janitor had done. Jurors were sensitive to the quality of the hearsay evidence. They gave no weight to hearsay that recounted the inaccurate statements of a child who was questioned suggestively but gave appropriate weight to hearsay that recounted the accurate statements of children questioned in a neutral manner. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parents' beliefs about their children's cognitive abilities.

Examined mothers' judgments of their children's cognitive abilities and the relation between such judgments and the child's developmental level. 49 1st-grade children responded to tasks drawn from either the Piagetian literature or the Stanford-Binet IQ tests. Ss also completed a vocabulary test drawn from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Subsequently, each S's mother was asked various questions about probable response, both for her own child and for children in general. Results reveal that mothers were more accurate in predicting their child's success or failure on the IQ items than on the Piaget items. In both conditions, overestimations of ability were more common than underestimations. Estimates of age of mastery also showed overestimation, in some cases by several years. Data collected from 12 fathers indicate that fathers' patterns of response were similar to those of their wives. The correlations between accurate predictions by the mother and correct answers by the child were .85 in the Piaget condition and .49 in the IQ condition. Findings are compatible with the match hypothesis, which posits that the mother's knowledge of her child enables her to create an optimally challenging environment. (11 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mock Jurors' Perceptions of Child Witnesses: The Impact of Judicial Warning.

The present study examined the impact of a judicial warning, witness age, and the method of testimony presentation on mock jurors' perceptions of credibility of witnesses and accused, and on guilty verdicts. The participants were 435 undergraduate university students who listened to an audio-taped summary of a theft trial followed by abbreviated instructions to the jury. Witness age was 7, 10, or 23, the jury warning was either present or absent when witnesses were children, and the testimony by the prosecution eyewitness and accused were either presented or summarized. For the taped testimony conditions, the mock witnesses and the accused read a fact pattern describing the events in the case and were audiotaped as they answered a series of questions, which constituted direct and cross-examination. The testimony of the 7-year-old child, compared to the 10-year-old, was associated with lower cognitive competence and higher suggestibility, but also with higher accuracy of recall (lower mistaken recollection) and lower credibility of accused. The pattern of results for appraisal of the older child was more similar to that of an adult witness. The young adult was judged to be less trustworthy than children of either age. While the presence of a warning had no impact on guilty verdicts when a 7-year-old was a witness, there were fewer guilty verdicts when a witness was 10 years old. Participants also made fewer guilty verdicts when a young adult's testimony, compared to conditions involving child witnesses, was presented, but not when it was summarized. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Innovations for child witnesses: A national survey.

Numerous innovative procedural reforms have been proposed concerning child victims involved in legal cases. In this study, 153 district attorney offices nationwide were surveyed about their use of innovations, their perceptions of the innovations' effectiveness, reasons why they opt not to utilize innovations, and defense strategies used with child witnesses. Prosecutors were also asked about the type of cases they encountered in which children testified. Prosecutors reported mainly using inexpensive, easy-to-implement innovations, which were also typically rated as helpful in reducing children's trauma and enhancing guilty outcomes. Prosecutors reported rarely using expert witnesses and innovations that altered how children were interviewed or how they testified. The most common types of cases in which children testified involved sexual abuse. Frequent defense strategies to challenge child credibility concerned suggestibility, inaccurate memory, coaching, and delays in reporting abuse. Results are discussed in relation to the need for increased social science research on procedural reforms for child witnesses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social attributions and conversation style in trial testimony.

83 undergraduates and 43 law students heard either a male or a female witness in a taped reenactment of criminal trial testimony. The testimony was presented either in a "fragmented" style, with brief answers by the witness to many questions by the lawyer, or in a "narrative" style, with long answers to few questions. Consideration of adversary court norms and sex stereotypes led to the prediction that Ss would attribute favorable evaluation of the witness by the lawyer in the female witness–narrative style condition and unfavorable evaluation of the witness by the lawyer in the male witness–fragmented style condition. The prediction with respect to the female witness was confirmed only with law students; the prediction with respect to the male witness was confirmed only with undergraduates. Ss' own evaluations of the witness showed the same pattern of effects. Implications for social perception and social psychology of law are discussed. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Impact of child sexual abuse: A review of the research.

Reviews studies that have tried to empirically confirm the effects of child sexual abuse cited in the clinical literature. In regard to initial effects, empirical studies have indicated reactions—in at least some portion of the victim population—of fear, anxiety, depression, anger and hostility, aggression, and sexually inappropriate behavior. Frequently reported long-term effects include depression and self-destructive behavior, anxiety, feelings of isolation and stigma, poor self-esteem, difficulty in trusting others, a tendency toward revictimization, substance abuse, and sexual maladjustment. The kinds of abuse that appear to be most damaging are experiences involving father figures, genital contact, and force. The effects of duration and frequency of abuse, age at onset, the child's reporting of the offense, parental reaction, and institutional response are also considered. The controversy over the impact of child sexual abuse is discussed. (49 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trivial persuasion in the courtroom: The power of (a few) minor details.

Investigated the influence of trivial testimonial detail on judgments of 424 undergraduates who served as mock jurors. Ss read a summary of a court case involving robbery and murder. In Experiment 1, detailed testimony influenced judgments of guilt, even when the detail was unrelated to the culprit. In Experiment 2, detailed testimony was especially powerful when an opposing witness testified that she could not remember the trivial details. Subsequent analyses suggest that the impact of detailed testimony on guilt judgments is mediated by inferences about the eyewitnesses. When eyewitnesses provided more detail, they were generally judged to be more credible, to have a better memory for the culprit's face and for details, and to have paid more attention to the culprit. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)