Jannah Nassar

Dr. Christina Marinakis

Litigations Insights Lawyer and Jury Researcher in Los Angeles, California

November 15th, 2019 at 4:00 PM EST

Interview Transcription

Jannah: Hi, good afternoon Dr. Marinakis

Marnikais: Hey there, how’s it going?

Jannah: Great, I so I wanted to hop on and ask you a few questions, if that’s still ok?

Marnikais: Sure

Jannah: Ok great thank you, and would I be able to record the conversation, this would only be

for my educational use and help further my research.

Marnikais: Yeah absolutely no problem.

Jannah: Ok great thank you. So to start, my first question is “What got you into this field and

how did you end where you are today?”

Marnikais: I was interested in both psychology and law. Pretty much growing up even through

high school and middle school, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to do psychology or legal. I was

involved in the debate team, which is what a lot of people do pre-law and then also really

enjoyed a AP-psychology class in high school. So going into undergraduate, I majored in bio-

science psychology which is a psychology but with a neuroscience background more based on

brain and chemical issues as opposed to treatment and therapy. I also considered going to

medical school for psychiatry but still wasn’t sure if I wanted to do the med school route or law

school. My advisor in college, this is at penn state, suggested a joint degree program which was
out of the University of Delaware and Wydner, which is in Philadelphia. They have you do your

Phd in psychology during the day and then go to law school at night, so you can both degrees at

the same time. While it wasn’t an envy in psychiatry, it offered an opportunity to pursue law and

psychology at the same time; and give me a little more time to figure out which route was more

appropriate for me or which route I was more interested in. Once I got into that program, the first

year I worked with my advisor there and then kinda talked about different careers that are

available with people that backgrounds in law and psychology and those careers were limited to

being a prison psychologist, working for the FBI, criminal profiling and working with the policy

and legislation, or being a jury consultant. So I initially worked for a prison and enjoyed that

work doing evaluations for competency files and restoring competency for criminal defenses,

but found that the work was fairly runtied and there wasn’t a lot of opportunities to advance, and

the money was limited quite frankly when your working for the government. So I ultimately

applied to some jury research firms in los angeles and was accepted into one of them and that's

what started the career in jury consultant.

Jannah: oh ok, that sounds complicated but great. So this leads me to my next question, what

does an everyday work day look like for you, like I know you mentioned you do juries, so

what'd you do there? Are you an active lawyer? What do you do with jury research?

Marnikais: It varies greatly, which is one thing I really enjoy about the work it's not an everyday

sorta thing, it varies greatly. I’d say our primary work involves three things, I’m usually doing

one of the three that would be either jury research, so we would put on a mock trial or maybe do

a focus group and learn about potential jurors and the communities attitudes and opinions and

experiences and how that might influence how they view the case. So, what's really interesting

about our work is well present a case to say 30 or 50 people in the community and we have the
lawyers pretend to be each side. We’ll have our side present its side of the case and then pretend

to be the other side. We get juros to tell us what they think, what they believe and what they

don’t believe, how they would rule in the case, we have them deliberate. The super interesting

thing is we never have all jurors agree. We could present the same information at the same time

to a group of people and they will come to different conclusions. Why is that? It's because each

person comes to that experience with biases, and I don’t mean bias in a bad sense it's just that

your experiences, your backgrounds, your attitudes, and your beliefs will cause you to filter the

evidence in ways that kinda confirm your pre-existing bias. In psychology that's called

confirmation bias, essentially you come in thinking that big corporations are dishonest; when you

are presented with evidence you tend to distrust evidence that is presented by the organization of

you view it in a lense causing you to be believe it is sinister or malintent behind it. Therefore,

you are more likely to come out against the corporations because you already have that anti-cop

repeat bais going in. Whereas another juror might have worked for a large corporation and had a

really good experience; or maybe they own a business themselves so they have positive ideas.

