By Nina Totenberg | NPR | November 2, 2015

The U.S. Supreme Court wrestles Monday with a problem that has long plagued the criminal justice system: race discrimination in the selection of jurors. Continue reading »

By Sara Zhang | WIRED | August 3, 2015

JAMES HOLMES WALKED into a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 carrying three guns including a semi-automatic rifle and opened fire, killing 12 people and injuring 70 more. Nobody, not even his defense attorneys, denied that. But those attorneys still told a jury and a judge that Holmes was not guilty of those crimes—because he was insane. Last month, that jury rejected that assertion, finding Holmes guilty on all counts.

Holmes’ plea didn’t get him off, but it did get people talking about the insanity defense again. It’s a rare move for defense attorneys these days, even quaint sounding. Psychiatrists no longer call patients “insane.” It’s not a clinical diagnosis. Yet the term persists in the courtroom—along with many other practices unsupported by modern psychology and neuroscience.

Americans inherited a legal system shaped by history, not by science. “The legal system is resistant to change and resistant to paying attention to scientific research,” says Adam Benforado, a law professor at Drexel University and author of the recent book Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice. The system assumes that innocent people don’t confess to crimes they didn’t commit. It presumes that eyewitness testimonies are reliable. It counts on the impartiality of jurors.

None of those things are borne out by evidence.

Continue reading »

By Ana Swanson | The Washington Post | July 20, 2015

We like to believe that decisions made in U.S. courts are determined by the wisdom of the Constitution, and guided by fair-minded judges and juries of our peers.

Unfortunately, this is often wishful thinking. Unsettling research into the psychology of courtroom decisions has shown that our personal backgrounds, unconscious biases about race, gender and appearance, and even the time of day play a more important role in outcomes than the actual law.

Adam Benforado, a professor of law at Drexel University, describes these unsettling problems with the justice system in the recently published book “Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice.” The book uses psychology and neuroscience to examine and expose the illogical and unfair ways that judges, jurors, attorneys and others in the legal system make decisions about who is sent to prison, and who walks free.

Benforado’s research shows that mistakes in the criminal justice system are more common than we like to think, and that our personal biases play a disturbingly strong role. He also argues that there are clear and easy steps that we could follow to limit these injustices, if we care to take them. Continue reading »