OBJECTIVE When an officer places a suspect in an identification procedure and the witness identifies the suspect, it falls on attorneys to make decisions that reflect the strength of that identification. The factor that most affects the strength of identification evidence is the likelihood that the suspect is guilty before being subjected to the procedure, which scholars refer to as the prior probability of guilt. Given large racial disparities in exonerations based on eyewitness misidentifications, the current work examined whether defense attorneys are less sensitive to prior evidence of guilt when the defendant is Black as opposed to White. HYPOTHESES We predicted that when the defendant's race was described as White rather than Black, attorneys' judgments would be more sensitive to variations in the evidence that would influence the base rate of guilt. We also predicted that attorneys would rate the case as stronger when the victim's race was described as White rather than Black. METHOD We gave 316 defense attorneys case files (modeled after the New York Police Department's style) that varied the strength of the preidentification evidence (strong vs. weak), the race of the defendant (Black vs. White), and the race of the victim (Black vs. White). RESULTS Attorneys made judgments that were sensitive to the base rate of guilt, but self-report measures demonstrated that they did not understand the extent to which the base rate of guilt influences the reliability of eyewitness evidence. Participants also rated the strength of the preidentification evidence as stronger for Black than for White defendants. CONCLUSIONS Although attorneys are intuitively sensitive to the strength of preidentification evidence, they lack conscious awareness of how a suspect's prior probability of guilt affects likelihood of a mistaken identification, which may have implications for their ability to make race-neutral evaluations of preidentification evidence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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嫌疑人种族会影响辩护律师对预识别证据的评估。


目标 当警官将嫌疑人置于辨认程序中并且证人辨认嫌疑人时，律师需要做出反映该辨认强度的决定。对鉴定证据强度影响最大的因素是嫌疑人在接受程序之前有罪的可能性，学者们将其称为有罪先验概率。鉴于基于目击者错误识别的无罪判决存在巨大的种族差异，当前的工作研究了当被告是黑人而不是白人时，辩护律师是否对先前的有罪证据不太敏感。假设我们预测，当被告的种族被描述为白人而不是黑人时，律师的判断将对影响基本有罪率的证据变化更加敏感。我们还预测，当受害者的种族被描述为白人而不是黑人时，律师会认为此案更有说服力。方法 我们提供了 316 份辩护律师的案件档案（以纽约警察局的风格为蓝本），这些档案改变了预识别证据的强度（强与弱）、被告的种族（黑人与白人）以及被告人的种族。受害者（黑人与白人）。结果 律师做出的判断对基本有罪率很敏感，但自我报告措施表明，他们不了解基本有罪率对目击证人证据可靠性的影响程度。参与者还认为黑人被告的预识别证据强度比白人被告更强。 结论 尽管律师对预识别证据的强度直觉上很敏感，但他们缺乏对嫌疑人先验犯罪概率如何影响错误识别可能性的自觉意识，这可能会影响他们对预识别证据进行种族中立评估的能力。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。