Sarah McFadden '08 was recently named the 2008 recipient of the Best Undergraduate Paper Award from the American Psychology-Law Society (APLS), an international organization of psychologists, lawyers, and legal scholars.
The award for Best Undergraduate Paper is given for outstanding undergraduate research papers focused on the interdisciplinary study of psychology and law. McFadden's senior thesis, Juvenile Offenders, Expert Testimony, and Mock Jurors' Sentencing Recommendations had already been selected "Best Thesis" by the psychology department at CMC last spring.
McFadden's thesis was inspired by a paper she wrote her junior year, examining teenagers convicted of murder in the United States and sentenced to long stints in prison. The topic focused on how the punitive practice is in conflict with modern research on adolescent development.
"For my senior thesis, I wanted to conduct an empirical study looking at whether mock jurors are also punitive in their sentencing recommendations, or if their sentence recommendations are more lenient and therefore more consistent with the emerging literature on adolescent development," said McFadden, explaining how her experiment was conducted. "I determined this by having several different experimental conditions; the age of the defendant and the type of evidence presented at trial were varied.
"I found that unlike judges in our criminal justice system, mock jurors sentenced juvenile offenders to significantly shorter sentences than adult offenders," McFadden says. "I also found that when an expert on adolescent development testified, juvenile offenders received even shorter prison sentences than when no such testimony was presented.
"Receiving the AP-LS Award was exciting news, but I owe the success of the paper to all the people who helped me in the process," McFadden says, crediting her reader, professor of psychology Mark Costanzo, and associate professor of psychology Dan Krauss, "as well as the CMC department of psychology as a whole."
"Sarah did a terrific job of summarizing the research on adolescent brain development and creating a realistic mock trial," Costanzo said.
(An abstract of McFadden's senior thesis is included below):
"Research in developmental psychology suggests that the adolescents' poor decision-making abilities. This study examined how mock jurors sentence a defendant convicted of murder as a function of defendant age and presentation of expert testimony. One hundred undergraduate students participated in the study. Results revealed that defendant age affected juror verdictssuch that a 15-year-old defendant received significantly less prison time than a 30-year-old defendant. Mock jurors listening to expert testimony on adolescent development or traumatic brain injury recommended significantly less prison time for the defendant than mock jurors not listening to expert testimony. Implications for the sentencing of juvenile defendants in the criminal justice system are discussed."
Joshua Bowling '12