The Impact of Illegal Alibi Activities, Corroborator Involvement and Corroborator Certainty on Mock Juror Perceptions

1. The basis for this manuscript was the third author's honors thesis at Elon University (2011). In addition, some of the data included in this manuscript were presented in an alibi symposium at the biennial meeting of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, New York, NY (2011).

Abstract

Undergraduate mock jurors (N = 360) received a mock police report and trial in which a suspect was accused of rape. The suspect offered one of three alibis: a sexually salacious and illegal alibi, a non-sexually salacious and illegal alibi, and a control condition. The corroborator either helped or observed him in his illegal alibi activities and was either 100 or 80% sure she was with him that night. Alibi salaciousness did not significantly affect alibi believability although it had a significant impact on views of the defendant's and corroborator's characters, corroborator believability, and verdict certainty. The non-sexually salacious alibi generally led to higher ratings on these measures in comparison with the control condition. Corroborator certainty had significant effects on perceptions of the corroborator.

Key words:

• alibi believability
• criminal defendants
• jury decision-making

Notes

1. The basis for this manuscript was the third author's honors thesis at Elon University (2011). In addition, some of the data included in this manuscript were presented in an alibi symposium at the biennial meeting of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, New York, NY (2011).

2. We conducted several ANOVAs with country (American versus Canadian sample) as the independent variable on all dependent measures. No significant differences were found between the two countries (all p > .05).

3. Not all means are reported here for all conditions the sake of brevity but they are similar in pattern to the means that are reported.