Jodi A. Quas

Legal questioning of adolescent victims of minor sex trafficking versus sexual abuse.

OBJECTIVE: We compared court transcripts of adolescent victims' testimonies in minor sex trafficking and child sexual abuse criminal cases to understand how attorney questioning behavior may vary as a function of attorney type, case type, and victim age at trial. HYPOTHESES: We p...

The Ultimate Legal Fiction: Knowing and Intelligent Guilty Pleas

Abstract Guilty pleas dominate the resolution of criminal charges in the U.S. criminal justice system. In entering guilty pleas, the law is clear that defendants must do so knowingly and intelligently (and voluntarily) for the plea to be deemed valid. The belief that defendants w...