Court Testimony Research Articles

Emotions and Migration in Argentina at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This book is about failed marriages and how migration played a role in their failure. It is a translation of a 2019 book titled Lazos rotos: La inmigración, el matrimonio y las emociones en la Argentina entre los siglos XIX y XX. Narrower than its English title suggests, the book focuses specifically on cases of marital conflict that found their way into the judicial record, including bigamy, domestic abuse, murder, and adultery (real or imagined). Migrating might not lead to a greater proportion of failed relationships (and their related crimes), but as María Bjerg shows, it added unique pressures, ones that sedentary people did not have. The book draws from about 25 court cases from the city and province of Buenos Aires between 1880 and 1905 as well as newspaper accounts of the plaintiffs, defendants, and victims. Migration is central to all these cases. Strains brought by a significant period of separation (several years) before a couple was reunited were a significant factor in all disputes. Feelings of alienation in a new society also loomed over these unhappy denouements. Many of the crimes took place in the conventillos (tenement housing) of Buenos Aires, and the tight living quarters and the prying eyes and ears of neighbors fueled discovery and appeared in court testimonies and newspaper accounts.The cases of bigamy were particularly striking. Bigamy here refers to men remarrying in Argentina while having an estranged wife across the ocean. Bjerg uncovers several instances of married men leaving behind wives (and sometimes children), nominally with the shared decision that the woman would later follow. Yet in these cases, absence did not make the heart grow fonder, and sometimes the man grew more distant or entirely silent in epistolary exchanges or the woman refused to uproot her life and resettle in Argentina. In court, some men successfully argued that so much time had passed (as much as a decade) or that the wife disobediently refused to follow that they were entitled to remarry and start anew. That such arguments worked in some instances reveals much about the importance of class, gender, and the malleability of the law. Other men, such as Domingo DeBartolo, were sentenced to 4.5 years in jail. In these cases of bigamy and in others of adultery and murder, Bjerg exposes the varied meanings and double standards that applied to male and female honor at the turn of the twentieth century in Argentina.Bjerg draws exclusively from cases involving Italian and Spanish migrants, and the author notes that archival records in Argentina suggest that rural Germans and Danes or urban Jews settled marital conflict differently (p. 123). More theorization or reflection on these archival absences or the incorporation of further research in the revised English book could have been illuminating. That Italians and Spaniards comprised 75 percent of the foreign nationals in the country (according to the 1914 census) does not explain why they make up 100 percent of the court cases related to abuse, murder, adultery, and bigamy. Did factors relating to longer separations and a trailing spouse, compared to those relating to more family-centered migration, lead to greater strife for the few dozen Italians and Spaniards who appear in this book? Were there cultural, religious, or community factors that kept marital conflict out of the public eye (whether through preemptive conflict resolution or hiding)? If other groups are not in court cases, are there other ways to talk about emotions as they relate to migration (such as hope, nostalgia, nationalism, love, boredom, sadness, disdain, etc.)?The focus on migration-specific issues that affect emotions offers a fascinating contribution to both the history of emotions and the history of migration. As Bjerg notes, these cases reveal the “heavy emotional toll of migration” and expose the flip side of standard accounts of people living or embracing transnational lives (p. 2). This book reminds us of some of the ways that separation, epistolary relationships (including when illiteracy was an important factor), and emotions suffered as the result of that same transnationalism. This book examines the final breakdown of marriages, but it offers a potent reminder of how multiyear separations put strains on all relationships and how everybody involved in migration works “to reestablish the affective bond and rekindle the language of love and the intimacy of conjugal life” (pp. 45–46). With its focus on emotions, this book proposes a series of new methodological questions, and historians of migration and of Latin America more broadly will find that Bjerg's work offers many new angles to approach well-studied topics.

„Robert Schumann und Clara Wieck gegen Friedrich Wieck, Vater der Mitklägerin”. Zwischen Erwartungen und Liebe – zum Bild der Vater – Tochter Beziehung am Beispiel von Clara Schumann und Friedrich Wieck

Clara and Robert Schumann are the most famous nineteenth-century artistic couple. In the background of their life story there is, probably, the most famous dispute in music history: Clara Schumann's father, the ambitious piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, refused Schumann when the latter asked for the hand of his daughter. In the article, the author analyzes the correspondence between Clara and Robert as well as the letters to Clara’s father. They prove of the fight between the two men and illustrate Clara’s sensuality and variety of emotions, as well as present her self-strategy. The aim of this article is to describe the reasons for the conflict, based on their correspondence, court testimonies as well as their social and family background.

