Erin M. Richter

I am in my 5th year as a Ph.D./M.L.S. student in the Law-Psychology program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and also in my 5th year as a member of Dr. Wiener’s legal decision-making lab. I am currently finishing up my MERP (equivalent to a Master’s thesis) and getting ready to start the dissertation and comps process (yay!). My research interests lie mostly in the realm of criminal law and social justice issues. My MERP examines the impact of the 1st and 14th Amendment on decision-making about court cases involving hate symbols. I have a strong interest in death-penalty jury decision-making research, and recently have become interested in pro-se litigants and refugee and asylum law. I am currently the Executive Director of SRL, Inc., which is a student-based trial consulting firm at UNL and I recently completed a summer internship with Persuasion Strategies, a Denver-based trial-consulting firm. I serve as assistant-to-the-editor for “Forward”, the newsletter for SPSSI (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues). In my spare time, I’m an avid fan of reality television (I know!) and sleeping.

Publications
Richter, E.M. & Wiener, R.L. (2007). Psychology and legal decision-making: Where should we go from here? In R.L. Wiener, B. Bornstein, R.Schopp & S. Willborn (Eds.), Social consciousness in legal decision making: Psychological perspectives. New York: Springer.

Wiener, R.L. & Richter, E.M. Symbolic hate: Intention to intimidate, political ideology, and group association. Manuscript submitted for review.

Richter, E.M. Who wins what?: The struggle between freedom and equal protection in symbolic hate speech. Manuscript in preparation.

Richter, E.M. & Voss, A. Technology in the Courtroom: The use of multimedia tools in case presentation. In R. L. Wiener & B. Bornstein (Eds.), Trial Consulting: A psychological handbook. Chapter in preparation.

Richter, E.M., Voss, A., Wiener, R.L., & Shank, N. Improving access to resources: An analysis of Nebraska’s 2-1-1 Human Services Website. Manuscript in preparation.

Presentations
Richter, E.M., Maeder, E., & Wiener, R.L. (2007). Witherspoon excludables: What is death qualification telling us? Paper to be presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, Illinois.

Richter, E. M. & Wiener, R.L. (2006). Intimidation through symbolic speech: Assessing offender’s intent. Poster session presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Long Beach, California.

Richter, E.M., Voss, A., Barba, M., Wiener, R.L. & Shank, N. (2006). The effectiveness of online government: An analysis of Nebraska’s 2-1-1 website. Poster session presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Long Beach, California.

Richter, E.M., & Wiener, R.L. (2005). Cross-burnings, swastikas & skin-fists: Symbolic speech or intention to intimidate? Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American psychology and Law Society, La Jolla, California.

Richter, E.M. & Wiener, R.L. (2004). Intent to intimidate and perceptions of culpability in hate speech crimes. Poster session presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Judgment and Decision-Making, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Project Descriptions
Hate symbol decision-making: In this project, we set out to test the assumptions made by the Supreme Court in the 2003 case of Virginia v. Black, where the Court ruled, for the first time, that the banning of cross-burnings was not a violation of the First Amendment. In their decision, the Court upheld a Virginia state statute which banned all cross-burnings committed “with the intent to intimidate”. However, the Court determined that all other cross-burnings (committed for legitimate First Amendment purposes) would still be allowed. We were interested in determining whether participants would be able to make the distinction between cross-burnings (and other hate symbols) used purely for “intimidation” and cross-burnings used to express other messages. The current study is examining whether priming participants with either 1st or 14th Amendment values will change their decision-making process.

Death-penalty decision-making: In the most recent study completed by Dr. Wiener’s lab, we examined the role of motivation in juror’s comprehension of death-penalty jury instructions. In previous research, Dr. Wiener has found that comprehension of these instructions is often very low and this lack of comprehension influences the punishment decision made by jurors. Here we manipulated and measured juror’s motivational states and also varied the type of jury instruction they received. Some jurors were motivated to be goal-oriented in their task, while other jurors were motivated to avoid making mistakes in their task. Jurors received either regular jury instructions or a lab-created simplified-flowchart version of the instructions, which included diagrams to help jurors understand their decision-task better. Future studies will further examine the role of motivation on comprehension.