446 ———Legal Authoritarianismconsequences about how one views a criminal trial.
According to Packer, individuals who hold strong
crime control values regard the control and reduction
of criminal conduct as the primary goal of the crimi-
nal justice system. To do so, one seeks efficiency in
the criminal justice process to be maintained at all
costs. They, therefore, tend to have greater confidence
in law enforcement and other criminal justice actors to
correctly and competently carry out their duties of
apprehending and convicting criminals while acquit-
ting the innocent. These individuals see the presump-
tion of innocence and burden of proof as unwanted
obstacles and encourage the power of institutionalized
authority over the rights of the accused. Conversely,
those holding due process values question the ability
of the criminal justice system to properly carry out
their duties in apprehending and trying offenders.
They stress the rights of the accused, are fearful of
innocent persons wrongfully convicted, and empha-
size the importance of procedural safeguards in main-
taining the integrity of the process, even at the
expense of releasing persons who may be factually
guilty. The crime control and due process models con-
ceptually covary with legal authoritarianism. That is,
those who place trust in the system and seek to appre-
hend and punish wrongdoers at the expense of their
liberties demonstrate authoritarian values, whereas
those who question unfettered police powers and seek
to maintain procedural safeguards to protect the rights
of the accused demonstrate antiauthoritarian values.
In the same year, Packer published his theory of the
crime control and due process models, and Virginia
Boehm published the Legal Attitudes Questionnaire
(LAQ). The scale measures three constructs: authori-
tarianism, antiauthoritarianism, and equalitarianism.
This 30-item scale was grouped into 10 sets of triads,
each containing a statement reflecting each construct.
Participants rank ordered agreement with the
statements within each triad. Authoritarian items
expressed unquestioned support for authority and lim-
its on the rights of the accused (e.g., “Evidence ille-
gally obtained should be admissible in court if
such evidence is the only way of obtaining a convic-
tion.”). Antiauthoritarian items reflected beliefs that
challenged authority and expressed the need for
procedural safeguards to protect the accused (e.g.,
“Wiretapping by anyone and for any reason should
be completely illegal.”). Equalitarian statements
reflected neither authoritarian nor antiauthoritarian
values, but instead reflected beliefs that fell some-
where within these extremes (e.g., “Citizens need tobe protected against excessive police power as well as
against criminals.”).
Researchers later developed the Revised Legal
Attitudes Questionnaire (RLAQ) in an effort to
improve the psychometric properties of the scale.
Ranked agreement within the 10 triads was aban-
doned in favor of Likert scoring for all 30 items. This
led to a sizable reduction in items scored incorrectly.
It also revealed some limits to the construct validity of
the scale. For the RLAQ, significant negative correla-
tions emerged for the authoritarian and equalitarian
subscales, whereas the antiauthoritarian subscale
failed to correlate with the others. Moreover, although
the authoritarian subscale significantly positively corre-
lated with a traditional measure of authoritarianism—
the Balanced F Scale—it was scores on the
equalitarian subscale and not the antiauthoritarian
subscale that negatively correlated with this measure
of authoritarianism. This finding suggested that equal-
itarian items on the scale are better conceptualized as
antiauthoritarian and vice versa.
In 1983, Saul Kassin and Larry Wrightsman pub-
lished the Juror Bias Scale (JBS). The goal was to cre-
ate a measure of “generalized pretrial bias.” They noted
that typical models of jury decision making assume that
verdicts reflect two judgments—the likelihood that the
defendant committed the crime charged, or probability
of commission (PC), and a judgment of threshold nec-
essary to convict, or reasonable doubt (RD). The
authors surmised that jurors may differ along two theo-
retically independent dimensions (i.e., PC and RD).
The scale contains 9 PC items (e.g., “Generally, the
police make an arrest only when they are sure about
who committed the crime.”) and 8 RD items (e.g., “If a
majority of the evidence—but not all of it—suggests
that the defendant committed the crime, the jury should
vote not guilty.”). Here again, these same elements of
authoritarian beliefs (e.g., trust in authority) as well as
antiauthoritarian beliefs (e.g., need for safeguards to
protect the rights of citizens) emerge.
Researchers, in developing the most recent mea-
sure of juror attitudes—the Pretrial Juror Attitudes
Questionnaire (PJAQ)—used a dual approach to item
generation. Here, items were derived from a sample of
participants in addition to using items present in existing
scales. The initial pool of items was reduced to a man-
ageable size based on a separate sample’s consensus that
the items reflected attitudes that could bias a juror’s
judgment in the case, along with factor analytic meth-
ods. For the final 29-item scale, the separate constructs
of cynicism and confidence reemerged, along withL-Cutler (Encyc)-45463.qxd 11/18/2007 12:43 PM Page 446