Physicians' perspectives on Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) in the clinical setting: Challenges and opportunities for gun violence prevention.

BackgroundFirearm-related injuries remain a heavy public health and clinical burden in the United States. Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) laws, which create a path through a civil court process to temporarily remove firearms from individuals deemed to be at risk of harming themselves or others and are one strategy designed to reduce firearm violence. Maryland was the first state to authorize clinicians as ERPO petitioners.ObjectiveWe aim to document a sample of Maryland physicians’ perspectives about the utility of, any barriers to, and other thoughts on clinicians as ERPO petitioners.DesignA series of semi-structured interviews with Maryland physicians identified through a combination of purposive and snowball sampling. We coded the transcribed interviews and analyzed the coded transcripts for themes using deductive content analysis.Setting/Participants13 Maryland-based physicians interviewed over Zoom in and around Baltimore City, Maryland.ResultsThe interviewees had overall positive feedback about ERPO as a gun violence prevention tool in the clinical setting. They identified several barriers to effective implementation such as time spent on paperwork and in court, a lack of awareness among clinicians about ERPO, threats to therapeutic alliance, and a sense of futility in a culture where firearms are easy to obtain. Solutions such as providing clinician education about ERPO laws, allowing for virtual court testimony, and creating a consult service with ERPO specialists to manage ERPO petitions were discussed.LimitationsThis study includes a small sample of Maryland-based physicians.ConclusionsThe physicians we interviewed expressed interest in knowing more about ERPO laws and emphasized education as an important tool for improving implementation. Addressing physicians’ concerns about ERPO implementation will improve their ability to be effective and efficient petitioners.

Time and space in a dish: examining the relationship between materiality and space in the early modern saloop stall

ABSTRACT Walking in the early morning in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries you would have come across a new consumption space, the saloop stall. These stalls operated for only a few hours before being packed away. Yet in their time they offered to labouring Londoners, its watchmen and chimney sweeps, a warm respite. Taking a microhistorical approach, this paper provides the first critical examination of these spaces. It looks to establish the temporality of these stalls and how they were situated in the broader urban routines. It also analyses the role materiality played in establishing these spatialities. This paper looks to reframe the stall’s ceramic cups and hot tea urns, demonstrating how they were crucial to creating a space of labour and sociability, removed from the domestic context they have often been associated with. This research is approached via a wide range of sources such as contemporary literature, visual culture and court testimonies. Consideration is given to material and sensorial attributes; factors that inform the creation and use of this space at every turn. It hopes to provide an example of the value taking a material and sensory-based approach when researching itinerant street traders.

Procedural conditions for admitting evidence from the testimony of a crown witness in Polish criminal procedure

The procedural criminalistic institution of a crown witness is one of the most effective mechanisms for combating organized crime at the disposal of the justice system. The aim of this article is to analyse Article 3 of the Crown Witness Act, which presents a collection of obligatory and facultative conditions that a suspect must fulfil in the process of applying for the status of a crown witness. This provision can be seen as a complement to the definition in Article 2 of the aforementioned Act. In the text, the author discusses the issue of the content of statements made by the accused, who is seeking to obtain the status of a crown witness, as well as the mechanism that obliges them to provide testimony in court. Additionally, the facultative condition of the suspect's commitment to returning any financial benefits derived from the crime or fiscal offense and compensating for damages incurred as a result of its commission is explored. The considerations are based on available literature and current legislation. The author also refers to court rulings concerning the discussed provisions and the line of jurisprudence related to the assessment of testimony provided by a crown witness.

Vieillissement et distorsions de mémoire : l’impact des stéréotypes du vieillissement

The reliability of our memories is of crucial importance, both in extraordinary situations (e.g. court testimony) and in everyday life (e.g., when a person must take medication on a regular basis). To address these issues, numerous studies documented the conditions under which false memories emerge. Research clearly demonstrated that memory distortions are a normal and frequent phenomenon in the general population, but greatly accentuated in aging. Here, we review studies that documented age-related impact on memory distortions in the DRM and misinformation paradigms. Next, we examine the factors that underlie false memory susceptibility, with a focus on socio-emotional factors, and in particular aging stereotypes. We present recent results that highlighted the way negative age-related stereotypes might threaten older adults’ and influence false memory susceptibility. Importantly, we also demonstrate that older adult’s memory distortions can easily be reduced when taking into account tasks’ characteristics and participants’ motivation. Finally, we discuss the implications of age-related stereotypes when older adults’ memory is evaluated, both from a theoretical and an applied perspective.

