NCJ Number
142801
Journal
Law and Human Behavior Volume: 17 Issue: 3 Dated: (June 1993) Pages: 261-276
Date Published
1993
Length
16 pages
Annotation
A sample of 137 undergraduate students was used to examine issues related to judicial instructions (traditional American Law Institute vs. Guilty But Mentally Ill [GBMI]), based on an insanity defense vignette portraying a highly psychotic defendant.
Abstract
The study explored whether previous findings concerning juror construal in insanity cases were due simply to verdict justification effects; whether GBMI instructions directly influence the construal process or only the verdict selection process; and whether a between-instructions comparison of construals clarifies the nature of the shifting in verdicts that accompanies the GBMI verdict. These results refined previous research by showing that verdict distributions were unaltered by the order of construal measurement and that levels of construal ratings and the close association between construals and verdicts did not differ across orders of measurement. The mechanism of the GBMI effect on individual decision making appears to lie in some process other than a direct influence upon responsibility construal dimensions. However, the verdict selection process is clearly affected by the availability of the GBMI option, even in cases involving highly psychotic defendants. The between-instruction comparisons of construals indicated that insanity and guilty verdicts reached in response to GBMI instructions corresponded to attributionally more extreme judgments. 2 tables and 26 references