Individual attitudes toward coerced confessions change perception of confession evidence: why jurors may accept or reject poor-quality confessions

Abstract

Wrongful conviction statistics indicate that jurors will accept confession evidence even when it was coerced or contains inconsistent information. While research has considered the role of both inconsistencies and coercion in juror decisions about retracted confessions, little attention has been given to whether juror attitudes toward coerced confessions contribute to perception of suspect guilt. Using an experimental design, we manipulated the presence of inconsistencies and coercion in a fictional confession transcript. When presented with a coerced confession, low support for coercive interrogation techniques predicted lower belief in the suspect’s guilt, unlike those with higher support for coercion who did not alter their verdicts. This indicates that the effect of coercion on perceived suspect guilt differs depending on the juror’s individual attitude towards coercion. Inconsistencies in the confession similarly influenced judgements of guilt dependent on whether the person believed that confessions could be coerced from an innocent person. Implications are discussed further.

Keywords:

• Coercion
• confession consistency
• false confessions
• juror decisions
• police interrogation
• pre-trial bias

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Glenys A. Holt has declared no conflicts of interest.

Matthew A. Palmer has declared no conflicts of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee [University of Tasmania Social Sciences HREC, approval number: H0012662] and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study