Race, Gender, and the Multi-Directional Model of Credibility Assessments

Abstract

Abstract This chapter takes a close look at the way biases, prejudices, and myths about race and gender cause, fuel, and exacerbate agential testimonial injustice, leading to a multi-directional attack on the credibility of some of the most vulnerable suspects, defendants, witnesses, and victims in the American criminal legal system. According to this “multi-directional model,” credibility assessments wrong testifiers in a multitude of directions and a variety of ways, all of which can be magnified by other factors at both the intrapersonal and interpersonal levels, such as myths and prejudices that target social identities, other biases, and the content of the testimony in question. What we have, then, is not a linear regression of deficits leading to an ever-increasing discounting of credibility, but a multi-directional attack that twists and turns and, in so doing, maximizes the epistemic wrongs perpetrated within the criminal legal system.