Robert J Norris
Biographic Data
| ID | 4076450 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert J Norris |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert J |
| FAMILY NAME | Norris |
| SIGNATURE | NORRIS R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1521-6889 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Punitiveness of the Mass Public: Lessons From Exploratory Studies
Objective A large literature across the social sciences examines the punishment preferences of the mass public. Although this work yields valuable insights into the correlates of punitive attitudes, differences in research design and measurement complicate comparisons across studies. We engage in a large‐scale exploratory analysis of the dynamics that shape punitiveness. Methods We fielded two surveys in the United States with multiple measures o…
Expanding wrongful conviction analyses: A framework to foreground temporality and change
Innocence research has traditionally focused on a common set of contributing factors and the aftermath of exoneration. A result of this narrow lens is that researchers typically frame wrongful convictions as primarily involving innocent defendants and the state actors who harmed them, glossing over the roles played by the many other actors who may be involved in these cases. Further, scholars rarely analyze the timing and sequencing of the crimin…
An opportunity for abolition: McCleskey, innocence, and the modern death penalty decline
For more than two decades after Gregg v. Georgia (1976), use of the death penalty greatly expanded across the United States. Since 2000, however, it has declined significantly. Perhaps the most notable explanation for this decline is the contemporary focus on wrongful convictions. In this paper, we aim to contextualize the modern death penalty decline, and its connection with innocence, through the theoretical lens of social movements and collect…
Humor, resistance, and the power of images: The case for studying prison cartoons
In this research note, we advocate for greater use of a largely untapped form of archival data—prison cartoons. Drawing on scholarship in visual criminology, we argue that prison cartoons can supplement and enrich scholarly understandings of the lived experience of confinement, especially as access to prisons becomes more difficult. Using a series of cartoons published in The Pea Pickers Picayune , an American prison newspaper published in the 19…
The Good, the Bad, and the Uncertain: State Harm, the Aftermath of Exoneration, and Compensation for the Wrongly Convicted
The Politics of Wrongful Conviction Legislation
Wrongful convictions are an increasing salient feature of criminal justice discourse in the United States. Many states have adopted reforms to mitigate the likelihood of wrongful convictions, discover errors, and provide redress in the wake of exonerations, yet we know little about why some are seemingly more committed to reducing such errors than others. We argue that public opinion is consequential for policy reform, but its effects are conting…
The Feedback Effects of Controversial Police Use of Force
The criminal costs of wrongful convictions: Can we reduce crime by protecting the innocent
Research Summary In this article, we examine criminal offending by true perpetrators after innocent people are arrested and convicted for their crimes. After investigating a set of cases in which DNA was used to exonerate the innocent and to identify the guilty party, we identified 109 true perpetrators, 102 of whom committed additional crimes. We found a total of 337 additional offenses committed by the true perpetrators, including 43 homicide‐r…
Pulled-Over Rates, Causal Attributions, and Trust in Police
A growing literature documents racial disparities throughout the American criminal justice system. Yet, even as this evidence accumulates and garners increasing media attention, we know relatively little about the consequences of this type of information for public opinion. We incorporate insights from attribution theory to suggest that people differ in the cause they attribute to racial disparities in the justice system, and these different caus…
The influence of confessions on guilty pleas and pleadiscounts
The influence on confession evidence in trials is quite strong; triers of fact who hear confession evidence find these self-incriminating statements hard to ignore and in turn, vote to convict more often. However, most cases do not see the inside of a courtroom, but rather are resolved via plea bargains. In the present study, we examined how confessions, whether partial or full, influence guilty plea rates and plea discounts (the difference betwe…
Punishing Benevolence: The Criminalization of Homeless Feeding as an Act of State Harm
An Explicit Test of Plea Bargaining in the “Shadow of the Trial”
Bargaining in the “shadow of the trial,” which hinges on the expectations of trial outcomes, is the primary theory used by noncriminologists to explain variation in the plea discount given to defendants who plead guilty. This study develops a formal mathematical representation of the theory and then presents an empirical test of the theory using an innovative online survey with responses to a hypothetical case from 1,585 prosecutors, defense atto…
The Feedback Effects of Controversial Police Use of Force
An Explicit Test of Plea Bargaining in the “Shadow of the Trial”
Bargaining in the “shadow of the trial,” which hinges on the expectations of trial outcomes, is the primary theory used by noncriminologists to explain variation in the plea discount given to defendants who plead guilty. This study develops a formal mathematical representation of the theory and then presents an empirical test of the theory using an innovative online survey with responses to a hypothetical case from 1,585 prosecutors, defense atto…
Pulled-Over Rates, Causal Attributions, and Trust in Police
A growing literature documents racial disparities throughout the American criminal justice system. Yet, even as this evidence accumulates and garners increasing media attention, we know relatively little about the consequences of this type of information for public opinion. We incorporate insights from attribution theory to suggest that people differ in the cause they attribute to racial disparities in the justice system, and these different caus…
The influence of confessions on guilty pleas and pleadiscounts
The influence on confession evidence in trials is quite strong; triers of fact who hear confession evidence find these self-incriminating statements hard to ignore and in turn, vote to convict more often. However, most cases do not see the inside of a courtroom, but rather are resolved via plea bargains. In the present study, we examined how confessions, whether partial or full, influence guilty plea rates and plea discounts (the difference betwe…
