In 1984, 10 Washington, D.C., teenagers allegedly forced Catherine Fuller into an alley, where they punched, kicked, hit, robbed, sodomized and killed her. Lacking physical evidence, detectives relied on eyewitnesses, including 16-year-old Carrie Eleby, who told detectives that one of the teens had confessed to the crime. The resulting investigation led to several indictments, among them two defendants who pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution. Despite the circumstantial evidence in the case, a jury found seven teenagers guilty of armed robbery, kidnapping and felony murder.
In 2010, two of the defendants, Russell Overton and Charles Turner, sought to vacate their sentence in light of new evidence suggesting that the prosecution withheld information, most notably that the prosecution knew about a violent criminal who operated in the area where Fuller was killed and was known for sodomizing female victims. Overton and Turner also called into question the credibility of eyewitness Eleby, a PCP user they claimed provided misleading statements to the police.
According to Brady v. Maryland (1963), the prosecution must disclose all evidence favorable and material to the defense. In their appeal, Overton and Turner posited that defendants must demonstrate a reasonable likelihood—not a legal certainty—that withheld evidence would have affected the jury's verdict. They noted that the faulty eyewitness testimony of a PCP user and the possible involvement of another violent criminal provided a reasonable likelihood that jurors would have viewed an "alternative perpetrator" defense as legitimate. The prosecution disagreed, claiming that the state had met its Brady burden, and that the undisclosed information would not have affected the verdict. Given the lack of clarity regarding exonerating evidence in Brady, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari (an order to review the lower court's decision) to determine whether the defendants' sentences should be vacated.
If prosecutors fail to provide defendants with exculpatory evidence at trial, is it possible to know how jurors might have used that information? Psychological research may provide answers. The "Story Model" proposed by Nancy Pennington, PhD, and Reid Hastie, PhD, in 1986 posits that jurors create a story-based narrative for a crime, integrating each new piece of information into a cohesive story framework. Would the "story" differ with the addition—or suppression—of exonerating evidence?
According to research on predecisional distortion, jurors incorporate information into their verdict stories in a biased manner, altering new evidence to support whichever verdict they tentatively favor (Carlson & Russo, 2001). Like confirmation bias, predecisional distortion may alter how much weight jurors give exculpatory evidence.
Yet jurors may be unwilling to adjust their narratives when it comes to hypothetical evidence, be it exonerating or incriminating. Eerland and Rassin (2010) provided mock jurors with a trial in which investigators looked for incriminating versus exonerating evidence, and either found or failed to find such evidence. As expected, finding incriminating evidence increased guilt verdicts while finding exonerating evidence lowered guilt verdicts. Yet failing to find exonerating or incriminating evidence led to similar verdicts, suggesting that jurors weighted the presence of found evidence as more important than the absence of possible evidence. Psychologically, this argues against Overton and Turner's assertions that withholding evidence affected the jury, but the Supreme Court's decision—expected in this month—will provide a definitive legal decision.
"Judicial Notebook" is a project of APA Div. 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues).