An Unforeseen Alliance: The Experience of Mental Health Professionals when Testifying in Sexual Assault Criminal Proceedings

Introduction: Court testimonies of mental health expert witnesses (MHEWs) received scholarly attention regarding paradigmatic differences, and ethical issues, neglecting the testimony experience. The study examines MHEWs’ testimony experience in sexual assault proceedings in Israel. Methods:16 interviews. MHEW were recruited using chain referral sampling. Interviews were analyzed based on the constructive dialectical model. Results: Three main themes were conceptualized: MHEWs’ initial image of the court, their perception of mental health and legal languages, and their perception of court conduct as a theatrical play. The themes address the experience of tension between law and mental health along with an unprecedented experience of congruence that emerges when: 1. MHEWs based their testimonies on evidence-based tests and therapeutic interventions which value objectivity, as opposed to focusing primarily on the subjective experience, accommodating the evidence-based legal debate; 2. When MHEWs and legal practitioners formed an interpersonal connection, in accordance with key relational therapeutic elements.

THE DEBATE OF TURKISH THEOLOGIANS ON FEMINISM AND THE RENEWAL OF ISLAM

Intellectual debates about the status of women in Islam have been actively developing since the end of the 19th century, coinciding with the emergence of the first wave of feminism. However, the peak of the debate occurred in the 90s of the 20th century, when researchers from Iran, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, as well as representatives of the Muslim diaspora in the West, such as Amina Wadud, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Asma Barlas, etc., were prominent figures defenders of Islamic feminism. Despite the fact that Islamic feminism is one of the important trends of modern world Islamic thought, this phenomenon is little known in the post-Soviet space. Modern theologians of Turkey who support Islamic feminism are published exclusively in Turkish. In this article, the author presents to the Russian-speaking reader the modern intellectual debates of the Turkish theologians Hidayet Tuksal and Ihsan Eliachik regarding anti-capitalist Islam, the status of women in Islam and the attitude to hadith. The materials for the article were collected in 2021 during several personal interviews of the author with Hidayet Tuksal and in 2019 with Ihsan Eliachik, as well as by processing speeches, video lectures, books, articles, dissertations of these theologians. Traditionally minded theologians criticize representatives of Islamic feminism for combining the incongruous, since, according to them, Western-style feminism can have nothing to do with Islam. The debate of Islamic feminism in Turkey originates from the criticism of hadith, the Quran is interpreted from the standpoint of modern human rights and the principles of democracy. According to modern interpretations, it is not necessary for a Muslim woman to cover her head with a headscarf during prayer. If, for example, in traditional Islam, a woman's testimony in court was not equal to a man's, then Islamic feminism equalizes a woman and a man in this matter. Also, the right given to women to conduct Friday prayers in a mosque as an imam, as well as, according to this interpretation of the Quran, that polygamy is not allowed in Islam, has become an actual discussed interpretation.

반대신문권 보장의 헌법 및 인권법적 의의와 비교법적 검토

The Constitutional Court decided the targeted clause unconstitutional, which had allowed the admissibility of the video recording containing pretrial statement of the minor victims of sexual violence crimes without their direct testimony in the trial court. According to the Court, this is mainly because there is a risk of hindering the discovery of the truth, if the defendant's right to cross-examination is not guaranteed and even though harmonious methods that can prevent secondary damages of the victims already exist, depriving the defendant's opportunity to cross-examine not utilizing those methods violate the constitutional principle of prohibition of excessive restriction and violate the right to a fair trial guaranteed by Article 27 of the Act. However, the decision contradicts the Constitution and the criminal procedure law system, and the right to cross-examination itself cannot be regarded as an independent fundamental right of the Constitution. Guaranteeing the defendant's right to cross-examination of minor victims of sexual violence crimes without considering the fairness of the specific trial can not be justified in terms of human rights, as it can impair the truth of case and impose secondary harms on minor victims. These problems cannot be solved with the so-called harmonious methods, and the decision cannot be justified in terms of the point of view of comparative law. The admissibility of the video recording where the right to cross-examination is not guaranteed should be allowed to be ultimately decided by the court according to the judgment on whether or not the fairness of a specific trial has been violated, and that is a more appropriate and systematic way.

