Looks

Why They Matter More Than You Ever Imagined

Author: Dr. Gordon L. Patzer
Pub Date: 2007
Your Price: $24.95
ISBN: 0814480543
Format: Hardcover

 

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Looks

Chapter 6

Rendering Judgment: How Looks Affect Courtroom Results

How PA testifies in courtrooms, jury boxes, and judges' chambers

 

"May it please the court, I enter into evidence that my client is a tall, handsome, healthy specimen, as virile a defendant as has ever graced this chamber. Could such a man actually do the terrible things of which he is accused? Plainly, he could not! Furthermore, I pray the court take judicial notice of my own physiognomy, which includes a broad chest and lean waist set off by a head of thick, lustrous hair, pearl-white teeth, unblemished skin devoid of scars or moles, twinkling eyes, and a duo of disarming dimples. Obviously, you must and will believe everything that I say!

"I therefore have no doubt that the court will find that the crime of which my client is accused, though indeed a very serious offense, could not possibly have been committed by such a splendid-looking fellow as he. I now move that the court dismiss all charges, so that my client may at once regain his liberty and return to the pursuit of happiness to which he is so obviously entitled."

Okay, okay. Let's get real. Would any lawyer really come into court with such a ludicrous defense, claiming that his client is so gorgeous that he could not possibly be the archfiend described in sworn testimony by a phalanx of credible witnesses? Or that because the attorney himself is a hunk, the judge and jury ought to reject the testimony of a team of forensic experts, ignore a truckload of physical evidence—and accept whatever the defendant's lawyer tells them instead?

You bet. Happens most every day.

Of course, few attorneys are so foolish as to couch their argument quite so baldly—they can't actually say such things aloud, much less for the record in a court of law. But that doesn't stop smart lawyers from using their own PA, that of witnesses, and especially their clients' own good looks to influence jury verdicts and judicial rulings. And it's been going on for a very long time.

Consider, for example, the 1929 trial of theater mogul Alexander Pantages, accused of raping seventeen-year-old Eunice Pringle. She appeared in court with her long dark hair in a pigtail fastened with a simple bow and wearing a dark blue, ankle-length dress with Dutch collar and cuffs, long gloves, flat shoes, and black stockings—as demure an adolescent as ever took the witness stand.

Pantages denied that any rape had occurred, denied that one was even attempted, swore that no such idea had even entered his head. Miss Pringle had made an appointment to audition her dance act, he said, then came to his downtown Los Angeles office. After chatting for a few minutes, she suddenly jumped up and without warning tore her clothing, jerked his shirt out of his pants, then ran into Spring Street screaming that she had been raped.

Pringle told another story. Pantages had shown no interest in her act and had instead pawed her, and when she resisted he apparently became infused with animal lust. With almost superhuman strength, he overpowered her, forced her onto his carpeted floor, pried her legs apart, and had his way with her.

There were no other witnesses.

The case came down to "he said, she said." The jury seemed fascinated with the contrast between the charming, shy, sweet young girl and the wrinkled, scrawny, sixty-something Pantages and his stiff, Old-World manners.

Hoping to show the jury what kind of person Pringle really was, the attorneys for Pantages petitioned the judge to order her to appear for cross-examination dressed exactly as she had been on the day of the alleged rape. When Pringle returned to court the schoolgirl was gone. In her place was a sexy young thing in an adult hairstyle, full makeup, and a clinging, low-cut dress that accentuated every lush curve—an irresistible, full-bodied young woman with the face of an angel.

This was the worst thing that could have happened for Pantages. Now anyone could see how a man with his faded looks and old-fashioned clothing—a man with little sex appeal and few prospects—could have lusted after a sexy morsel like Pringle and lost control of his sexual urges.

The aging showman was convicted and sent to prison.

Two years later, however, on appeal, he won a new trial. New evidence was introduced that thoroughly discredited Pringle's testimony: By her sworn account, Pantages would have required not only superhuman strength but also four arms. New evidence suggested that Pringle had been bribed to bring rape charges against Pantages, paid by her forty-something lover, a mysterious Russian in the employ of an East Coast bootlegger, businessman, and banker named Joseph P. Kennedy. Yes, that Kennedy—the father of the future president of the United States. He coveted Pantages's chain of sixty theaters and wanted to buy them at fire-sale price to turn his start-up film studio into a rival to more established studios and himself into a player.

