The effect of double judgments on public confidence in court decisions for the trial by citizen-participation in Korea

The verdict by the jury in Korea is not binding but advisory for the bench of three judges. Consequently, two judgments exist in each and every trial by citizen-participation, one by the jury and the other by the court, and in some cases, the two judgments are not the same. An effect of incongruent double judgments on the public confidence in the judicial verdict was examined. Five hundred juror-eligible adults were sampled nationwide and randomly assigned to eight experimental conditions that were created by manipulating the presence and the content of the jury’s recommendation and the judicial verdict. After reading a case scenario based on a real trial, each subject rated the likelihood for the judicial verdict to be correct on a scale of 0–100%. The result showed that confidence in the judicial verdict was lowered when it was different from the jury’s recommendation. The result was interpreted in the framework of the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of attitude change to indicate that the incongruence was used as a negative peripheral cue, and the message of the judicial verdict was processed through a peripheral route without an in-depth evaluation of the case contents. The interpretation by the ELM implied that in the long run, double judgments can reduce the confidence of the public in the judicial verdict. On the other hand, the confidence in the final verdict was not different in the conditions in which the verdict was solely rendered by the jury, or by the judges. Thus, public confidence in the legal judgment would be maintained even if binding power is assumed for the jury’s determination of the defendant’s guilt in the trial by citizen-participation in Korea.