The Benefits of Beauty
“People react to attractive men and women differently than they do less attractive people,” offered Daniel Medwed, a law and criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “They react in different ways to good-looking people, and usually give attractive people the benefit of the doubt, in some ways.”
This bias has been observed in both mock-juror studies as well as actual court cases. Most recently, experts claim Massachusetts financial analyst Karen Read benefited from her good looks when she was tried twice—and twice acquitted—for the 2022 murder of her boyfriend, Boston policeman John O’Keefe.
It could also explain the enduring popularity of Luigi Mangione, who stands accused of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel back on the morning of December 4, 2024. Supporters lined the stood outside a New York City courtroom for hours during a pretrial hearing for Mangione in early December 2025, some camping out for two days to catch a glimpse of him.
“People are supporting him because he’s a hottie,” Jessica Salerno, an associate professor of psychology at Cornell University in New York, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “People will assume all sorts of good traits about attractive people—that they are smart, they’re funny, they’re moral.”
Dozens of mock trials have returned the same results, says Salerno: jurors are less likely to convict an attractive man compared to a less attractive suspect.
“You find this across all types of crimes, including sexual assaults, DWIs, robberies,” Salerno continues. “It tends to show up more when the case evidence is a little ambiguous against the person. If there’s not lots of evidence against you and you’re an attractive guy, you may get a bit of an edge, and if you’re unattractive, you may be at a disadvantage.”
Salerno said that if “prosecutors have a slam dunk case” on a criminal, as they did with charming serial killer Ted Bundy, who was sentenced to death following his 1979 convictions in California, “they’re going to be convicted, no matter what they look like.”
Study results have further shown handsome defendants are also viewed as less likely to reoffend by jurors, she says. “Disturbingly, in studies that focused on rape and sex assault as the offense, jurors assumed the rape was less traumatic for the victim if the perpetrator was attractive, which is pretty terrifying.”
A Double Standard for Women
The majority of research on the “handsome devil theory” has been conducted in mock trials involving male offenders. More recently, though, Salerno says that studies have sought to document the same effect with women.
“With females, we found totally different patterns,” she reveals. “It actually backfires for attractive women, as it did with Amanda Knox when she was wrongfully convicted” in 2009 by Italian authorities for killing her roommate, Meredith Kercher.
“A big part of the narrative came from her being an attractive, young woman and the problem with women is attractiveness gets tangled up in sexuality,” Salerno explains. Knox “got painted as this oversexed, attractive femme fatale, and it played a big role, because they had no motive for her whatsoever.”
Eventually, though, the police and the media pushed a false narrative that had Knox involved in a love triangle with Kercher and Knox’s boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, who she’d allegedly convinced to carry out the killing.
In the case of convicted killer Jodi Arias, efforts were made to dull her attractiveness when she went on trial for killing her boyfriend, Travis Alexander, in his Arizona home in 2008.
“The defense was worried about her being painted as a sex pot or a femme fatale, so they actually played her looks down,” Salerno says. “She went from blonde to brunette, they gave her these glasses, and made her wear this nun-like sweater. So, where it really helps men, it hurts women.”
Arias was convicted of first-degree murder in 2013 and received a life sentence.
How It Holds Up in Court
Richard Painter, a legal ethics professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that both the prosecution and defense employ different tactics to make their witnesses and clients more appealing to jurors, so attractiveness is often accentuated at trial.
“Defense attorneys are aware of the psychological factors that go into jury decision-making, and they will dress up their defendants and witnesses, because you want them looking credible,” says Painter, who served President George W. Bush as the White House’s chief ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007. “So, everyone is thinking about how best to present witnesses to the jury, and appearance is certainly a part of that.”
Painter says there’s no ethical ambiguity when it comes to relying on a client’s good looks, or dressing them up to make a better impression on a jury.
“It is all legitimate strategy,” he explains. “If you have a drug dealer squealing on someone else, you don’t ask him to come into court wearing his street attire from the ‘hood. No, you have him coming in in a suit—and it may be the first time they’re wearing a suit in his life.”
It all comes down to perception. “It’s a classic tactic to make sure your client is well-groomed, and nicely dressed, and that is considered to be fine,” Medwed adds. “You can present yourself or your client in a way you know will trigger certain reactions in them.”
