A Judge’s Decision Has Potential Bias Due To Crime :: Legal Research Papers

A Judge’s Decision Has Potential Bias Due To Crime Introduction A Clemson University Student named Erin Brophy did an experiment to see if there was potential bias in a legal case depending on the crime. She did this after hearing about an experiment performed by Dr. Ben Stephens and Dr. Spurgeon Cole. They wanted to know if a prior association between a lawyer and a judge had potential judicial bias. Erin Brophy found that there is no difference in crime whether a judge will be biased. She surveyed people to see what their opinion was. The two crimes in her study were burglary and murder (Brophy). Because there was no difference in her experiment, we wanted to make the differences in the crimes more extreme. We wanted to find whether there is a difference between shoplifting and murder. We predicted that there will be more bias for the lawyer in the murder case and that the judge should be removed. Methods We gave the survey to 160 people for this experiment. There were 16 experiments and each experiment collected 10 surveys, five with the crime being shoplifting and the other half being murder. There was a lot of variability in selection methods. One example was selecting friends to take the survey. The participants included both male and females. The final sample size was 120 people. 64% were females and 36% were males. The age range of the participants was 17 to 25. The mean age was 19.69. Materials A survey was given to the participants to see if the judge would be bias for or against the attorney, and if he should be removed from the case. The survey asked the person’s gender and age. The next two questions asked if there was potential bias for and against the attorney. The last question asked if the judge should be excused from the case. The type of crime had two different versions. On half of the surveys, the crime was shoplifting and the other half was murder. The measurement of the bias from the questions was by circling â€Å"yes† or â€Å"no.