Social Work Advocacy in Federal Immigration Courts

Advocacy for immigrant families undertaken by social workers, attorneys, and other supporters to protect against deportation, detention, and unfair government policies occurs mostly in immigration and federal courts. Social workers bring unique knowledge and skills that enhance legal teams’ representation of immigrants. This paper provides case illustrations of social work’s contribution in three types of legal actions. One illustration from immigration court demonstrates the social work consultant’s role in cancellation of removal cases when undocumented immigrants have US-citizen children. A second case is a federal class-action lawsuit to end the detention of asylum-seeking families. The third case was a federal lawsuit to dismantle bureaucratic policies and procedures that undermined the legal rights and well-being of unaccompanied children. In each of these actions, social work knowledge influenced lawsuits that can have lasting policy impact. While this paper focuses on social work advocacy in immigration cases, social work extends to many other areas of advocacy in the legal system. Social work consultants must have a clear understanding of what the attorneys are requesting to ensure that they have the requisite knowledge and skill to be optimally effective and to practice ethically within the scope of their expertise. Other implications include maintaining familiarity with contemporary social and behavioral research and providing expertise confidently in written reports and oral testimony in court. When social workers bring their expertise to legal teams in immigration cases, they promote the profession’s expertise and help families facing oppressive policies.

Does Convenience Come with a Price? The Impact of Remote Testimony on Perceptions of Expert Credibility

The purpose of the present study was to experimentally examine whether testimony modality leads to differences in perceptions of expert witnesses and their opinions. We hypothesized that simulated testimony delivered via phone would be perceived as less credible, efficacious, and assigned less weight than testimony delivered via videoconference or in-court. We recruited a sample of 275 U.S. men and women via Amazon Mechanical Turk. After viewing a videotaped mock court scenario depicting testimony by a forensic psychological expert witness, participants completed measures of expert credibility, efficacy, and expert social presence. A simple contrast multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed perceptions did not differ between in-court, videoconferencing, and phone testimony conditions. Higher social presence scores predicted more favorable perceptions of the expert. These findings provide clearer support for the continued implementation of remote videoconference testimony in courts. We offer recommendations on how to optimize the use of remote testimony based on the present study and previous findings.

The ‘Real’ Pakistan in Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geometry of God (2007): A Testimony of Blasphemy

Since their widespread implementation and amendment in the 1980s by Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, blasphemy laws have been used in Pakistan to supress freedom of speech and to create an environment of terror, fear, and subjugation. Islamist political parties on the right side of the spectrum in alliance with the military establishment ensure that resistance against these laws both judicially and socio-politically becomes almost unfeasible. Those who do have a chance to be released from the charges are faced with death threats and often become prey to homicide or mob lynching. In such a scenario, literature can and must offer an alternative imaginative space where constructive dialogue is made possible and where some form of healing is offered to the victims. It, therefore, becomes incumbent to understand the way in which Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Geometry of God (2017) offers an alternative to the state led official narrative regarding issues of blasphemy, freedom of expression and creative thought in relation to Pakistani identity. The Geometry of God deals with Pakistani history in the 1980s and ’90s under Zia-ul-Haq’s influence and legacy from three different narrator-perspectives and the (mis)use of blasphemy laws in Pakistan with respect to Zahoor, a palaeontologist. The book challenges the mainstream narrative about blasphemy as well as Pakistani history as it unfolds, and presents, instead, an alternative ‘real’ image of modern Pakistan which is more complex, polyphonic, and diverse. In this respect, this article demonstrates how Khan creates a larger alternative literary testimony within the novel through three narrator-characters as well as by employing various stylistic features. Indeed, the novel both mirrors and challenges the ‘official’ court testimony where Zahoor is silenced by false accusations against him in the name of blasphemy. Through a detailed analysis of the three narrators, this article shows how memories of past events are represented, including the way in which the literary form of the novel foregrounds the act of testimony.

