spenrod@jjay.cuny.edu

Steven D. Penrod joined the John Jay faculty as Distinguished Professor of Psychology in 2001. He earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1974 and his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University in 1979. He was previously on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Minnesota Law School and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has over 150 publications; is a co-author of books on juries, on eyewitnesses, introductory psychology and social psychology; and a co-editor of volumes on research methods in forensic psychology and comparative psychology and law.

Professor Penrod’s research and writing have focused on decision-making in legal contexts. He has written about the effects of jury size and decision rules on jury decision-making, death penalty decision-making, juror’s use of probabilistic and hearsay evidence, comprehension of legal instructions, and the impact of extra-legal influences such as pretrial publicity, joinder of charges, the effects of cameras in the courtroom, the and the effects of juror questioning of witnesses on jury performance. His research and writing about eyewitness evidence has encompassed factors that reduce eyewitness reliability and lineup procedures that may enhance eyewitness performance,  jury assessments of eyewitness evidence, the relationship between eyewitness confidence and eyewitness accuracy and the effects of eyewitness expert testimony and jury instructions on jury decision-making.

Research Topics:

Eyewitness Reliability; Jury Decision Making

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Current Projects/Research Interests

• Eyewitness Issues
  • Operationalizing “Unnecessary Suggestiveness” [lineup fairness] and assessing judicial operationalizations
  • Measuring eyewitness performance
  • The role of familiarity in eyewitness identifications [with Margaret Kovera]
  • Assessing the discriminative value of pre-identification confidence [with Margaret Kovera]

• Factors influencing plea bargaining decisions by prosecutors and defense attorneys
• Sometimes: pretrial publicity effects on juries

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Recent Publications

Roth, J. A., Vaynman,A. & Penrod, S. (In press).  Why Criminal Defendants Cooperate: The Defense Attorney’s Perspective.  Northwestern University Law Review.

Lee, J. & Penrod, S. D. (2022).  Three-level meta-analysis of the other-race bias in facial identification, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3997

Lee, J., Mansour, J.K., & Penrod, S. D. (2022). Validity of mock-witness measures for assessing lineup fairness. Psychology, Crime, and Law, 28, 215-245.    https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316X.2021.1905811

Penrod, S. (2021). Pretrial Publicity. In Oxford Bibliographies in Psychology. Ed. Dana S. Dunn. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780199828340-0290    https://bit.ly/3kGkpLj

Bergold, A. N., Jones, A. M., Dillon, M. K. & Penrod, S. D. (2020). Eyewitnesses in the courtroom: a jury-level examination of the impact of Henderson instructions. Journal of Experimental Criminology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-020-09412-3

Lee, J & Penrod, S. D. (2019). New signal-detection-theory-based framework for eyewitness performance in lineups.  Law and Human Behavior, 43, 436-454. https://doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000343

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Current Students