Jurors Look to Mannerisms for Clues to Truth

When Ron Shipp urged his friend O. J. Simpson to “tell the truth,” when Denise Brown heaved sighs and sobbed on the stand, and when Detective Mark Fuhrman snapped his head back while viewing the letter of a woman who has accused him of racism, what was the jury doing?

Were they watching to see if Brown, detailing Simpson’s alleged abuse of her sister, ever looked at Simpson from the witness box? Taking mental note of how Shipp, during a break in the proceedings, stared pointedly at the accused double-murderer and mouthed a message to him? Wondering what Fuhrman’s sudden movement meant?

Wouldn’t we all like to know? As armchair jurors glued to the broadcasts of Simpson’s televised trial, we size up the witnesses not only by weighing their statements but by observing their demeanor, believing that mannerisms sometimes speak louder than words.

Behavioral experts say the real jurors are no different, seeking out clues of truthfulness or deception in the shrug of a shoulder, the twitch of a brow, the steadiness of a gaze.

“When we’re placed in a new situation or confronted with people we don’t know, we generally place more importance on the nonverbals,” said Donald Vinson, chairman of DecisionQuest, the Torrance trial consulting firm advising the prosecution in the Simpson case. Jurors, he added, “have got nothing to do all day but sit and watch. So (nonverbal communication) matters a great deal.”

Jude Nelson will attest to that. The former rock band manager from Sylmar sat in a Van Nuys courtroom for six months in 1993 as a member of the Lyle Menendez jury. He remembers one defense witness who leaned toward Lyle and “kept eyeballing him” from the stand, as if trying to communicate with him. The juror concluded that the witness was “lying through her teeth.”

“Body language,” insists Nelson, who voted for first-degree murder on a jury that ultimately deadlocked, “is incredibly important.”

That idea--that a person’s behavior while testifying can be a powerful gauge of honesty--is embedded in the American judicial system.

“The courts assume that you are better at judging someone’s truthfulness if you can see them,” said Phoebe Ellsworth, a professor of law and psychology at the University of Michigan law school who has studied how juries make decisions.

That is why most witnesses are questioned in open court before a judge and jury, and why jurors are commonly instructed by judges to use demeanor on the stand as one of several important tests of believability.

The irony is, a growing body of research shows that most people are mediocre at best when they try to judge truthfulness from facial expressions, tone of voice, body movements and other facets of demeanor. This weakness has been found even in professionals for whom lie-catching is crucial, such as customs inspectors and psychiatrists.

In the courtroom, a leading authority on lie detection says, the odds are stacked almost hopelessly against intuiting deception from behavior.

“The courtroom is the most difficult situation of all,” said Paul Ekman, a psychology professor and researcher at UC San Francisco’s Human Interaction Laboratory.

In Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito’s courtroom, the 20 jurors and alternates have kept poker faces for the most part, giving away few clues to their thoughts about the witness parade under way for the past several weeks. But jury specialists who have conducted extensive post-trial interviews with jurors in other cases say it’s likely that little is escaping their gaze.

Sequestered jurors may be especially attuned to nonverbal messages from courtroom players, said Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, the Pasadena trial consultant advising the Simpson defense team.

“What happens is the courtroom becomes their home. They know everybody who walks in and out of that door. They notice not only what you have on but how all the people in the courtroom interact with one another, not just the defendant and the attorneys, but the reporters, the judge, the bailiff and the people in the audience,” she said. “Trials get to be monotonous, so (the jurors) look around the courtroom for reactions.”

Jurors also use courtroom behavior as a sounding board. “We all look for validation. How do you do that when you’re sitting in the jury box and you’re told you cannot talk about the case or anything having to do with the case?” Dimitrius said.

“The validation you get is through the body language of everybody in that courtroom. That’s a very important part of the process.”

Courts can try to regulate behavior, as Ito did when he issued an order against emotional displays among courtroom spectators while the jury is present. “This includes the rolling of eyes, facial grimaces, hand gestures and all other obvious expressions,” Ito wrote. The prohibition came after members of the Brown family were noticed visibly sighing or rolling their eyes during defense presentations before the jury was brought in. Simpson has reacted similarly during testimony by prosecution witnesses.

University of Washington forensic psychologist Elizabeth Loftus says jurors, like most of us, are also sensitive to “para-linguistic cues,” especially those that express confidence or uncertainty.

Studies by many researchers have shown that confident speech is very persuasive, particularly from an eyewitness to a crime. Verbal tics or hedges, such as preceding a statement with “I think” or “I kind of feel,” are a turnoff.

Given that, jurors might have difficulty believing Rosa Lopez.

The maid to Simpson’s next-door neighbor was a vital alibi witness who was expected to testify that she saw Simpson’s white Bronco parked in front of his Brentwood estate around the time that the prosecution alleges the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were committed.

Instead, she seemed tentative and confused when she was questioned about the time. And, during her videotaped testimony--which the jury might be shown when the defense presents its case--she often used phrases such as “if you say so, sir” when responding to prosecution questions.

During the Menendez trial, juror Ruth Slike recalls being impressed--negatively--by Lyle’s manner of speech. “It was kind of chopped. It seemed to imply a kind of arrogance about him,” she said.