The criminal costs of wrongful convictions: Can we reduce crime by protecting the innocent
Research Summary In this article, we examine criminal offending by true perpetrators after innocent people are arrested and convicted for their crimes. After investigating a set of cases in which DNA was used to exonerate the innocent and to identify the guilty party, we identified 109 true perpetrators, 102 of whom committed additional crimes. We found a total of 337 additional offenses committed by the true perpetrators, including 43 homicide‐r…
The Good, the Bad, and the Uncertain: State Harm, the Aftermath of Exoneration, and Compensation for the Wrongly Convicted
The Politics of Wrongful Conviction Legislation
Wrongful convictions are an increasing salient feature of criminal justice discourse in the United States. Many states have adopted reforms to mitigate the likelihood of wrongful convictions, discover errors, and provide redress in the wake of exonerations, yet we know little about why some are seemingly more committed to reducing such errors than others. We argue that public opinion is consequential for policy reform, but its effects are conting…
Humor, resistance, and the power of images: The case for studying prison cartoons
In this research note, we advocate for greater use of a largely untapped form of archival data—prison cartoons. Drawing on scholarship in visual criminology, we argue that prison cartoons can supplement and enrich scholarly understandings of the lived experience of confinement, especially as access to prisons becomes more difficult. Using a series of cartoons published in The Pea Pickers Picayune , an American prison newspaper published in the 19…
An Explicit Test of Plea Bargaining in the “Shadow of the Trial”
Bargaining in the “shadow of the trial,” which hinges on the expectations of trial outcomes, is the primary theory used by noncriminologists to explain variation in the plea discount given to defendants who plead guilty. This study develops a formal mathematical representation of the theory and then presents an empirical test of the theory using an innovative online survey with responses to a hypothetical case from 1,585 prosecutors, defense atto…
The influence of confessions on guilty pleas and pleadiscounts
The influence on confession evidence in trials is quite strong; triers of fact who hear confession evidence find these self-incriminating statements hard to ignore and in turn, vote to convict more often. However, most cases do not see the inside of a courtroom, but rather are resolved via plea bargains. In the present study, we examined how confessions, whether partial or full, influence guilty plea rates and plea discounts (the difference betwe…
Punishing Benevolence: The Criminalization of Homeless Feeding as an Act of State Harm
The criminal costs of wrongful convictions: Can we reduce crime by protecting the innocent
Research Summary In this article, we examine criminal offending by true perpetrators after innocent people are arrested and convicted for their crimes. After investigating a set of cases in which DNA was used to exonerate the innocent and to identify the guilty party, we identified 109 true perpetrators, 102 of whom committed additional crimes. We found a total of 337 additional offenses committed by the true perpetrators, including 43 homicide‐r…
Pulled-Over Rates, Causal Attributions, and Trust in Police
A growing literature documents racial disparities throughout the American criminal justice system. Yet, even as this evidence accumulates and garners increasing media attention, we know relatively little about the consequences of this type of information for public opinion. We incorporate insights from attribution theory to suggest that people differ in the cause they attribute to racial disparities in the justice system, and these different caus…
The Politics of Wrongful Conviction Legislation
Wrongful convictions are an increasing salient feature of criminal justice discourse in the United States. Many states have adopted reforms to mitigate the likelihood of wrongful convictions, discover errors, and provide redress in the wake of exonerations, yet we know little about why some are seemingly more committed to reducing such errors than others. We argue that public opinion is consequential for policy reform, but its effects are conting…
The Feedback Effects of Controversial Police Use of Force
The Good, the Bad, and the Uncertain: State Harm, the Aftermath of Exoneration, and Compensation for the Wrongly Convicted
Humor, resistance, and the power of images: The case for studying prison cartoons
In this research note, we advocate for greater use of a largely untapped form of archival data—prison cartoons. Drawing on scholarship in visual criminology, we argue that prison cartoons can supplement and enrich scholarly understandings of the lived experience of confinement, especially as access to prisons becomes more difficult. Using a series of cartoons published in The Pea Pickers Picayune , an American prison newspaper published in the 19…
An opportunity for abolition: McCleskey, innocence, and the modern death penalty decline
For more than two decades after Gregg v. Georgia (1976), use of the death penalty greatly expanded across the United States. Since 2000, however, it has declined significantly. Perhaps the most notable explanation for this decline is the contemporary focus on wrongful convictions. In this paper, we aim to contextualize the modern death penalty decline, and its connection with innocence, through the theoretical lens of social movements and collect…
The Punitiveness of the Mass Public: Lessons From Exploratory Studies
Objective A large literature across the social sciences examines the punishment preferences of the mass public. Although this work yields valuable insights into the correlates of punitive attitudes, differences in research design and measurement complicate comparisons across studies. We engage in a large‐scale exploratory analysis of the dynamics that shape punitiveness. Methods We fielded two surveys in the United States with multiple measures o…
Expanding wrongful conviction analyses: A framework to foreground temporality and change
Innocence research has traditionally focused on a common set of contributing factors and the aftermath of exoneration. A result of this narrow lens is that researchers typically frame wrongful convictions as primarily involving innocent defendants and the state actors who harmed them, glossing over the roles played by the many other actors who may be involved in these cases. Further, scholars rarely analyze the timing and sequencing of the crimin…
Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (8 works) · Criminology (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Conviction (5 works) · Social Psychology (5 works) · Deception detection and forensic psychology (4 works) · Politics (4 works)