ABSTRACT
Under federal and state laws, a defendant who has been charged with more than one related offense may be compelled to defend against those charges in a single trial. However, a prosecutor's decision to try several offenses in the same trial can be challenged at several points in the legal process. The theories of prejudice expressed in the legal rules lend themselves to empirical investigation and research in the areas of cognitive and social psychology offers some evidence in support of the legal intuitions. In addition to empirical evidence on joinder, there is related research on juror decision making. Nagao and Davis studied the effects of previous experience judging unrelated crimes of differing relative severity. The recall measures collected at the end of the experiment were designed to further investigate the decision-making process in terms of the confusion hypothesis. The results provide compelling evidence that joined trials significantly influence mock juro's judgments.
