informational video. It's about 4½ minutes long and focuses on latent print examinations, including fingerprints, footwear impressions and tire impressions.
In the FSI video, a narrator explains what a forensic expert is and how they might testify in court. The video describes how latent print examinations are conducted and what types of statements are appropriate—or not—for an expert to make in their testimony, based on the DOJ guidelines.In two different studies, we recruited jury-eligible adults to test whether our video had any effect on how jurors judged forensic testimony.
In our first study, some participants watched the FSI video and others didn't. Participants who watched the FSI video wereIn our second study, we tested whether the video could help jurorswithout creating a general distrust in forensic evidence. Participants watched a 45-minute mock trial video. Without training from the FSI video, participants rated both low- and high-quality forensic testimony highly.
But participants who watched our informational video prior to the mock trial were more likely to differentiate between the low- and high-quality testimony, rating the expert giving low-quality testimony more poorly than the expert giving high-quality testimony.These findings suggest that our informational video helped mock jurors in two ways. Participants learned how to identify low-quality forensic testimony and how to adjust their evaluations of the expert and their testimony accordingly.
Our study is a promising first step in exploring ways to help jurors understand complex forensic testimony. A brief video like ours can provide standardized information about