Natalie Martschuk

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• PostDoc Position at Griffith University

The quality of cross-examination in child sexual abuse trials is critical to elicit accurate evidence. In a mixed model study, we examined perceptions of Australian practitioners (i.e., judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers, police officers, and witness support officers; N = 337) of child cross-examination and judicial intervention. Each participant...

Courts are making increasing use of audiovisual links (AVL) for many purposes, including taking evidence from witnesses. However, there has been little in the way of research to provide guidance for courts and judges on conditions or standards that should apply to their use. Participant expert and lay witnesses in a mock trial were randomly assigne...

Background Attrition of child sexual abuse (CSA) cases occurs at different stages of investigation, and only a small proportion of the cases reported to police are referred for prosecution. Different factors have been linked with the prosecution of CSA cases; however, little is known about how prosecutors determine which cases should proceed and wh...

The underlying principle of a jury trial is to be judged by one’s peers. Defendants who don’t share the same cultural and linguistic background as the jurors can hardly be considered peers. Interpreters are needed to bridge the language gap when defendants cannot speak the language of the court; but language is not the sole factor that may impinge...

Forensic risk assessments are used to determine sanctions, identify recidivism risk and inform implementation of risk reduction strategies. The best way to gather reliable data to inform decisions is important and the focus of this mixed-method study. Forty-five experienced professionals performed a risk assessment involving a young person who sexu...

Cross-examination is central to all common law adversarial trials. The rule in Browne v Dunn is, in turn, central to cross-examination. This article considers the rule in the context of cross-examining child witnesses. Both the literature and case law indicate the rule is often misunderstood by practitioners which, in turn, may lead to appeals, mis...

This study used innovative transdisciplinary methods to describe the nature and extent of early childhood memories recalled by 84 adults convicted of sexual offences. The timing of the memories, level of detail recalled and way memories were recollected were largely consistent with extant memory research. One important finding, however, was that mo...

Note-taking for interpreting is a specialist skill originally developed to assist conference interpreters to remember the contents of long speeches when interpreting consecutively in a unidirectional mode. The bulk of the research into note-taking has been in relation to the classic consecutive interpreting mode in international settings, with litt...

The need to educate criminal justice professionals about best practices to cross-examine complainants of child sexual abuse is widely acknowledged. Yet, a dearth of empirical information about their perceptions has hindered development of targeted professional education programmes. The present study compared perceptions of the quality of cross-exam...

Child sexual assault (CSA) cases reliant on uncorroborated testimony yield low conviction rates. Past research demonstrated a strong relationship between verdict and juror CSA knowledge such as typical delays in reporting by victims, and perceived victim credibility. This trial simulation experiment examined the effectiveness of interventions by an...

Remote interpreting has traditionally been the less preferred option when compared to face-to-face interpreting. But the recent pandemic has shifted the landscape, making remote interpreting the default in many, if not most, settings. Improved videoconferencing technologies have facilitated this transition. The main question is whether remote inter...

Remote interpreting via video-link is increasingly being employed in investigative interviews chiefly due to its apparent increased accessibility and efficiency. However, risks of miscommunication have been shown to be magnified in remote interpreting and empirical research specifically on video-link remote interpreting is in its infancy which grea...

This article presents the results of a study that evaluated the extent to which judges and lawyers intervene during questioning of child and adult complainants in child sexual assault (CSA) cases. Transcripts of the evidence of 120 CSA complainants were analysed according to the frequency and nature of interventions, such as raising issues with the...

For over a century, changes have been implemented in the way the evidence of adult and child sexual assault complainants is received during the common-law adversarial trial process. Could the fact that reforms have rarely affected the way information is gathered at the initial stages of investigation be a reason why legal systems still struggle wit...

Child sexual assault (CSA) cases reliant on uncorroborated testimony yield low conviction rates. Past research demonstrated a strong relationship between verdict and juror CSA knowledge such as typical delays in reporting by victims, and perceived victim credibility. This trial simulation experiment examined the effectiveness of interventions by an...

