Wisconsin's Unconstitutional Burden of Proof

My coauthor Larry White and I just finished a follow-up study to our U. Richmond L. Rev. article about Wisconsin's unconstitutional burden of proof jury instruction. Our follow-up study will be published in the Columbia L. Rev. Online; for now, the abstract and a pre-publication draft of the article can be found on SSRN. In short, we made three findings: (1) we replicated the results of our original study by again finding a statistically significant difference in conviction rates between mock jurors who received a legally proper burden of proof instruction and those who received Wisconsin's "search for the truth" language; (2) we found that mock jurors who received Wisconsin's "search for the truth" language were nearly twice as likely to mistakenly believe it is proper to convict a criminal defendant even if there is reasonable doubt about guilt; and (3) we found that mock jurors who held this mistaken belief (regardless of the jury instruction they actually received) voted to convict the defendant in our study at a rate 2.5 times that of mock jurors who correctly understood the burden of proof. On Wisconsin!