The second jury deliberated briefly; Pantages left court a free man.¹

But how could such a thing happen? How could an innocent businessman with a sterling reputation be convicted of rape solely on the accusation of a single witness? Simply put, because the alleged victim was young and beautiful, and the alleged rapist exactly

her opposite. Guided by a skilled prosecutor, jurors allowed intellect and reason to bow before emotion and instinct.

But it's hard to blame them: Science and society have struggled for centuries to find connections between human appearance and behavior, especially antisocial behavior.

In the sixteenth century, J. Baptiste della Porte (1535–1615) invented the pseudoscience of physiognomy, which claimed that judgments about people's character could be made from the appearance of their faces. After studying the cadavers of convicts executed for various crimes, he announced that people with small ears, bushy eyebrows, small noses, and large lips were the most likely to commit criminal acts. Two centuries later, physiognomist Johan Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) made a connection between "shifty-eyed" people with weak chins and arrogant noses and criminal behavior.

Today, no serious sociologist or criminologist gives the slightest credence to such theories. Yet, until about 1950, respected academics known as "criminal anthropologists" preached that studying the human physique, or body constitution, would eventually show which people were born with genetically determined criminal tendencies, and that the expression of these "bad" genes could be ascertained by expert observation of an individual's facial features and body characteristics.²

Such pseudoscience probably rests on superstition, often intertwined with religious teachings, that links evil with ugliness. In antiquity, many people believed that those who consorted with or were possessed by demons, and often their descendants, were afflicted with repulsive appearances—God's way of warning others and of punishing sin. Evil creatures are variously described as the Old Testament's "fallen angels" or the New Testament's "malignant spirits." Many even have names and are associated with such temptations as lust, mischief, or crime. For example, the demon Asmodeus could take either male or female form; it filled people with insatiable desires for sex, leading them to adultery, buggery, even child molestation. Beelzebub, lord of flies, was believed to inspire murder and cannibalism—anything to do with dead bodies. Nor were demons limited to Judeo-Christian theology. The Hindi vampire demon Rakshasas, for example, is associated with murder lust and was believed capable, for evil purposes, of reanimating dead bodies.³

Even today—in an era of near-instantaneous worldwide communications, where billions of pages of Internet information are available to anyone with a home computer, and in a time when robotic explorers beam back close-up images of Saturn's moons and the dry seabeds of Mars—millions of Americans say they believe the Bible, demons included, is the literal Word of God. Not many years ago a substantial fraction of America—not all residing in rural areas or small towns—believed that when children were born with cerebral palsy, a brain disorder mostly afflicting motor skills, it was because of the sin of a parent or grandparent—bad blood, as it was called.⁴

Still, it's been a while since "experts" opined that when it comes to guilt or innocence, one's face equates to one's destiny. Surely, civilization and the application of courtroom justice have come a very long way, haven't they? Then what could cause a modern juror, sworn to uphold the law and to determine the facts of a case, to be swayed by the perception of a witness's physical attractiveness?

To help answer this question, in 1988 Bruce Darby and Devon Jeffers of Ohio's Denison University created a mock jury to investigate the interaction and effect(s) of hypothetical defendants' PA on jurors. They recruited seventy-eight college students to serve as mock jurors and for openers asked them to rate their own PA.

Then photos of "defendants" were shown, "charges" were read, and "evidence" introduced. The jury was asked to evaluate, in turn, three categories of defendant—attractive, moderately attractive, or unattractive—and to decide not only the individual's guilt or innocence but also, after rendering a guilty verdict, whether the individual was truly responsible for the lawless act. Finally, jurors were asked to rate each defendant's trustworthiness, happiness, honesty, intelligence, and likability, and to recommend punishment for those "convicted."⁵

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the first five chapters of this book that attractive jurors were more likely to convict than to acquit an unattractive defendant. And that all jurors in the Darby and Jeffers experiment, regardless of their own personal PA, recommended the least severe punishment for the most attractive defendants. (Less attractive jurors, however, did not seem to factor a defendant's PA into decisions to convict or acquit.) Jurors with high personal PA rendered the harshest verdicts on the least attractive defendants, while jurors lacking in PA were toughest on average-looking defendants. So a smart attorney well versed in the art of criminal defense and representing a good-looking client facing a mountain of incriminating evidence will try to get the best-looking people he can find to put in the jury box. If the accused is PA-challenged, however, that same attorney will try to disqualify good-looking veniremen (i.e., prospective jurors) and seat only the least attractive. And when the client is, like most, only an average-looking person, a smart attorney will try to seat as many average-looking folks as possible.