Zusammenfassung In einer Zusammenschau dreier in englischsprachigen Fachzeitschriften publizierten Studien wurden die tatsächliche und die wahrgenommene Richtigkeit von Identifizierungsaussagen älterer und junger Augenzeugen verglichen. Die Studien wurden in ein integratives Modell von Augenzeugenaussagen und deren Evaluation eingebettet, das zwisc...

This study tested the effects of the consecutive and simultaneous interpreting modes in a simulated police interview, addressing four research questions: (1) Does the consecutive interpreting mode lead to more accurate interpreting than the simultaneous interpreting mode? (2) Do language combinations moderate the performance of similarly qualified...

Police interviewers in English-speaking countries increasingly conduct interviews via an interpreter with suspects and witnesses who do not speak English. Oral communication in an official interview has serious legal consequences, beginning with Miranda rights or similar cautions. Past studies have yielded inconsistent results on key issues such as...

In recent years, the experience of being a juror has been transformed. The jury ‘workplace’ has become more accommodating, and judges and lawyers have improved the way they communicate with jurors. In many ways the trial process has also become fairer for the accused—the key person in the criminal trial. The framework of procedural justice provides...

We examine the appeals from the conviction of Cardinal Pell in light of the common sense versus scientific belief system about human memory and robust principles of memory. We outline how assumptions about memory operations appeared to influence the legal decisions. At the heart of the High Court’s reasoning seemed to be an assumption that memory a...

In an era of international terrorism, interviews with high-value detainees may have the dual purpose of extracting useful information and of disengagement. We conducted a small-scale, qualitative study using in-depth, individual interviews with 11 experienced interviewers in the Southeast Asia region and Australia, in order to provide insights into...

Past empirical studies comparing the performance of trained interpreters and untrained bilinguals in police interviews have focused on the accuracy of the propositional content. Little is known about the relative skill of these two groups regarding other key tasks performed by interpreters such as the management and coordination of turn-taking and...

While age-related changes in memory have been well documented, findings about jurors’ perceptions of older witnesses are conflicting. We investigated the effect of victim age (25 vs. 75 years old) and crime severity (victim injured vs. not injured) on mock jurors’ decisions in a robbery trial. Jury-eligible participants (120 women; 84 men) read a m...

Professional interpreters are obliged by their codes of ethics to interpret the speakers’ speech faithfully, including offensive, profane or vulgar language. In order to achieve this goal, interpreters need to be pragmatically competent, so as to understand the intention and effect of the offensive remark in the source language and be able to appro...

Internationally, admissible incriminating evidence of uncharged acts by the accused is presumed unfairly prejudicial, and remains controversial. In an experimental study, 325 jury-eligible citizens were randomly assigned to a simulated trial in which the accused faced two charges. Juries were exposed to no evidence of uncharged acts or prejudicial...

The decision whether to prosecute an individual can potentially impact a number of private and public interests. In Australia, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions in each jurisdiction provides written prosecutorial guidelines relating to the decision to prosecute. Little scholarly attention has focused on how these guidelines differ i...

Approximately 25 years ago, special measures were adopted in many jurisdictions to support child sexual assault complainants in legal proceedings. This study tracked activities of a multi-agency committee of criminal justice professionals, including social workers, in enacting those provisions. We manually reviewed 99 sets of minutes of meetings of...

In most countries, it is not compulsory to be trained to work as an interpreter in community settings. A comparison across jurisdictions reveals that different requirements exist, from a simple selfevaluation of language competence, to passing a certification or accreditation test. Even in countries where certification or accreditation systems exis...

Since the late 1980s evidence has been accumulating that confidence recorded at the time of identification is a reliable postdictor of eyewitness identification. Nonetheless, there may be noteworthy exceptions. In a re-analysis of a field study by Sauerland and Sporer (2009; N = 720; n = 436 choosers between 15 and 83 years old) we show that the po...

