Welcome to the Legal Decision Making Lab at Montclair State

We study the decision-making of prosecutors, defendants and other legal actors across a range of adjudicative contexts. Our aims are to understand the human psychological factors that affect justice system outcomes and to effectively disseminate and communicate these data to policy makers. 

​

We are currently pursuing three interrelated lines of research.

1. Adolescents. We seek to understand how justice involved youth make legal decisions and to identify circumstances that might put them at risk for adverse outcomes (e.g., wrongful conviction). Most recently, this work has focused on potential deficits in the legal knowledge and decisional capacity of adolescents who plead guilty.

2. Guilty Pleas. These projects focus on identifying the most important system-, individual- and case- level factors that influence guilty plea decisions. An important, long-term goal this work is to develop a computational model of guilty plea decision making that can be optimized to maximize true- and minimize false- guilty pleas across various contexts (e.g., jurisdictions). Interested in sharing your own story? Watch this space for a survey link coming soon. 

​

3. Criminal Sentencing. This area of research, currently funded by the National Institute of Justice, focuses on resentencing and reentry of individuals sentenced to extreme terms as youth. As a part of this work we are conducting a large scale implementation evaluation of resentencing processes for youth in 5 jurisdictions across the United States. Past work has examined the resentencing, release, and reentry of juvenile lifers which can be found here. 

​

You can read more about these research areas by clicking here.