Research team receives grant to study psycho-legal aspects of central criminal justice concept

Photo by Christina Ulian

Faculty members of the research team: Nick Bala and Lisa Dufraimont of Queen’s Law; McGill child psychologist Victoria Talwar; and Queen’s forensic psychologist Rod Lindsay. Absent: U of T child development expert Kang Lee

It has long been a key principle of common-law justice systems that the conviction of an accused criminal must be based on “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” (PBRD). Now, with a $190,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Professor Nick Bala, Law ’77, will head a multidisciplinary team studying how well the concept is actually applied.

“Despite its widespread use, there is little psycho-legal research on how well jurors grasp the PBRD principle or how effectively judges instruct them in it,” says Bala, a leading scholar on family and children’s law.

The new study, “Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Bridging Psychological and Legal Perspectives,” will examine two of the most common issues in criminal trials: assessing the credibility of child and adult witnesses who are victims of assault, and assessing the reliability of witnesses identifying suspects in a police lineup.

Whereas past studies asked in a general way how subjects assessed the credibility of witnesses, the new research will focus specifically on assessments based on the PBRD standard. The study will use videotapes of adults and children making statements about true and fictitious criminal events. The videos will be shown to adult subjects -- including lay persons, judges, Crown attorneys, teachers and police officers -- to assess the extent to which standardized instructions about PBRD assist when determining witness credibility.

The study will explore what should be said to jurors, as the court’s triers of fact, about the concept of PBRD to make their assessments of credibility more effective. “The results will have implications for most common-law systems,” Bala says. “In Canada, it could determine whether the Supreme Court standard is too demanding or not demanding enough in what it expects judges to say in their instructions to juries.”
 
This project, due to be completed by 2014, builds on research by the team Bala has led since 1999: Queen's Professor Rod Lindsay, a forensic psychologist for more than 30 years; Professor Kang Lee, a University of Toronto expert in psychology and child development; and Professor Victoria Talwar (MA’99, PhD’03), a McGill University child psychologist.

Professor Lisa Dufraimont of Queen's Law, an evidence and criminal law expert, is also participating. She’s excited to join this established research team, she says. “The project dovetails with my previous research on jury decision-making.”

Bala is concurrently a co-investigator of another SSHRC-funded project studying the effect on children and their divorcing parents of being involved in the family justice system. “The link between the two studies is the questions they ask: How is the justice system doing in understanding children and dealing with their problems in different situations? How can it be improved?”