Sexual Assault Trials Handbook — Evidence

Professor Jane Goodman-Delahunty and Professor Annie Cossins, “Jury views of psychological expert evidence about child sexual abuse”, presentation to the Public Defenders Criminal Law Conference, 13 February 2016, Sydney.

Section 79(2) of the Uniform Evidence Act 1995 was inserted in 2005 as an exception to the opinion rule (s 76) which permits the admission of expert opinion evidence about children’s behaviour and reactions to child sexual assault (CSA) to bolster a child’s credibility in a CSA trial.

The researchers investigated the impact of both research and clinical expert evidence in a simulated CSA trial to explore the extent of jurors/laypeople’s misconceptions about children and CSA. The researchers randomly assigned 334 deliberating and 325 non-deliberating jurors to one of three experimental conditions: a control group, with no expert evidence presented to it; a research group with specialised CSA knowledge, presented by an experimental/research psychologist; and a clinical group with specialised CSA knowledge presented by a clinical psychologist who interviewed the complainant. Participants in the study viewed a professionally-acted video-trial, 45–55 mins long, which included opening and closing addresses by legal counsel; examination-in-chief and cross-examination of 13-year-old complainant; examination-in-chief and cross-examination of the complainant’s grandmother; no evidence from defendant; and summing-up with standard judicial directions. The researchers generally observed that jurors struggled with how to interpret the expert’s evidence and how much weight to give it; there was considerable variation in the amount of time spent discussing the expert’s evidence, from less than a minute to more than half-an-hour; clinical expert evidence generated more deliberation than research expert evidence; jurors used expert evidence for a credibility purpose; and jurors applied the same amount of skepticism to the expert’s evidence as other witnesses’ evidence.

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