Maureen O`Sullivan

Last year, I was helping a trial lawyer with jury selection. After the preliminary hearing, we met to discuss our strikes. This lawyer vehemently insisted that one of the jurors was lying and had to be struck. He knew in his gut that the juror had lied and there was no way he was going to keep on the jury. She went, and we will never know whether or not she was telling the truth.

Is it possible to tell whether a juror is lying? Over the years, much of psychological research has been conducted to see if there are behaviors that are correlated with the lie. To very briefly summarize this research, the following behaviors have been found to be associated with deception: - Vocal behavior: Increased height of the speaker 's voice, decreased levels of articulation, hesitation not to speak, and short answers. - Micro Expressions: short head shaking, decreased or increased eye contact, breaking eye contact by interfering body movements (like adjusting his glasses one), mouth, or briefly covering his. - Face Body posture covering ': A rigid and generally frozen posture and / or a defensive posture (backward lean, arm crossing, and leg crossing).

It would appear relatively easy to detect deception, but evidence of a number of studies point to exactly the opposite direction. In 1999, Paul Ekman and Maureen O'Sullivan published the results of a groundbreaking study, "Who can catch a liar in the American Psychologist (Vol. 46, No. 9, 913-920). They recruited 509 people and tested their ability to detect people lying. Among the subjects were members of the CIA, FBI, DEA, NSA, and the secret services and Polygraphists professional judges and psychiatrists. The sample did not include jury consultants. One might expect that these people more than anyone would be able to determine who was lying (to the authors describe, they are "sensors are working). They have each shown videotapes of a dozen people, half the people were lying and half were told the truth. Only the Secret Service agents performed significantly better than the chance of scoring them liars. Even these agents classified some liars as truth tellers and vice versa. All other groups subject performed no better or worse than chance. Ekman and O'Sullivan the assumption that intelligence agents have been trained to pay more attention to subtle facial expressions to say, in fact, there are special people who may be better at detecting deception than others. However, Ekman, O'Sullivan and other researchers have found more "but":

There was no relationship between the person has confidence in its ability to detect deception and its real capacity. - There is some evidence that those who are more experienced are less able to detect lying than novices. - Many behavioral traits related to the sea are also associated with anxiety, a feeling many honest jurors have during voir dire. - It is easier to detect deception over time in a controlled environment (not in a courtroom). - And some people are more likely to lie than others. After all, people are more practiced at deceiving than in the detection of deception.

So what about the trial attorney? Beware of consultants who tell you they can choose jurors who are lying (however, confident that they are), question your instincts, stick with the profiles you have developed, and, most importantly, stick the history of presentation that you will tell. Or, you could hire a Secret Service agent.