Sounds pretty simple, no?

Not quite.

Actually, because of the possibility that studying an actual jury trial could affect its outcome, most studies on juror bias have been theoretical, which is to say, they don't involve actual defendants who are in jeopardy of losing life, liberty, or lucre. So any conclusions drawn from them must be tempered by that vital fact.

An important exception is the mammoth study conducted in Chicago in the early 1960s by Harry Kalven, Jr. and Hans Zeisel. They surveyed 225 actual juries and discovered that defendant characteristics, including PA, clearly influenced real-life jury verdicts.

Kalven and Zeisel also employed a questionnaire analysis to determine how judges, if asked to review evidence and determine guilt or innocence without the services of a jury, would have decided a case that had previously been tried before a jury. Their study encompassed nearly 4,000 trials and showed that judges agreed with jury verdicts only 78 percent of the time.

The study also showed that when judge and jury failed to agree, juries were more lenient in 19 percent of the cases while judges showed more leniency in only 3 percent.⁶

Why were juries more lenient than judges? According to this study, sentiment, no less than the need to be certain beyond reasonable doubt, influenced juries far more than it did judges. Juries were more inclined to go easy when a defendant showed genuine regret, had recently experienced life difficulties, or looked physically attractive. Juries also tended to go easier on defendants with a high-status occupation, particularly physicians and members of the clergy; with personal demographics revealing elderly age and widow marital status; or when a likely guilty accomplice escaped penalty through plea bargaining and testifying against the defendant.

More recent research confirms and amplifies these findings as they bear on a defendant's looks: Not only are good-looking defendants less likely to be convicted, but when they are, they are likely to suffer less severe punishment than an unattractive person convicted of the same offense.

If justice were PA blind, a person's looks should make no difference to the judge who decides how much bail to assess a defendant awaiting trial in return for liberty. But is this true? To learn if that were so, a pair of British researchers collected data on bail sums assessed defendants in a variety of misdemeanor cases. Then police officers, none of whom were involved with the particular case in question, were asked to rate the attractiveness of the actual defendant in each case.

The data showed that, alas, not even judges are immune to the PA spell. On the average, most judges set bail for attractive defendants significantly lower than for those less attractive.

The same study also examined fines levied by judges against people convicted of misdemeanors. Again, the better-looking defendant usually got off with a smaller fine than did an unattractive offender convicted of the same offense. While this suggests that the legal system operates with a bias for attractive people and against ugly ones, this particular study also demonstrated a much weaker correlation between a defendant's looks and a judge's punishment in felony cases.⁷

When it comes to sentencing, most judges are empowered with wide latitude of discretion. Even where there are minimum-sentence laws, a jurist can order a convict imprisoned under very severe conditions, sent to a country club–type minimum security facility, or freed on probation. Often jurists can elect to substitute psychiatric treatment for prison. But when do a defendant's looks provide a reason to hand down less onerous types of sentences?

To answer this question, researchers Stuart McKelvie and James Coley of Bishop's University in Quebec, Canada, recruited 384 undergraduate students for mock juries. For each case, mock jurors were presented with a dozen experimental conditions, including a description of the defendant's crime and a picture of the defendant's face. Then they were asked to make sentencing recommendations. Although the severity of punishment meted out was greater for a murder than for a robbery, it did not differ significantly no matter how attractive—or not—the defendant appeared. A less attractive robber, however, was more likely to get a recommendation for psychiatric care than was a more attractive miscreant. In this study, jurors equated ugliness with bad behavior as it applies to mental illness—but not when it comes to criminal acts.⁸

But a defendant's PA, as well as the appearance of a witness against that defendant, can also warp a jury's perception of guilt. Professor Karl L. Wuensch of the Department of Psychology at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, and his colleague, Charles H. Moore, set out to see how this theory might work. They enlisted more than 300 student volunteers as mock jurors in a supposed lawsuit in which a man accused his female boss of sexual harassment.

Using several sets of mock juries, Wuensch and Moore manipulated the physical attractiveness of both accused and accuser. Jurors were asked to decide if the female defendant was guilty and then to rate their own "certainty of belief" in the defendant's guilt or innocence.

