The Impact of Expert Testimony and Victim Statements on Evaluations of Victimization Statements and Legal Judgment: An Introduction to Korea’s Crime Victimization Assessment System and Its Utility

This study aimed to introduce Korea’s victimization statement system and examine the effect of the person making the statement (stater) on laypeople’s judgment of the victimization statement and their legal judgment of the defendant. To achieve the goals, this study compares the effectiveness of victims and experts’ victimization statements on the legal judgments of jury-eligible participants, controlling for crime type and severity. This study used a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects full factorial design with two levels of manipulation of stater, crime type, and crime severity. The results showed a main effect of the stater on the objectivity evaluations of victimization statements (p < .05) and an interaction effect of crime type and stater at a significance level of .1. Laypersons were more likely to rate expert testimony as more objective in injury cases where victimization was visible. This study provides empirical evidence on the effects of VIS witnesses. Furthermore, it serves to broaden the generalizability of VIS’s effect – which has heretofore been examined primarily in common law countries’ adversarial trial systems – to civil law countries’ inquisitorial trial systems.