Legislation enabling special measures to take the evidence of vulnerable witnesses exists in all Australian jurisdictions. A gap between these laws and actual prosecutorial practices was previously reported in interviews conducted with stakeholders. A manual file review of 59 prosecution files in child sexual abuse cases in three Australian jurisdi...

Investigative interviewers apply a range of physical, cognitive, social or legalistic strategies to secure information from suspects. The perceived effectiveness of coercive and noncoercive strategies on turning points was examined by interviewing 34 practitioners and 30 high value detainees in East Asian and Western jurisdictions. Each recounted a...

The present meta-analysis investigated the influence of age on face recognition. A total of 19 studies with 79 comparisons of younger and older participants were included. Analyses revealed small to moderate effects for hits, and large effects for false alarms and signal detection theory (SDT) measures. Younger participants outperformed older parti...

Little is known about the extent to whichinstitutional child sex offending differs from non-institutional offending. Strategies to secure the compliance of child victims were systematically compared to compare the modi operandi (prior to, during and following abuse), and the type of power (intimate, aggressive, coercive) applied by child sexual off...

When one of the participants in a court case does not speak the language of the court, interpreters are needed to bridge the language barrier. Research into court interpreting has shown that interpreters can have an impact on the case in many different ways. However, the extent to which an interpreter influences the outcome of a case may differ dep...

A total of 1,931 non-empanelled jurors in the greater Sydney metropolitan area responded to a series of brief statements about forensically relevant issues common to many child sexual abuse cases. Jurors indicated the extent of their agreement with statements concerning typical evidential features of child sexual offences, children's responses to s...

Purpose: To identify best practice in interpreter use in suspect and intelligence interviews conducted by an international sample of experienced law enforcement practitioners in Asian Pacific jurisdictions (Australia, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea and Sri Lanka). Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 121 practitioners who de...

A validation study of the Child Sexual Abuse Knowledge Questionnaire (CSA-KQ) was conducted on a sample of 1712 nonempanelled jurors in the greater Sydney area, Australia. The CSA-KQ contains nine items derived from empirical findings on common misconceptions about typical features of abuse offenses, children’s responses to child sexual abuse, and...

Relatively little is known about employee perceptions of workplace psychological injuries following sexual and nonsexual harassment. In quasi-military occupational organizations, such as policing, the rate of sexual harassment to workplace injuries from other sources is comparatively high. In an exploratory 5 × 2 between-subjects factorial experime...

When lay jurors are unfamiliar with key evidentiary issues, expert evidence, judicial instructions and group deliberation may enhance their understanding of this evidence. Systematic steps to assess the relationship between juror biases in cases of child sexual abuse are offered as an example to illustrate a programmatic research approach. Using pr...

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse commissioned a major study into how juries reason in child sexual abuse trials. The study, released in May, is the largest empirical study of its kind. The report forms part of the Royal Commission’s research program in relation to the criminal justice system’s response to chil...

Terror management theory posits that fear of death influences judgments in criminal cases. A between-subjects study examined the influence of mortality and terrorism salience in the context of life-threatening versus non-threatening criminal conduct on mock jurors’ emotions and judgments of convictions by 485 jury-eligible Australian citizens. Mort...

Four types of coercive and noncoercive interview strategies (legalistic, physical, cognitive and social) used to facilitate disclosure by high value detainees were examined in an international sample of practitioners and detainees (N = 64). Predictive analyses confirmed that the accusatorial approach was positively correlated with physically coerci...

Bei Personenidentifizierungen, bzw. dem Wiedererkennen von Gesichtern, liegt die Aufgabe darin, den Täter in einer späteren Wahlgegenüberstellung oder Lichtbildvorlage in einer größeren Anzahl von Personen/Gesichtern wiederzuerkennen. Mit voranschreitendem Alter scheint die Gedächtnisleistung nachzulassen, was auch das Wiedererkennen von Gesichtern...