Jurors’ reactions to recanted confessions: Do the defendant's personal and dispositional characteristics play a role?

Abstract

Confession evidence presented at trial is extremely damaging to the defense. This study examines the impact of a recanted confession on jurors’ perceptions of a murder case in which the defendant claimed to have falsely confessed due either to an underlying medical condition, a psychological disorder, or the general stress of the interrogation. Also included were an inadmissible confession condition and a no-confession control condition. Results showed that the impact of the confession was mediated in part by the circumstances surrounding it. Although probability-of-commission estimates were as high in all of the conditions involving a confession, conviction rates were marginally higher when the disputed confession involved mental illness or interrogation-induced stress than when there was no confession, yet did not differ when the disputed confession involved a medical disorder or there was no confession. These findings show that not all recanted confessions are treated equally and that people selectively discount confessions depending on biases and beliefs they hold.

Keywords:

• confession
• false confession
• juror decision making
• mentally ill offenders
• stereotypes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Laura McSweeney for her advice on statistical issues and Saul Kassin for providing the trial transcript.

Notes

1. The exact wording for the neighbor's testimony and the officer's testimony was not available and hence was recreated for the present study.

2. A recanted confession may be deemed inadmissible during a pretrial suppression hearing, but may nonetheless be improperly admitted such as through the statements of a police officer during testimony about the investigation. Such a circumstance is not necessarily grounds for a mistrial or an appeal, since the case of Arizona v. Fulminante (1991) resulted in the ruling that a wrongly admitted confession may be considered to be trial error and subject to the ‘harmless error’ rule (hence be allowed with a judge's instructions to the jurors to disregard the information about the confession). Kassin and Sukel (1997) note that it is common practice in such situations for the judge to not explain the rationale for the inadmissibility ruling. In general, confessions can be excluded when they are coerced through physical violence or threats of harm or punishment, or when the suspect was not competent or was not advised of his or her Miranda rights.

3. Prior research has combined into one scalar score two separate scores, one from a dichotomous judgment (such as verdict) and one from confidence ratings for that judgment (e.g. see Kassin & Sukel, 1997). Scalar variables were created for relevant items in the present study, and in all cases, the significance or lack thereof of effects did not change from the main analyses. Thus for the sake of simplicity, statistics for these scalar variables are not reported here.