As it happened, jurors were more convinced of a woman's guilt if the man who brought the charges was attractive than if he was not. It was, in other words, easier for a juror to believe that a woman might cross the line of propriety if the object of her desire was a hunk than if he was ordinary looking.

Female jurors also treated the issue of an accusing man's PA as significant only when the woman defendant was unattractive. When a pretty woman was accused of sexual harassment, her accuser's looks seemed to make little difference to women on the mock jury.

With male jurors, however, the accuser's attractiveness significantly affected perception of guilt when the defendant was attractive. When accused and accuser significantly differed in their degree of attractiveness, women jurors were somewhat more likely than male jurors to conclude that sexual harassment had indeed taken place.⁹

Beyond sexual harassment lies rape, and in many rape cases that go before a jury, verdicts often hang on which party has more credibility, the alleged victim or the alleged rapist. In an attempt to discern whether the PA of these parties affects jurors, in 2001 researchers at Britain's University of Portsmouth set up a two-part study.¹⁰ Alder Vrij and Hannah Firmin first asked volunteers to take a self-exam called Burt's Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (RMA), which correlates an individual's attitudes toward rape by measuring how accepting he or she is of common—but false or erroneous—myths about forcible sexual congress.

Test subjects were then invited to share their perception of a hypothetical rape case. Although every subject heard the same scenario, descriptions concerning attractiveness varied for the alleging victim and alleged offender. Vrij and Firmin sought to determine whether this appearance feature of supposed rape victims and offenders influences their credibility and, if so, whether the effect differs according to a jury member's stance toward legends about rape incidents.

Test results were mixed. Nevertheless, Vrij and Firmin concluded that sufficient PA bias existed that anyone being considered for a jury in a rape trial, or for employment as a police officer, should be required to take the RMA exam.

They might also have concluded that judges who hear rape cases would serve their communities better if they, too, were conversant with Burt's RMA. That's because other studies of both simulated and actual trials indicate that a handsome rapist is more likely to get off with a shorter sentence than an ugly rapist who committed a similar crime. That is to say, judges frequently give more lenient sentences to attractive people convicted of rape.¹¹

Moreover, any defendant accused of raping an unattractive victim is less likely to be found guilty than one accused of raping an attractive victim.¹²

Jurors also like defendants and attorneys who smile on appropriate occasions more than those who don't.¹³

Not everyone can look like a movie star, of course. But most jury consultants—usually a psychologist who helps attorneys select jurors—agree that even a good suit or a new tie can help make jurors see a defendant as a more attractive person. In fact, a 1968 study of inmates whose appearance was improved by cosmetic surgery before their release found that this group of multiple offenders was less likely to return to jail than those who did not get such surgery. They were even less likely to return than inmates who received rehabilitation services. A decade later, a follow-up study of former inmates found that while the surgery did not affect the chances of someone committing another crime, it lowered the probability that the offender would be returned to prison for that crime.¹⁴

In summary, unless your attractiveness was obviously helpful to you in committing a crime (something I'll talk about later in this chapter), you are less likely to be convicted and less likely to see the inside of a jail if you are perceived as attractive—even if that requires you to wear dentures, tint your hair, climb into elevator shoes, or wear a Wonderbra. Or, if you have the time and money, get a new nose and do something about those bags under your eyes.¹⁵

Physical attractiveness also has an effect on the outcome of civil trials. The PA of witnesses, attorneys, and litigants influences jurors and judges in these proceedings in much the same way as in criminal proceedings.

Nowhere is this more evident than in how juries treat the testimony of expert witnesses. Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor, has written about the paradox of expert testimony. He noted that "we call expert witnesses to testify about matters that are beyond the ordinary understanding of lay people (that is both the major practical justification and a formal legal requirement for expert testimony), and then we ask lay judges and jurors to judge their testimony . . . ."¹⁶

Expert witnesses are expected to instruct the jury in such complex and often arcane matters as economic modeling, business practices in foreign countries, medical procedures, animal anatomy, physics, chemistry, and a host of other technical or scientific disciplines. In high-stakes civil cases, expert witnesses frequently are called to testify by both plaintiff and defendant, usually offering subtly different but sometimes diametrically opposite conclusions.

Which expert does a juror believe?

