In 2014, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shot and killed Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old black youth. In his police report, Van Dyke claimed that McDonald had pointed a knife toward Van Dyke and advanced at him, at which time he shot McDonald in self-defense. Yet, video from a camera mounted on a police cruiser dashboard revealed that McDonald was actually walking away from Van Dyke when the officer began shooting, and he continued to shoot while McDonald lay on the ground. After determining that nine of the 16 bullets fired entered McDonald’s back, the Cook County coroner ruled McDonald’s death a homicide.
Thirteen months later, Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder. It was the first time in almost 35 years that a Chicago police officer was charged with murder for a death caused while on duty. The significant turnaround in the handling of such cases was likely due to the dash-cam video of Van Dyke killing McDonald. In recent years, many instances of police-inflicted injury and death have been captured by dash cams, bodycams, smartphones and surveillance cameras. Yet little is known about how such video influences outcomes for police who go to trial as defendants.
Cases like the murder of Laquan McDonald raise a variety of issues relevant to understanding jury decision-making in the trials of police defendants. Among them is intense public anger. The video showing McDonald’s murder led to public outrage and mass protests over the next several years in Chicago, as well as a growing distrust of the police. This phenomenon has implications for understanding the attitudes of citizens in the jury pool, who may be more skeptical of police than in the past.
In addition, because a video of an incident of police violence may be circulated widely before an officer’s trial begins, it may be difficult to identify jurors who have not seen the video or its resulting media coverage, or who have at least remained unbiased by such pretrial publicity. Even after jurors are seated in a trial, it is important to ensure they are not exposed to publicity while the trial is in progress.
The growth of video technology also has increased the likelihood that video evidence of injurious or deadly, yet contested, police interactions will be introduced during trial, directly affecting jurors’ decisions. Although jurors have been found to perceive police witnesses as more credible than lay witnesses, when police testimony is contradicted by video evidence, jurors might be more likely to believe what they see with their own eyes. Jurors generally find video evidence to be particularly reliable and convincing, in part because they consider video to be a reflection of objective reality. Indeed, one juror in Van Dyke’s case—the only black juror—indicated that Van Dyke should never have testified because he came off as not believable.
It has long been recognized that advances in technology can be an impetus for changes in laws and policy. As the murder of Laquan McDonald and other cases like it illustrate, technological advances also have the potential to shape justice through juror decision-making. In October 2018, nearly four years after McDonald’s death, a jury found Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery—a conviction that bucked historical patterns and might reflect the beginning of a new trend toward police accountability.
An earlier version of this article originally appeared on the OUPBlog at https://blog.oup.com/2018/12/how-video-influence-juror-decision-making-police-defendants/opens in new window. For further reading, see Criminal Juries in the 21st Century: Psychological Science and the Lawopens in new window, an edited volume published in 2018 by Cynthia Najdowski and Margaret Stevenson.
“Judicial Notebook” is a project of APA Div. 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues).
