A defendant's mental illness can be an important influence on jurors making punishment decisions in capital cases. The broad goals of this line of research are to identify the ways in which juror perceptions of the mentally ill and their evaluations of legally recognized aggravating and mitigating factors interact with the evidence presented in capital trials to create punishment decisions of death or life in prison. The long-term objective of this research is to better understand jury decisionmaking at the sentencing phase of death penalty trials.
The specific aims of this proposal are as follows:
Specific Aim 1 is to ascertain which specific aggravating and mitigating factors (with particular attention to mental health factors) are being argued in capital trials and to what effect.
Specific Aim 2 is to assess the ways in which juror beliefs and attitudes about the mentally ill influence penalty decisions in capital cases.
Specific Aim 3 is to identify the mediating constructs (e.g. inferences about criminality, responsibility, blameworthiness, heinousness, deterability, etc.) that jurors use to think about and evaluate evidence when making penalty decisions in capital cases.
Specific Aim 4 is to identify specific case situations where mitigating circumstances, including mental illness of the defendant, may sway jury sentencing decisions.
Specific Aim 5 is to map and formulate a general model of the relationships among jurors' beliefs and attitudes, case situations, and mediating constructs that are employed when jurors are making capital punishment decisions.
