Abstract
South African courts have recently accepted social psychological phenomena as extenuating factors in murder trials. In one important case, eight railway workers were convicted of murdering four strike breakers during an industrial dispute. The court accepted conformity, obedience, group polarization, deindividuation, bystander apathy, and other well-established psychological phenomena as extenuating factors for four of the eight defendants, but sentenced the others to death. In a second trial, death sentences of five defendants for the "necklace" killing of a young woman were reduced to 20 months imprisonment in the light of similar social psychological evidence. Practical and ethical issues arising from expert psychological testimony are discussed.
Highlights
Background to the KillingsThe events leading up to the killings were described by several witnesses during the trial, and the most important details were included in a set of "agreed facts" formally accepted by the prosecution and the defense after the liability phase of the trial
I recently testified as an expert witness in two South African murder trials that contributed to an important legal breakthrough and a significant development in the history of applied social psychology
In the late 1980s, in murder cases arising from mob violence, defense lawyers in South Africa began to lead expert psychological evidence in an attempt to introduce an entirely new class of extenuating circumstances, namely, social psychological processes operating at the time of the killings
Summary
South African courts have recently accepted social psychological phenomena as extenuating factors in murder trials. I recently testified as an expert witness in two South African murder trials that contributed to an important legal breakthrough and a significant development in the history of applied social psychology. In both trials the courts accepted social psychological phenomena such as conformity, obedience to authority, group polarization, deindividuation, frustration-aggression, relative deprivation, and bystander apathy as extenuating circumstances, enabling convicted murderers to escape the death penalty. These decisions are not binding on courts outside South Africa, they indicate a growing influence of psychology in the international legal arena and are of potential interest to psychologists and lawyers in all jurisdictions
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