“I looked at the transcripts and for the most part Lyle never did make a sentence. I am a little bit critical of that. Maybe I was too judgmental, but if you went to Princeton, you should be able to form a sentence.”

Slike, who favored a verdict of first-degree murder, said such impressions never unduly influenced her evaluation of the evidence. Trial consultants say most jurors insist they focus purely on the evidence, looking for inconsistencies, and rely heavily on opening statements and closing arguments to help them interpret a case.

“Gestures, body movements, they didn’t faze me at all,” said Edith Foster of Los Angeles, who has served on two criminal trials. “I listened for facts. Anyone with common sense is not going to go with the way someone moves their shoulders or clenches their fingers. That isn’t important.”

Some experts believe that jurors focus more on nonverbal cues when confronted by testimony that taxes their understanding. Overwhelmed by very complex information or difficult terminology, a juror might be tempted to fixate on the way the person talking shuffles nervously through notes or stutters on the stand.

“Boy, we are going to see that when we get into the DNA evidence,” said Vinson, a doctor of philosophy who has written a book about psychological strategies in jury persuasion. “When people are confronted in the Simpson case with information that is new to them or inconsistent with common sense, they are really going to focus on the behavior” of witnesses.

The danger is in how they interpret the clues. Vinson recalls a major antitrust suit he worked on where a witness for the plaintiff kept glancing around the courtroom. In post-trial interviews jurors said they thought the witness was being prompted by someone in the room. “That didn’t happen,” said Vinson, “but this witness gave the impression of being very uncomfortable and looking around, so people assumed this person was looking for help.”

Research shows that most people are poor lie detectors when asked to assess truthfulness from behavior. Even professionals who are assumed to be highly skilled judges of veracity flunk as often as they succeed.

In a 1991 study published in the journal of the American Psychological Assn., professor Ekman and colleague Maureen O’Sullivan of the University of San Francisco evaluated 509 subjects, including judges, college students, psychiatrists, federal polygraphers and Secret Service agents. Each was shown videotapes of 10 people--half of whom were lying and half of whom were telling the truth about a film they were watching--and asked to identify the liars.

The only group that was significantly above average in accuracy was the Secret Service. More than half of them--53%--could pick the liars at least 70% of the time, which Ekman rated as better than chance. Judges were a distant second, with 34% scoring that well, followed by psychiatrists at 32%. Only 26% of robbery investigators and 22% of federal polygraphers hit the high accuracy range.

Ekman surmised that the Secret Service agents used nonverbal clues more effectively and were better able to interpret subtle facial changes that can signal deceit, possibly a result of the amount of time they spend scanning crowds for potential attackers. In subsequent studies, the psychology professor has found that top-rated police interrogators also performed as well as the Secret Service.

“So it is possible to detect deception from demeanor,” concludes Ekman, whose three decades studying the subject have included requests to spot liars at diplomatic summits and to analyze photographs of heiress Patty Hearst for clues as to whether she was a willing or reluctant bank robber.

Poker player John Tonner is a firm believer in the value of nonverbal messages. The foreman of the jury that acquitted prominent San Francisco attorney Patrick Hallinan of drug conspiracy and racketeering charges in Reno last week, Tonner is a student of “the tell”--the facial expressions and gestures that can tip off poker players to a losing hand.

Practiced at reading body language, the construction engineer quickly dismissed the prosecution’s star witness as a well-rehearsed liar, in part because of eye blinking and hand movements that Tonner found phony. “You have to know what to look for and how to interpret it,” the juror said.

Experience, as in the case of the federal agents, probably does count for something. But no one yet knows whether the ability to decipher liars’ cues can be taught. Part of the problem for jurors and others is that lying is highly idiosyncratic.

Bella M. DePaulo, a lie-detection expert who teaches psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said studies show that when people are telling falsehoods they tend to blink more, have more dilated pupils, rub or scratch themselves, give shorter responses that are more negative, irrelevant and general, and speak in a higher pitch. But there are no behaviors that always mean someone is lying.

“You can train someone to be better at detecting a particular person’s deception” by familiarizing them with that person’s clues, she said. “But that doesn’t necessarily generalize to someone else. Different people have different ways of lying.”

“I don’t think it would help a jury a lot to get training,” DePaulo said. “They could be helped some, but not reliably enough.”

Ekman agrees. In the courtroom version of “Truth or Consequences,” juries, he says, have several strikes against them.

Guilty defendants and deceitful witnesses have months to prepare and rehearse their stories, allowing them to build self-confidence and decrease their fear of having their lies exposed.

The slow pace of justice also gives guilty suspects time to blunt any emotions associated with the crime that could blow their cover, or to rehearse their answers so many times that they begin to believe them.

An innocent defendant or truthful witness, on the other hand, could be so terrified of not being believed that a jury could read that fright or nervousness as fear of being caught, Ekman said.

Nonetheless, the lie-detection expert believes that jurors should be better instructed about how to evaluate courtroom behavior. He has proposed changing federal jury instructions to caution jurors about the limitations of nonverbal cues.

In a version of the jury instructions he drafted and sent to some judges a few years ago, he advises jurors to pay attention to facial expressions, gestures, posture and tone of voice and to “look for discrepancies between what the witness says and how the witness says it.”

“But remember,” he writes, “that sometimes truthful witnesses may look worried . . . and some liars can behave very convincingly.”