When they view the same exact evidence, they view it in a way that supports the company and

shows the company is doing responsible things, the same evidence can be interrupted based on

people's biases. That's what our jury research studies, what are these biases and how does it

influence that? So when we go to jury selection we know what types of questions to ask people

to bring out these biases and ultimately get the jurors on the panel that has a bias that favors our

clients and remove jurors that don’t have those biases, Or have biases that would disfavor us. So,

we might do that jury research say two weeks ahead of time and so I'm doing a focus group

during that time and then we're looking at the data doing analysis and SPSS and then when we

go to jury selection I'm drafting the questions that we ask jurors, drafting questionnaire they fill
out, And then I'm sitting there in court with the attorneys at the table during the jury selection

and pick who we want on the jury who do we not want, so on those days I'm more like an

attorney in court; on other days I'm acting more like a psychologist doing research.

Jannah: Ohh ok great! So my next question is that I read a lot about the IAT (implicit association

test) and other test that jurors and lawyers use, and I was just wondering do people actually use

the IAT on a normal basis or is it something that is less frequently. What is something that

they do use more often to detect bias?

Marinakis : those tests would not be practical to use in a real life situation, you can't give jurors

test to do. So while those tests could be used in research purposes to understand implicit bias,

it's not something you can do in the real world. Instead to get a potential bias, we look for

correlations between the implicit bias and other attitudes or opinions. so for example, if you're

saying like a racial bias, we had a case with a muscle doctor and we were trying to find if people

have biases with Muslims even if it's implicit bias. since you can't have jurors do implicit bias

tests, we would ask them questions that we could correlate with bias. So for example, the

interaction that you had with Muslim people, so people who have had a lot of interntractions

With Muslims, tend to have positive opinions then people who have not have personal

interactions. So that might be a question we would ask jurors, how many attractions have you

had with the people of the Muslim faith? Have you ever had a negative experience with someone

of the Muslim faith? What are your general attitudes towards Muslims? You might not be able to

get implicit biases but you can get biases that people are aware that we might be able to get some

of these biases had based on things like how much interaction you had.

Jannah: okay great, that sounds amazing. Makes a lot of sense. so the next thing that I was kind

of wondering is do you have any suggestions or ideas of sort of a route that I should kind of take
my research down; because I feel like racial bias has been research greatly so I don't want to do

the same thing that several people have done and so I don't want to write a paper on information

that is not relevant anymore. So do you have any suggestions of any topics that have not been

researched a lot or maybe taking racial bias at another perspective?

Marinakis : Yeah you're actually right, there's a lot of research on racial bias, especially in

criminal cases. It's a topic that you can study and report on but, if you're looking to break into

something new or expand that, people recently have been looking at gender bias and it's difficult

for me to give a lot of advice because I work in the civil arena and I'm not doing criminal cases,

onion cases against companies against doctors. I do wonder by gender bias in cases against

doctors specifically in the idea that people use female doctors as less competent doctors? So

looking at, a lot of times weu represent corporations, are female corporate Representatives are

viewed differently than a male. You also need to think about bias against the attorneys

themselves, the one thing that we studied is the gender bias to the attorneys. We found that

jurors rate female attorneys as overall being less competent, but more honest and more

trustworthy than male lawyers. So there's also something called the interaction effect, where you

know people expect females to be more docile and not as aggressive but, yet they expect lawyers

to be aggressive. So to be an effective lawyer you need to be aggressive but as a female if you're

too aggressive, you're violating gender stereotypes you're kind of cute as a rude person. You're

in an aggressive female lawyer you’re a rude person but if you're an aggressive male lawyer it's

effective. So, females have to walk a tight line of being assertive but not aggressive. That's

certainly an area where there's some research but not as much as the racial area oh, so that could

be a topic if you're interested in. There's certainly nationality bias about defendants who are from

Muslim backgrounds or the Middle East oh, there's also Asian bias. So there's so there is race
there's also nationality, religion, but primarily I'm looking at corporate bias. I would ask

yourself where are you interested in because you're going to be living at this for the next year,

and then work from there; I'm sure you could find research that even if it's not directly on point

you can extrapolate from it.

