Jurors swayed by witnesses’ body language risk putting foot wrong

‘One “juror” doubted a complainant’s testimony because he couldn’t make eye contact with anybody’

JUDGES should instruct jurors to ignore witnesses’ body language as taking it into consideration increases the risk of them coming to an inaccurate verdict, scientists have said.

Academics at Glasgow and Warwick universities said miscarriages of justice can occur when juries base their decisions on factors such as eye contact, fidgeting and hand movements. The researchers set up 64 mock juries, involving a total of 863 participants. Half of them watched a rape trial and half an assault trial performed by actors in the High Court in Edinburgh. They were told to consider the witnesses’ body language during their deliberations, which lasted up to 90 minutes and were recorded.

The research, published in The International Journal of Evidence and Proof, found several jurors reached false conclusions when assessing body language to determine whether witnesses were being truthful. One “juror” doubted a complainant’s testimony in the assault trial because he “couldn’t make eye contact with anybody”.

In the rape trial, the accused’s credibility was doubted by one juror because he “kept looking away”.

Fidgeting was seen as suspicious, with one juror saying, of a witness: “I think he is lying by the way he was fidgeting and didn’t look right.”

Other examples included jurors doubting credibility because “the witness’s neck was straining” or “the witness kept licking his lips”.

Prof James Chalmers and Prof Fiona Leverick, of Glasgow University, and Prof Vanessa Munro, of Warwick University, the report’s authors, said that their findings suggested miscarriage of justices could happen in real trials.

They said: “That the jurors drew on body language in this way is perhaps unsurprising, as they had been specifically directed by the judge to do so.

“The confidence with which jurors [wrongly] pointed to particular aspects of body language as signifying veracity or deception was, however, remarkable.

“Such assumptions run contrary to the prevailing view in the research, which is that witnesses can be nervous when testifying for all sorts of reasons unrelated to veracity.

“In several juries, we observed these false assertions being made with marked confidence by jurors, who stated for example that the witness’s body language ‘stuck out’ or was ‘obviously’ a sign of guilt.

“Another juror claimed they were ‘quite familiar with body language’, but proceeded to place weight on the fact that witness had ‘looked to the left’.

“These findings raise crucial questions regarding the extent to which jurors’ assessments of witness credibility … are robust and reliable.”

If jurors placed unfounded weight on such cues, they said, “we risk inaccurate verdicts”.