Research Portfolio
A focus on defendant decision-making
Some of the most interesting questions at the intersection of forensic psychology and decision-making relate to decisions made by the accused. Why do people commit crimes in the first place? Why do innocent people confess, or why do they plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit? And relatedly, why do professionals within the legal system allow (and sometimes, encourage) these seemingly unjust decisions? These, and related questions have garnered a great deal of research interest. Yet they are often studied as distinct decision points, with limited recognition of the dynamic process within which they may occur - a process that often imposes its' own pressures and involves a host of prior decisions and conditions, all of which can narrow the (perceived or real) options available to the decision-maker. However, studying the process is challenging because of the inherent limitations of paradigms used to study decisions made by the accused, most of which only allow one decision-point to be measured. I adapted Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (CYOA), a branching narrative commonly used in young adult fiction, to offer a systematic way for researchers to measure sequences of conditions and decisions. The CYOA paradigm enables participants to play an active role through the entire adjudication process, making multiple decisions throughout the process, as they would in the real world.
Validation evidence
Initial pilot testing, funded by the American Psychological Association Early Graduate Student Researcher Award, demonstrated the paradigm's capacity to capture sequential participant decisions throughout sexual assault cases with sufficient immersion to approximate real-world behavior. Scientific interest in the CYOA approach is growing, with three published articles and several known adaptations for research into sexual consent behavior, political radicalization, and sexual violence in the Title IX context.
Current research projects
Project #1: Wrongful convictions in sex crime cases: a look at false accusations.
The National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) has documented over 3,700 reversals of wrongful convictions since 1989. Remarkably, exonerees had been wrongly convicted of a sexual crime (child sexual abuse or sexual assault) in nearly one in five of these exonerations, and a majority of those (~60%) were based - at least in part- on a false accusation.
Investigations and prosecutions of sexual violence often depend on the complainant’s account, making their credibility central to the case. Accused individuals can face serious legal and social consequences based on how believable the report seems, even if they are not convicted. Recently, there has been public criticism of attempts to question or assess the credibility of these reports, with advocates arguing that false accusations are extremely rare and that doubting victims can discourage others from coming forward. However, there is little research on this topic—only 21 articles have examined false accusations in sexual crime cases, and just 12 present actual data. In this project, I use wrongful conviction cases from the NRE involving false sexual crime accusations to better understand the specific features and challenges of these cases.
Research assistants are coding NRE narratives and additional public records for each case, documenting individual characteristics of the accused and accuser, common motives, as well as accused-complainant relationship. Preliminary analyses of these data indicate that false allegation cases may be distinguishable in some ways from most sexual violence reports, which may aid in their accurate detection.
Project #2: Adjudicative competency in criminal cases involving sovereign citizen defendants whose ideology was mistaken for delusional thinking.
Following Dusky v. United States (1960), courts require that defendants possess both a factual and rational understanding of the criminal process and the ability to assist in their own defense, ensuring fundamental fairness and protecting those rendered defenseless by impairment. Traditionally, competency to stand trial (CST) referrals have focused on defendants with mental health, cognitive, or neurological issues, but recent increases in extremist ideologies—such as the Sovereign Citizen movement—have complicated this landscape. Adherents of such movements often espouse beliefs that challenge the legitimacy of the court, disrupt proceedings, refuse to communicate with counsel, and file nonsensical motions, raising questions about whether their bizarre, fixed political views can or should be grounds for incompetency findings.
These cases blur the line between delusional thinking (a form of psychosis) and deeply held ideological beliefs, especially when defendants insist on waiving counsel under Faretta v. California (1975), which sets a higher bar for self-representation. Defense attorneys and judges may feel compelled to seek competency evaluations for sovereign adherents due to their disruptive conduct and refusal to engage meaningfully with their own cases. The challenge is heightened by the fact that some evaluators may lack familiarity with the ideology, making it difficult to distinguish between incompetence rooted in mental illness and disruptive behavior stemming from fringe political convictions—raising complex legal, ethical, and philosophical questions for both the legal and psychiatric treatment systems.
To aid in resolving the ethical questions raised by applying the Dusky standard in these cases, I have collected court decisions and public record information on 85 Federal and 96 U.S. state court cases involving sovereign citizen defendants whose competency was questioned. Together with colleagues, we are working to code and analyze nearly 5,000 pages of judicial writing to understand behavioral, crimino-legal, procedural, and demographic variables that may contextualize these competency inquiries, as well as lead to improvements in the accuracy of CST referrals in the future.
Project #3: Collective decision-making in high-stakes contexts.
Another common problem in decision-making science is the focus on individual decision-making (and individual decisions) even in situations where the ultimate decision is made not by any individual, but by a group following a collective decision-making process. One common example of this can be commonly seen in jury decision-making research, where opinions and verdict inclinations of individual jurors replace a systematic effort to assess the group's collective process of arriving at a verdict. Another, far less commonly recognized example is presented by decisions of parole boards, where discretionary release of prisoners can result. Unlike juries, parole boards have garnered far less research attention, and relatively little is known about the accuracy or logic underlying their collective decisions.
In the wake of Covid-19, multiple parole boards took their discretionary release hearings online, and some never returned to traditional, in-person hearings. This left a treasure trove of data that could be transcribed, coded, and analyzed to improve our understanding of the inner workings of these boards and diagnosticity of their release decisions. This project analyzes over 500 hours of Louisiana parole board hearings from 2020-2021, examining how prisoner narratives affect board decision-making processes. Research assistants are working to code multiple elements of hearings (questions posed, narratives and statements, and decisional components) to understand the board's process, while public record data collection for prisoner outcomes is also underway.The research also explores admissions of guilt made in high-stakes contexts, recording innocence claims and contradictory statements (on innocence and guilt), while providing policy implications for discretionary parole practices.
Research impact metrics and outcomes
Source: Google Scholar Profile, July 11, 2025.