PROJECTS
Elevating Trust and Legitimacy for Prosecutors Project
Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory has partnered with the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and LaGratta Consulting to develop the Elevating Trust and Legitimacy for Prosecutors Project. Through a multi-phase site selection process, project partners chose the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office, Saint Paul City Attorney’s Office and Columbus City Attorney’s Office as the project pilot sites to engage in a year-long collaborative assessment, planning, and implementation process of procedural justice practices.
These practices may include witness and defendant interview protocols or guides, community and participant feedback forums, and improved transparency efforts for key decision points like diversion eligibility and pretrial detention. The end goal is to produce increased public trust and legitimacy of prosecutors locally and develop a national model for other prosecutor offices nationally.
Diagnostic Facial Features & Eyewitness Identification
One of the most common police practices for suspect identification is presenting an eyewitness with a six-person facial photo lineup. Unfortunately, the photo lineup is not without its flaws; the Innocence Project found that eyewitness misidentification played a role in about 71% of over 360 wrongful convictions overturned by post-conviction DNA testing. This inaccuracy prompts the question: what is it about a person’s face that motivates a witness to identify them as a suspect?
I aim to answer the following question: how much impact do facial features, or the combinations of certain features, have on identification accuracy in a photo lineup? I want to systematically establish which features, if any, improve accuracy when identifying a suspect in a photo lineup. This will help determine whether certain features, or combinations of features, are, in fact, diagnostic and to what degree they contribute to correct identification.
Manipulating Criterion for Freely Recalled Episodic Events
Testimony, or relaying any memory to another person, involves making decisions about what information to report. According to Signal Detection Theory (SDT) models, every person sets a different reporting threshold, or criterion, based on the amount of information they can recall. The ultimate decision to report information from a witnessed event depends on the level of familiarity and the scenario, which can dictate whether a person only relies on strong, clear memory evidence or is willing to rely on relatively weaker memory evidence. The ability to shift these criterion thresholds (criterion shift) has the potential to improve decision outcomes, especially in situations where there is some uncertainty. I am applying criterion shifting to areas of memory, such as the free recall of episodic events, to evaluate its effects in more ecologically valid circumstances.
DAVIS Database
In recent years, neuroscience has embraced the significance of naturalistic stimuli to understand real-world information processing in the brain. While traditional experimental approaches using artificial audiovisual stimuli have contributed to investigations of sensory processing, they are limited by their reliance on mainstream films or lab-specific performances with restricted character and scene diversity.
To bridge this gap and enhance the complexity and authenticity of video-based stimuli, I have created a novel resource called the Durdle Affective Video Input Stimuli (DAVIS) Database. The DAVIS Database comprises six hundred videos that have been carefully curated from a wide range of Creative Commons sources. Unlike staged or fictional scenarios, the DAVIS Database exclusively focuses on real-life events. This distinction permits the exploration of daily life aspects and facilitates a more ecologically valid examination of human responses to naturalistic stimuli.