Effects of victim attractiveness, care and disfigurement on the judgements of American and British mock jurors*

For almost all crimes, the appearance and behaviour of the victim are legally irrelevant to a defendant's guilt or innocence. However, there is evidence that such extralegal victim characteristics can influence juror behaviour. This paper reports an experimental juror simulation which examined the effects on mock jurors' verdicts of three victim characteristics—facial disfigurement, precautiousness and physical attractiveness. Subjects were drawn from student populations in both the US and the UK. Under most experimental conditions, the defendant was less likely to be convicted when the victim took every reasonable precaution to avoid the crime than when the victim took no such precautions. The opposite effect resulted when the victim was both physically unattractive and facially disfigured prior to the crime. These results were interpreted in terms of Lerner's just world theory and the principle of comparative negligence. The degree of harm done to the victim was implicated as a key mediator of victim characteristic effects. The effects on verdicts were also related to subjects' verdict criteria (standards of reasonable doubt) and their perceived costs of committing the ‘Type II’ juridic error (i.e. acquitting a guilty defendant). Although several cross-cultural differences were obtained, the effects of the victim characteristics on subjects' verdicts were identical for the British and American samples.