Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/307698 
Year of Publication: 
2024
Series/Report no.: 
Discussion Papers of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods No. 2024/17
Publisher: 
Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn
Abstract: 
Defendants should be judged on the merits of the case, not on prejudice, rumors, or evidence obtained through questionable methods. This is why criminal law of procedure regulates which information can be introduced in a trial. Two types of prohibited evidence are the criminal history of the defendant (the defendant shall not be considered more likely guilty since he had earlier been convicted for another crime), and information harvested from an unauthorized wiretap. In a series of online vignette experiments involving 1432 US participants, we show that character evidence never makes it significantly more likely that the defendant is judged guilty, whereas wiretap evidence has a strong effect. Various interventions aimed at debiasing the adjudicator have an effect, but this effect is insufficient to neutralize the bias.
Subjects: 
criminal procedure
character evidence
wiretap
bias
debiasing
JEL: 
C91
D02
D84
D91
K14
K41
K42
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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