What Were You Thinking? How Jurors Read Your Guilty Mind
"A central tenet of Anglo-American penal law is that in order for an
actor to be found criminally liable, a proscribed act must be
accompanied by a guilty mind. While it is easy to understand the
importance of this principle in theory, in practice it requires jurors
and judges to decide what a person was thinking months or years earlier
at the time of the alleged offense, either about the results of his
conduct or about some elemental fact (such as whether the briefcase he
is carrying contains drugs). Despite the central importance of this task
in the administration of criminal justice, there has been very little
research investigating how people go about making these decisions, and
how these decisions relate to their intuitions about culpability.
Understanding the cognitive mechanisms that govern this task is
important for the law, not only to explore the possibility of systemic
biases and errors in attributions of culpability but also to probe the
intuitions that underlie them."
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