Perceptions of coercion in interrogation: comparing expert and lay opinions

ABSTRACT

When confessions are entered into evidence in criminal courts, issues of coercion and voluntariness are important and often contested matters. Occasionally, defense attorneys proffer expert witnesses to testify about the coercive pressures of an interrogation and the risk of a false confession. Such testimony is often ruled inadmissible on the grounds that it does not inform the jury beyond its common knowledge. In our effort to test this judicial assumption about common knowledge, we surveyed jury-eligible laypeople (n = 67) and social scientists specializing in interrogation and confessions (n = 54) regarding their opinions about the coerciveness of prohibited interrogation tactics, maximization techniques, minimization techniques, and suspect risk factors and compared their ratings with a set of independent t tests. Laypeople gave lower ratings to the coerciveness of all sets of items representing interrogation techniques, and lower ratings to the vulnerabilities associated with suspect risk factors, as compared to social science experts. The disparities between laypeople’s and experts’ perceptions of coercion in interrogations demonstrate that such issues are not fully within the common knowledge of prospective jurors, and suggest the need to provide jurors with expert witness guidance when tasked with evaluating confession evidence.

KEYWORDS:

• Interrogation
• coercion
• expert testimony
• admissibility
• common knowledge

Data availability statement

The survey used in this study is available through the Center for Open Science repository: (https://osf.io/n79yg/?view_only=37b2022d7cfc4b76ac1f7e3f89e9a888). The data set may be obtained by contacting the first author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number CGS-M Grant #239935]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number Insight Grant: #430-2016-00605].