A Study on Automatic Latent Fingerprint Identification System

Latent fingerprints are the unintentional impressions found at the crime scenes and are considered crucial evidence in criminal identification. Law enforcement and forensic agencies have been using latent fingerprints as testimony in courts. However, since the latent fingerprints are accidentally leftover on different surfaces, the lifted prints look inferior. Therefore, a tremendous amount of research is being carried out in automatic latent fingerprint identification to improve the overall fingerprint recognition performance. As a result, there is an ever-growing demand to develop reliable and robust systems. In this regard, we present a comprehensive literature review of the existing methods utilized in latent fingerprint acquisition, segmentation, quality assessment, enhancement, feature extraction, and matching steps. Later, we provide insight into different benchmark latent datasets available to perform research in this area. Our study highlights various research challenges and gaps by performing detailed analysis on the existing state-of-the-art segmentation, enhancement, extraction, and matching approaches to strengthen the research.

THE LAWS PROTECTING CHILD WITNESSES IN GIVING EVIDENCE: HARMONIZATION BETWEEN MALAYSIAN LAWS AND AS-SHARIA

Since issues of child abuse and other crimes against children have been brought to the public's attention through the media, this article considers to highlight one of the issues relating to the protection of child. The issue of the laws protecting child witnesses in giving evidence will come into the discussion. This paper considers the issue of corroboration of the child witness in the aspects of sworn and unsworn statements to determine whether the evidence given by children will be relevant and admissible in Courts. In tackling the issues, the research methodology applied by the authors is by analyzing and evaluating the decided cases and studying the substantive laws procedure in protecting child witnesses in giving testimony in Courts. The expectation findings of this paper are to harmonize between Malaysian and Islamic law relating to the protection of child witnesses in giving evidence in the court of law. After having observed the conflicts or the problems that had stem out of the current laws and procedures governing child witnesses as to the remedies, the final part of the article proposed some solutions and recommendations from the Islamic point of view.

Survivors’ experiences with testifying in trials after gross human rights violations in Argentina

In Argentina, persons who were held detained-disappeared during the last military dictatorship (1976 - 1983) now testify in trials related to the military regime’s use of enforced disappearances, torture and other crimes. The trials were re-initiated in 2005, after more than a decade of impunity. Trials have been taking place all over the country since then. Trials are related either to individual perpetrators, individual victims, or to places where the crimes were committed. Many witnesses testify in a number of trials. In this article, I explore experiences with testifying in these trials, based on interviews with 23 persons who were held ‘detained-disappeared’ for political reasons during the dictatorship. The witnesses have testified both to what they themselves have endured, and to crimes committed towards persons who remain forcefully disappeared.
 The testimonies of persons who were held detained-disappeared are central in the trials, as there is often little evidence besides these testimonies. The interviewees express a strong sense of responsibility related to testifying in court, due to the central role of these testimonies as well as the witnesses’ responsibility towards those who remain forcefully disappeared or were killed. Through testimonies in court, persons who remain forcefully disappeared are presented as persons with agency and often with a political commitment; not only as victims of serious violations of human rights.
 I discuss testimonies in court as a longer process, which begins before the trial is initiated and where the testimony itself is the main event. To testify in court may lead to distress, and there is a worry about re-traumatisation. Several aspects of trials have an influence on the experience with testifying, among them the presence and attitude of the defendants; the presence of threats, the ways in which questions are asked during testimonies, and how many trials the witness has testified in.

Фиксация показаний в ходе предварительного расследования: некоторые проблемные аспекты

The article considers the problem of designing the text of the descriptive part of the record of interrogation during a preliminary investigation. The investigator, acting as the author of the record, edits the received oral information, which can give rise to errors: inconsistency between the text of the testimony and the interrogated person; problems in assessing the reliability of the study of testimony in court. We highlight the problem of identical texts of interrogation records drawn up during the investigation. We formulate recommendations on writing down the testimony in the record of the investigative action and proposals for improving the reliability of interrogation records: the possibility of supplementing the record with one’s own hand, developing and explaining the position of the highest court on the inadmissibility of using identical texts of testimony obtained during the preliminary investigation in the process of proving.

