Terror in the Justice System: Effects of Defendant Race and Religion on Juror Decision-Making in a Criminal Trial
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
New Canadian anti-terror legislation was passed in 2015, expanding the scope of criminal offences to include advocating or promoting terrorism offences in general. This study explored juror perceptions of the applicability of this law by having participants read a trial transcript involving this charge in which the defendant's race (Black/White/Arab) and religion (Christian/Muslim/undisclosed) were manipulated. Participants provided a guilty/not guilty verdict, then answered a brief questionnaire on attributions of the defendant's actions and stereotypes held by the Canadian public. Results demonstrated that two attribution measures, defendant stability and defendant responsibility, were related to verdict outcome. Of note, at middling levels of defendant responsibility, the defendant's religion influenced verdict outcome, leading to more guilty verdicts for Muslim defendants. Furthermore, although defendant religion only showed a weak effect on verdict outcome, results indicated that this might operate via stereotypes of the defendant's religious group. Additionally, at some levels defendant stability and defendant responsibility were related to the strength of the effect produced by stereotypes of the defendant's religious group. Although White Canadians received lower stereotype ratings than Black or Arab Canadians, White defendants received more internal ratings of attribution than either Black or Arab defendants. Muslim Canadians received higher stereotype ratings than Christian Canadians and Canadians with no disclosed religion, and Muslim defendants' actions were perceived as less stable than Christian defendants or defendants with no disclosed religion.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it