Often, it's the one who looks and sounds the most believable. Or it is the expert who is the most likable or the most attractive. Judges, who usually have both legal training and years of experience in courtrooms, are often able to set aside the influences of PA when evaluating an expert witness's testimony. However, jurors as a group are less able to separate their feelings about a witness from what that person has told them. This is also true about the way jurors perceive lawyers who introduce evidence, elicit testimony, or cross-examine a witness. Whether male or female, jurors will find the more attractive attorney more likable and therefore more believable and worthy of trust.¹⁷

 

 

While statutes prohibiting discrimination in such areas as housing, schooling, and employment on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion, gender, or age have been on the books for decades, only a few U.S. jurisdictions have legislation specifically addressing appearance-based discrimination.¹⁸ One of them is the District of Columbia, where the statute prohibiting employment discrimination includes "personal appearance" as a protected category.

The DC statute defines "personal appearance" as "the outward appearance of any person, irrespective of sex, with regard to bodily condition or characteristics, manner or style of dress, and manner or style of personal grooming, including, but not limited to, hairstyle and beards."

A Santa Cruz, California, ordinance prohibits discrimination based on, among other things, "physical characteristics," defined as "a bodily condition or characteristic of any person which is from birth, accident, or disease, or from any natural physical development, or any event outside the control of that person, including individual physical mannerisms." But while Michigan, for example, prohibits discrimination based on height or weight, it provides no coverage for other aspects of physical appearance.

If "lookism" is still legal in most of the United States, in the English-speaking nations of the former British Commonwealth, where British common law remains the basis for civil codes, physical attractiveness is addressed in unusual ways. In Australia, until November 2002, a woman suing for damages arising from the wrongful death of her husband by another was required to undergo a humiliating hearing where a judge, after considering her age, "warmth of personality," and physical attractiveness, would determine how "marriageable" she was and therefore by how much her damages should be reduced! Australian courts, however, have presumed that few men are financially dependent on their wives, and on the few occasions that such dependency has been demonstrated in spousal wrongful death cases, judges have never required a widower to undergo a similar evaluation of his marriage prospects.¹⁹

 

 

There is, of course, no truly objective measure of individual PA as it relates to its influence on a jury's determination of guilt or innocence or the harshness or forbearance of sentencing.

If "finders of facts"—judges or a jury impaneled to decide the fate of defendants—tend to discover more mercy in their hearts for those who look more rather than less like they do, will they not also note, for example, such an obvious component of physical attractiveness as skin pigmentation, no less than the size and shape of facial features? In other words, if a defendant of one race comes before a jury of another race, do jurors allow their PA biases to distort justice?

One classic study of this phenomenon, by David A. Abwender and Kenyatta Hough, involved 207 participants chosen from twenty-five regional postbaccalaureate achievement programs at universities across the United States. They were high-achieving college graduates who were first-generation Americans from low-income, ethnic minority groups. Participants had been previously selected for special academic training to better prepare them for completing doctoral programs; they were therefore presumably brighter and possessed more mature judgment than an average American. Because few prospective test subjects were of Asian or Native American ancestry, researchers limited their test group to those describing themselves as African American, Hispanic, or white. The group ranged in age from nineteen to fifty-one years; the mean age was twenty-four.

While several previous studies indicated that PA was a significant factor in jury decisions, no previous study had explored negligent homicide, an unintentional crime associated with poor or lapsed judgment and lacking any implication that a defendant had exploited PA for personal gain. Abwender and Hough sought to learn if a defendant's higher PA would lead a mock juror to expect them to display better judgment. If so, they theorized, then male jurors should be harsher with an attractive woman accused of a crime of negligence, such as vehicular homicide. Because previous studies suggest that women care less about a female defendant's PA, researchers theorized that the expectation of better judgment should be weaker for a female juror.

They also sought to confirm a second hypothesis: that African American jurors would show greater leniency toward an African American defendant than white jurors would, while white jurors would treat African Americans more harshly than members of their own race.

The researchers asked study subjects to read an account of a vehicular homicide that described the facts and circumstances of a killing in an identical manner, except for three particulars: the defendant's PA, which varied between highly attractive and unattractive; the defendant's gender; and the defendant's race, which was variously stated as African American or white. Participants were then asked to rate the defendant's guilt and to recommend a prison sentence.