The Challenges of Forensic Linguistic Analysis of False Testimony

The present paper arises from wider research which focused on various manifestations of destructive and malicious speech behavior in spontaneous oral or written dialogs, related to the processes of information concealment and falsification in police interviews and court testimonies. A number of analytical methods were used to generate this paper: a retrospective analysis of scientific literature, comparative legal and logical analysis, extrapolation methods, and content analysis. Despite numerous experimental researches devoted to acoustic-phonetic or psycholinguistic features of lies, their results are not sufficiently reliable for forensic purposes as the expert report should not rely on assumptions. The author disputes the evidence admissibility of experts’ conclusions about utterances implying speech parameters correlating with lies detected via psycholinguistic examination in oral speech audio or video recording of a police interview or a court testimony. Forensic psycholinguistic methods and comprehensive algorithms used in some forensic experts’ reports to detect speech signs of lying demonstrate a great variety that contradicts with the principals of evidence admissibility. The insufficient development of the currently used expert approach and the lack of a unified methodology for solving expert tasks on a strictly scientific basis creates a demand for developing comprehensive methods for studying lies on the basis of forensic speech science and cognitive theory.

PERANAN SAKSI AHLI FORENSIK DALAM PENETAPAN TERSANGKA TINDAK PIDANA PEMBUNUHAN (Studi Polres Labuhanbatu)

In a trial examination of a criminal case, the judge conducts an examination with at least two valid pieces of evidence and also pays attention to the indictment of the public prosecutor regarding what criminal act the defendant has committed. In the case of murder the judge needs a forensic expert to find out what caused the criminal incident. The forensic doctor's statement in the form of a visum et repertum plays a role in deciding / imposing a sentence for the convicted person, because the Visum Et Repertum contains information or information about the causes that resulted in a person's death or injury. The formulation of the problems in this study are: 1. What is the role of forensic experts in uncovering the crime of murder? 2. What are the obstacles faced by forensic experts in uncovering the crime of murder? This study used a normative approach, the research material was collected using document study techniques, and data analysis techniques were used qualitatively. The results of the research show that: 1. The role of a forensic specialist is very important in uncovering the crime of murder, namely being able to directly provide information in court in the form of visum et repertum. 2. The judge's consideration of the results of the forensic doctor's testimony in court in revealing the crime of murder is very helpful for the judge in taking a legal consideration.Keywords: Witness; forensic expert; Criminal act; Suspect; Murder.

Establishing Gender Sensitive Witness and Victim Protection Measures in Complex Criminal Cases

The justice system relies heavily on evidence to establish the commission of a crime. In most complex criminal cases such as human trafficking and terrorism this evidence are not readily or easily accessible for a number of factors. One of such reason is that most times victims may be dead and so cannot give oral testimony of what happened to them. Other reasons that were the victim or witnesses of complex crimes are children or women they are usually vulnerable and are over taken with fear of what may happen to them or members of their family if they reveal the truth of what they know. For this reason, it is difficult for them to step out to give evidence to the police not to talk of give oral testimony in the open court of what they witnessed. Where in the cause of an investigation of a crime the police however stumbles into human evidence who witnessed the commission of a crime or is a victim it is the duty of both the investigator and the prosecutor to protect such vital witness knowing how sensitive and vital their evidence would help to bring about closure on the perpetuators of the crime. This paper identifies the challenges of witnesses and victims of complex crimes, in supporting the justice system by giving evidence of the commission of a crime without being protected by the State. For this reason, the paper proffers solutions on witness protection measures that can be made available to them. Keywords: Victim, witness, vulnerable witness DOI: 10.7176/JLPG/112-11 Publication date: August 31 st 2021

Jurors’ emotional state, attentional focus, and judicial judgment in a criminal court

ABSTRACT In order to consider the relevant relationships between emotion, information processing and judicial judgment, this study evaluated the impact of positive (amusement), negative (sadness) or neutral mood induction on 128 mock jurors’ visual attentional focus, as measured by their eye fixations on the face of a witness filmed while giving testimony in a criminal court. Participants then rated their perceptions of the witness's and their own emotions on the Differential Emotional Scale, before indicating their final judicial judgment. As expected, results showed that sadness can favour information processing in a in more effortful mode, with more steady visual attention, while a positive emotional state such as amusement can favour information processing based more on the witness's emotions, a source of useful clues for establishing the judicial judgment. These results are discussed in relation to how the cognitive approach can shed light on the processes underlying judicial judgment.