News
Divya Sukumar wins the Warwick Three Minute Thesis® competition
Congratulations to CJC member Divya Sukumar who won the Warwick Three Minute Thesis® competition during the live final last night (7 June)!
Divya's presentation got the highest score from a panel of specially appointed judges drawn from senior University staff and an external guest judge. She also won the People’s Choice Award from the audience. She now gets the chance to enter the national 3MT competition.
Melissa Colloff and Divya Sukumar win the 2016 Psychology PhD Student Publication Awards
Congratulations to Melissa Colloff and Divya Sukumar for winning the 2016 Psychology Student Publication Awards! The awards worth of £100 were announced and presented on Friday 19 May, during the closing session of the Psychology Postgraduate Research Day. Melissa is supervised by Kim Wade and Divya is jointly supervised by Kim Wade and Jackie Hodgson.
This is what the judging panel said about the award-winning publications:
Colloff, M. F., Wade, K. A., & Strange, D. (2016). Unfair lineups make witnesses more likely to confuse innocent and guilty suspects. Psychological Science, 27(9), 1227-1239.
"The study used a sophisticated and careful experimental design to examine an important real life issue from a theoretical perspective. An impressively large sample size gives more strength to the study's results which potentially will have important practical implications for improving the lineup construction practices in the police force."
Sukumar, D., Hodgson, J. S., & Wade, K. A. (2016). Behind closed doors: Live observations of current police station disclosure practices and lawyer-client consultations. Criminal Law Review, 12, 900-914.
Fair lineups for suspects with distinctive features
New Publication!
Melissa Colloff (PhD student, Psychology), Assistant Professor Kim Wade (Psychology), and Deryn Strange (John Jay College, CUNY) have a new publication. Their paper "Unfair Lineups Make Witnesses More Likely to Confuse Innocent and Guilty Suspects" has just been published in a leading psychology journal, Psychological Science.
In a study containing almost 9000 participants, the authors compare three fair lineup techniques used by the police with unfair lineups in which nothing was done to prevent a distinctive suspect from standing out. The paper highlights the importance of constructing fair lineups for distinctive suspects.
Access the press release here:
Access the paper, here:
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/07/21/0956797616655789.abstract
How the timing of police evidence disclosure impacts custodial legal advice
New Publication!
The new publication by Divya Sukumar, Prof. Jackie Hodgson and Assistant Prof. Kim Wade's article on the impact of police evidence on the advice which solicitor's give to client is now available to be read at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298789500_How_the_timing_of_police_evidence_disclosure_impacts_custodial_legal_advice
Presently, the police in England and Wales disclose their evidence at different points during the arrest and detention of a suspect. While the courts have not objected to this, past field research suggests that lawyers can only advise their clients accurately when the police disclose their evidence before the police interview. To examine this from a law/psychology perspective, we recruited 100 criminal defence lawyers to participate in an online study. Lawyers read fictional scenarios and provided custodial legal advice to a hypothetical client (Christopher) when given either pre-interview disclosure or disclosure at various points during the police interview (early, gradually or late). Lawyers given pre-interview disclosure provided considerably more informed legal advice compared to those who were only provided with disclosure during the hypothetical police interview. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this article provides further evidence that pre-interview disclosure is essential for lawyers to deliver case-specific legal advice to suspects.