Contrary to the researchers' expectations and some previous studies, when the crime was negligent homicide, women treated an unattractive female defendant more harshly than an attractive female defendant. In other words, even if women jurors expect a little better judgment from a prettier woman, they still give her a break when it comes to sentencing. Men, on the other hand, were more inclined to give an unattractive woman that break, but neither rewarded nor penalized a woman for her good looks. In summary, when an attractive woman screws up big-time, her PA never hurts but could help if there are enough women on the jury.

As for issues of race, Abwender and Hough found that African American participants showed greater leniency when the defendant was described as African American. Hispanic participants, however, dealt more severely with African Americans than with those described as white. White participants, against researchers' expectations, displayed no measurable race-based bias.²⁰

The study subjects for this experiment, however, were chosen from an atypical pool. While all were minorities, including those who identified themselves as whites, as potential jurors they were also, like Yogi Bear, "smarter than the average bear." Young college graduates who had been accepted into doctoral programs, individually and collectively they did not much resemble America's pool of potential jurors.

America carries the stain of centuries of racial bias. It was shocking, but hardly surprising, when novelist Harper Lee made this point in her 1960 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird: "In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man, the white man always wins. They're ugly, but those are the facts of life. . . . The one place a man ought to get a square deal is in the courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box."

Forty years later, two University of Michigan scholars set out to learn if the racial biases so blatant and acceptable in 1960 were still operating. On the basis of previously published research reports, Samuel R. Sommers and Phoebe C. Ellsworth hypothesized that during the intervening decades, race relations and related matters had been so widely publicized that in any trial where race was an issue, most white jurors would bend over backward to avoid even the appearance of bigotry.²¹

From previous research suggesting that the character and complexity of race relations in America had changed, they concluded that the elimination of race-based laws and increased economic and social opportunities for minorities, especially blacks, had made racial relations far more nuanced than before the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s. What they didn't know, and so sought to learn, was if white jurors might be biased against black defendants when the case to be decided had no obvious racial dimension.

Sommers and Ellsworth sent a white male research assistant to the waiting area of an international airport, where he handed out questionnaires to 196 U.S.-born white travelers who ranged in age from eighteen to eighty-three. Their median age was forty-three, and 55 percent were male. Because each traveler had to show a driver's license to pass through airport security, and because in that state driver's license holders are called for jury duty, it was assumed that all test subjects would be eligible for jury duty.

These test subjects were asked to read a brief trial summary and then encouraged to place themselves in the role of juror while answering a questionnaire about legal issues required to resolve a trial.

The trial summary included two paragraphs summarizing the prosecutor's case, two paragraphs summarizing the defense case, and a set of judicial instructions that laid out the legal criteria for conviction. The narrative described a mythical locker-room altercation between two high school basketball players. The prosecution alleged that one player intentionally assaulted the other. The defense maintained that the contact that had caused injury was unintentional: When a third player intervened, the defendant claimed that he panicked, tried to leave the area, and in the process accidentally struck the victim.

In the "race salient" version of the trial summary, a witness testified that the defendant was one of only two players of his race (either white or black) on the team and had previously been subjected to unfair criticism and racial slurs. In another version of events, a witness testified that the defendant had only one friend on the team and had previously been the object of obscene remarks and unfair criticism; but there is no mention of race.

Mock jurors received different versions of the trial summary. Some jurors were told that a black male student was accused of hitting a white male student, then the races are reversed in the version told to other jurors. All mock jurors were asked to decide if the defendant was guilty or not guilty, and then, using a nine-point scale, to rate their confidence in this verdict as well as the strength of the defense and prosecution cases. Finally, mock jurors were asked to choose a sentencing option for a person found guilty of assault. The nine options ranged in severity from probation to four years in prison.

When the data were in, Sommers and Ellsworth learned that nearly three-fourths of all mock jurors found the defendant guilty; in this there was no significant difference between male and female jurors. In the race-salient component, the defendant's race made a slight difference to mock jurors (69 percent convicted the white defendant; 66 percent found the black defendant guilty). The largest difference in conviction rates came in the non-race-salient component, where all-white mock jurors convicted the black defendant 90 percent of the time but the white defendant only 70 percent of the time.

The data also showed that when race was not a salient component of the case, mock jurors consistently gave higher ratings to the strength of the prosecution's case than to the defense's, and higher ratings to their confidence in their own verdict. When race was salient, however, mock jurors gave lower ratings to the prosecution, higher ratings to the defense, and indicated less confidence in their own verdicts.