Jannah: Yeah that's actually perfect because I am from the Middle East and I do have a Muslim

background and this is actually something that I am really interested in, along with the gender

bias. I have heard a lot about it but I actually haven't had a lot of time to research or look at data

to back up. Another question that I was wondering is, how do you actually detect bias that

jurors may have because like I read a lot about people may suspect a judge have bias but

what if you're like mid-trial?

Marinakis : so you wouldn't be able to stop the trial, you can't do much about people's biases, but

they're certainly a wealth of research that shows highlighting a bias to someone or a potential

bias is one of the antidotes to breaking that bias. So, say that you're concerned about gender

stereotypes and that influencing your case, jurors might hold your female doctor to a different

standard because she's female they might find she's more likely to be incompetent. So you can

bring that up to the jurors during the questioning to the judges, you can say things like “hey,

some people feel like females are less competent in things like science and math, how many

people feel that way?” You might not get people to raise their hands but now they're starting to

think about it and they're looking into themselves, and questioning “do I do that?”. By

identifying that you can kind of work against it, same thing with the hijab and Muslims really,

“is that going to cause any problems or make you more unloyal how much do you have any

problems with it?” You may not get the jurors to admit it but just by pointing it out to them, it'll

make them aware. Now you make them promise that they will be able to not hold that against
my client or view them differently, so that's one way that can help a little bit where is if you

don't address it at all, it's more likely to have an impact on the case.

Jannah: Yeah, Absolutely I definitely agree with all that and just my last question to kind of

wrap up the interview, do you have any tips for research or anything that I can do to further

my research?

Marinakis : Well I'm wondering what you have in mind when you say research, are you talking

about looking up previous articles and drawing conclusions or did you actually want to collect

data or do some type of study?

Jannah: Well, I was interested in collecting data along with going on site somewhere to kind of

see or detect any bias is present. I was planning on going to an actual courtroom and kind of

detecting bias there but, obviously I don't know what's going on in their head that would be more

for explicit bias. But yes I am looking for research with data and evidence to back up what I'm

going to claim.

Marinakis : Well, I see a couple things that you can do. You're located where? Howard County?

Jannah: Yes.

Marinakis : Well, um there are jury selections, which if I have one in Maryland, I can certainly

let you know, you can come in and watch and observe. However they're usually during school

days so you have to miss school to come in an observe a jury selection. But you'd be able to see

in that jury selection, Jurors trying to identify bias. I could certainly supply you with some

questions that we do ask the juror in cases to draw out their biases. That would be one thing to

just observe and see who raises their hands and in fact, recent case that I had in Baltimore City

we asked the jurors would anybody be influenced by the race of the party and we did have three

people raise their hand. Another option would be to put together a survey of questions that you
wanted to ask people and we can give that survey to mock jurors and see if their answers on the

survey have any impact how they view the case. That might be a little bit more challenging since

you can't necessarily control what cases are involved but, you know we can have the attorneys

explain whether they rated the females more incompetent then the males oh, so that's a survey

you can give after the mock trial. We can look at the witnesses we often have them rate

witnesses, how likeable they are, how confident, we can look at if there's a difference between

the ratings of females versus male witnesses or witnesses of different races. We show jurors

video clips of witnesses and have them write them.

Jannah: Yeah definitely, thank you so much. I just wanted to say thank you once again for

hopping on this interview, everything you mentioned was really helpful and I definitely want to

maybe shift my research towards gender or nationality bias instead of regular racial bias as it

does have a lot of research on it . Once again I just wanted to say thank you.

Marinakis : Of course, happy to help and if you have any questions about research design or as

you're thinking about putting together your topic feel free to reach out.

Jannah: Ok, yes thank you.

Marinakis : Alright, take care.

Jannah: You too!

Reflection

On November 15th, I held my first interview with my advisor, I personally really enjoyed the

interview as all the information was very beneficial. My advisor explained my questions very
thoroughly and helped me understand a new route to take my research down. One thing I could

improve on is asking for specific questions and less questions, Dr. Marinakis explains things

very well so less questions that are more specific can help me in a better way. In my next

interview, I plan on asking specific questions and shortening the interview so it takes less time to

transcribe.