Faculty and Staff

We investigated the role of moral disengagement in a legally‐relevant judgment in this theoretically‐driven empirical analysis. Moral disengagement is a social‐cognitive phenomenon through which people reason their way toward harming others, presenting a useful framework for investigating legal judgments that often result in harming individuals for the good of society. We tested the role of moral disengagement in forensic psychologists’ willingness to conduct the most ethically questionable clinical task in the criminal justice system: competence for execution evaluations. Our hypothesis that moral disengagement would function as mediator of participants’ existing attitudes and their judgments—a theoretical “bridge” between attitudes and judgments—was robustly supported. Moral disengagement was key to understanding how psychologists decide to engage in competence for execution evaluations. We describe in detail the moral disengagement measure we used, including exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses across two separate samples. The four‐factor measure accounted for a total of 52.18 percent of the variance in the sample of forensic psychologists, and the model adequately fit the data in the entirely different sample of jurors in a confirmatory factor analysis. Despite the psychometric strengths of this moral disengagement measure, we describe the pros and cons of existing measures of moral disengagement. We outline future directions for moral disengagement research, especially in legal contexts.

Prosecutors are handling increasing numbers of criminal cases concerning veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). How these prosecutors handle such cases may reflect their attitudes toward veterans or offenders with PTSD. In turn, their attitudes may affect perceptions of blameworthiness, as well as negotiations about sentencing during the pre-trial stage. The present study investigated the effect of a defendant’s military experience and mental health status (i.e., PTSD) on prosecutors’ offers at the pre-trial stage and their ratings of the defendant’s blameworthiness. Prosecutors’ offers were more lenient to stress-disordered veterans; specifically, they were offered more diversion programs compared to veterans without PTSD and to other offenders with PTSD. Prosecutors also perceived veterans and those with PTSD as less criminally culpable; they also empathized and identified more with veterans and those with PTSD than non-veterans and offenders without PTSD.