From these findings, Sommers and Ellsworth concluded that white juror bias is alive and well whenever there is no obvious racial component to a case against a black defendant. The researchers also suggested that one way to mitigate such antiblack bias is to ensure that all juries include black jurors.

Although attractive defendants seem to have an advantage, researchers have indicated that this situation relates only to such crimes as rape, robbery, and other offenses involving theft.²² For other types of crimes, and in particular those where someone apparently relied on his or her own PA in furtherance of a crime, being good-looking can cost a defendant dearly.

In a 1975 experiment, researchers Harold Sigall and Nancy Ostrove presented sets of mock jurors with a mythical case in which a female defendant was accused, variously, of swindling an unmarried man by convincing him to give her $2,200 to invest in a nonexistent company, or, alternatively, of breaking into his home during the hours of darkness and making off with the same amount of cash.

Half the participants were led to believe that the female defendant was attractive, while the others believed that she was unsightly. True to the PA stereotype, when it came to burglary—a crime where the perpetrator tries not to be seen—the more attractive defendant received a less punitive sentence than that given to the unattractive defendant.

So, when a person uses his or her own elevated PA to help commit a crime, jurors are unlikely to exercise leniency.

There may be no better example of this phenomenon than the infamous case of Ruth Snyder. In the small hours of March 20, 1927, with assistance from her lover, Judd Gray, she killed her husband, Albert Snyder. Ruth and Judd first bludgeoned Albert with a cast-iron window sash weight, then had to finish him off by first strangling him with picture wire before finally stuffing a chloroform-soaked cloth in his nose.

Then—quietly, so as not to wake her sleeping nine-year-old daughter—they ransacked the house to give the appearance of a burglary gone wrong. Before leaving, Judd tied Ruth up and left her in the hallway to give credence to her claim to police that she had been attacked by two "giant Italians."

Police didn't buy it. Ruth was thirty-two, gorgeous, voluptuous, and had a reputation as a party girl who wasn't too particular about whose bed she woke up in. Albert was forty-six, not much to look at, an assistant art editor at a motor-boating magazine, a hardworking, low-paid homebody. And, oh yeah, a few weeks before the "attack of the giant Italians," Ruth had tricked her husband into buying a new life insurance policy that paid twice the normal death benefit if Albert died violently.

Detectives didn't have to lean too hard on Ruth to get a confession. It was, she said, all Judd's doing. She found him irresistible; she was crazed with desire and had to have him. Judd insisted that they kill Albert, and he was relentless, and when she could no longer put him off she gave in and unwillingly went along.

Judd, a corset salesman, was soon in a cell—but telling another story: Ruth was the irresistible one. She had ensnared him with her steamy sexuality and manipulated him into killing Albert. She was the mastermind, he just another victim.

The press mined this gold for every nugget they could dredge up. Ruth and Judd were tried together. Although the venue was New York City, justice moved with the alacrity of a frontier town. The trial began less than thirty days after the murder, and for the next three weeks, fed by the tabloid press and the emerging medium of radio, America followed with fascination as Judd and Ruth took turns testifying about each other's viciousness. The trial was attended by songwriter Irving Berlin, film pioneer D. W. Griffith, and the producers of Chicago, a Broadway musical about women doing prison time for murder.

The jury debated a mere hundred minutes before finding both killers guilty. A few months went by while their appeals were heard and rejected. By autumn, New York Governor Al Smith had denied their clemency petition. The lovers perished minutes apart in Sing Sing's electric chair.

But their story lives on in American pop culture: It was the basis for James Cain's Double Indemnity, a novel adapted by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder into a film starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck as star-crossed lovers and Edward G. Robinson as the implacable insurance investigator who brings them to justice.

As for the real Ruth Snyder, the jury might easily have spared her life. In 1928, few New Yorkers were comfortable with the idea of executing a woman, especially in the then-new and fiendish electric chair. But, no. Ruth came to court in stylish skirts and sheer black stockings that set off her long legs. Her tightly tailored suits and blouses announced an ample bosom. She wore an immaculate coiffure and perfectly lacquered nails. She spoke in low, measured tones. It wasn't hard to see how Ruth could have wrapped first Albert Snyder and then Judd Gray around either of her sinuous little fingers. There were twelve men on the jury and they got it right away: As long as she drew breath, Ruth Snyder could get any man to do her bidding. She was poison—anyone could see it just by looking at her.²³

 

© 2008 Gordon L. Patzer, Ph.D.
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