By Greg Battye and Meredith Rossner
One of the strongest features of the study (using the mock trial, ‘the Sydney Bomber Case’), was the thoughtful and often heated deliberations carried out by the 12 jury groups. Some of the jurors, whose expectations were shaped by TV drama, were disappointed about the lack of blood and guts in the interactive displays. Others used the displays to take issue with the conclusions of the prosecution witness. Most found that the visual evidence gave them a fuller understanding of the case.
This chapter explores such questions as:
- What did the juries think of the interactive virtual environment and other images presented to them at trial?
- What did the jury learn from the visual evidence?
- How did the juries respond to expert witness testimony about the visual evidence?
- Does television shape jury expectations about evidence – the ‘CSI effect’?
This chapter is useful for:
- Lawyers, police and national security officers, judges and court officials
- Expert witnesses and forensic scientists
- Students, teachers, researchers – in Law, Psychology and Communications
- Communications practitioners and creators of digital products used in courts
- Policymakers
- Journalists.
The book
This chapter is in the book Juries, Science and Popular Culture in the Age of Terror
Other related chapters
The chapter uses insights from a mock trial, ‘the Sydney Bomber Case’, that involved a fictional alleged terrorist incident in which a young white man was accused of placing a bomb on a train that exploded after he alighted, killing innocent commuters in the centre of Sydney.
Other chapters that provide research insights arising from the ‘the Sydney Bomber Case’ are:
Chapter 4: Animating the Bomber: The Sydney Bomber Trial
Chapter 7: Displaying the Bomb on the Train: The Challenge of Preparing Visual Evidence
Chapter 8: Research Aims and Methods
Chapter 9: The Sydney Bomber Study: Introducing the Mock Jurors
Chapter 10: Images of Interactive Virtual Environments: Do They Affect Verdict?
Chapter 12: CSI Effects on Jury Reasoning and Verdicts
Chapter 13: The Effect of Deliberation on Jury Verdicts
Chapter 14: Making Sense of The Evidence: Jury Deliberation and Common Sense