Can you put a price on 14 years of life? Examining predictors of monetary compensation for exonerees

ABSTRACT

Compensation is one of the few resources available to exonerees, as they do not qualify for many of the same re-entry services available to parolees. Past research has shown public support for exoneree compensation; however, little is known about what factors influence perceptions of exonerees receiving compensation. The current study investigated the role of the contributing factor in an exoneree’s wrongful conviction case, participant characteristics, and perceptions of an exoneree and wrongful convictions, on perceptions of monetary compensation awards. Student participants were randomly assigned to read one of three fictitious news articles that varied in terms of the factor that led to an exoneree’s wrongful conviction (i.e. false confession, eyewitness misidentification, or police misconduct), and afterwards answered a series of questions assessing perceptions of assistance, of the exoneree, and of wrongful convictions. Results indicated that contributing factor (police misconduct), participant characteristics (men), and perceptions of the exoneree (more innocent than guilty, exoneree ‘Black’ or ‘Hispanic’) and of wrongful convictions (supportive of other forms of assistance) were significant predictors of monetary compensation awards.

KEYWORDS:

• Compensation
• exoneree
• wrongful conviction
• actual innocence
• criminal justice system

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/q4f36 and https://osf.io/q4f36.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The materials and data that support the findings of this study are available from https://osf.io/q4f36

Notes

1 As of June 8, 2022, 1653/3160 cases in the National Registry of Exonerations involved Black exonerees.

2 As of June 2, 2022, 370/3,150 cases in the National Registry of Exonerations involved a false confession and 777/3,150 cases involved a guilty plea.

3 After several diagnostics were conducted on our regression models, three outliers were identified with standardized residual values larger than 3 and studentized residual values larger than |2|.

4 Stimulus materials available on OSF

5 These numbers are only provided to give some context for the percentages. The data was transformed using the natural log and results cannot be interpreted with the raw compensation amounts.