open access
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open access
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ISSN : 2093-3843
This study tested the effect of the verdict category of lay-participation trial in Korea on the legal decision of layperson and the role of representation of ‘innocent’ in the process. Representation of ‘innocent’ refers to a psychological threshold for deciding someone’s innocence (no fault or sin) in a general sense. The functions as a threshold for a legal decision of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt (BRD)’ and the individual threshold (IT), regarded as a standard for judgment of guilt established by law and an estimate of an individual’s threshold, respectively, were compared. This study used a 2×2 complete factorial design in which the verdict category (guilty/innocent vs. guilty/not guilty) and the defendant’s likelihood of guilt (low vs. high) were manipulated. Data from 137 lay-people who voluntarily participated in the online experiment was analyzed. The experiment’s procedure was in the order of measuring ‘representation of innocent’ and the likelihood of guilt of an accused, presenting one of four trial vignettes, and obtaining legal decisions (verdict confidence and estimation of the likelihood of guilt for the defendant). As a result, it was found that the verdict category did not significantly affect the legal decision of layperson. However, the guilty verdict rate of the ‘guilty/innocent’ condition tended to be higher than those of the ‘guilty/not guilty’ condition. The layperson’s representation of ‘innocent’ and the verdict category had an interaction effect on the difference between BRD and IT (threshold change) at the significance level of .1. In the ‘guilty/innocent’ condition, the threshold change varying with layperson’s representation of ‘innocent’ was larger than in the ‘guilty/not guilty’ condition. In comparing the function of BRD and IT, IT significantly predicted the lay person’s legal decision at the significance level of .1 by interacting with the likelihood of guilt for the defendant. Therefore, it could be said that IT was a better threshold estimator than BRD. The implication of this study is that it provided experimental evidence for the effect of the verdict category of lay-participation trial in Korea, which is a problem often raised among lawyers, and suggested logical reasoning and empirical grounds for the psychological mechanism of the possible effect.
In this study, focused group interviews with 24 incumbent judges were conducted on how they conceptualize public opinion and what attitude they take toward it in relation to judicial trials. The contents of the interviews were analyzed through grounded theory and topic modeling (STM). According to the grounded theory results, judges distinguished concepts such as social rules, socially accepted ideas, legal emotion, and public mood from public opinion, and subdivided public opinion into temporary and emotional reactions to specific legal cases and consistent attitudes toward law and policies. In addition, it was found that judges' attitudes toward public opinion and social norms differed depending on the type of cases or legal issues. Topic modeling results significantly corresponded to the grounded theory results. In this model, the effects of the types of cases dedicated to participants on topical prevalence were statistically significant.
This article aims to explore the possibility of forgiving among serious juvenile offenders placed in correctional facilities, as an alternative to current correctional approaches. The definition, characteristics, and misconceptions of forgiveness were outlined, and the two major models of forgiveness were introduced. The differences between the two concepts of forgiveness in psychological literature and in restorative justice were addressed. Based on the prior studies on the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences in serious juvenile delinquents and a recent forgiveness project conducted in a maximum-security prison, it was argued that it would be possible for a small number of serious juvenile offenders in correctional facilities to forgive someone who did injustice in the past, which would result in an improvement in the outcomes of correctional education and treatment. Some limitations of this article and the need of further studies were pointed out as well.
Profiling is recognized as a representative application area of domestic criminal psychology, and the National Police Agency profiler is firmly established as a profession. However, compared to the social awareness, the recognition and utilization within the police is not high. In this study, we tried to identify factors affecting the intention to use profiling by identifying the perception of investigators who request and use profiling from a profiler when a violent incident occurs. To this end, the relationship between the perception of the importance of factors considered by investigators in the criminal investigation process and the attitude toward profiling on the intention to use profiling was verified through the path model. As a result of a survey of 340 police investigators, the investigator's perception of the importance of investigation elements was divided into two factors: the importance of normative investigative elements (evidence collection and legal judgment, etc.) and factual investigative elements (criminal analysis, criminal information system analysis, etc.). Among them, the importance of factual investigative elements were found to have a positive effect on the intention to use it by mediating the attitude toward profiling. On the other hand, in the case of the importance of normative investigative elements, it was found to have a negative effect on the attitude toward profiling. These results suggest that the perception that investigators have about investigation, which is their main work area, plays a role in determining whether to request profiling as well as attitude towards profiling. Based on the research results, strategies necessary to activate the use of profiling were discussed.