Study Says Jurors Discount Coercion in Confessions

There is a recent study that suggests when jurors are confronted with allegations of a coerced confession, they tend to ignore them.  The belief is that coercion only affects the guilty but not the innocent.  The paper is on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

Jurors Believe Interrogation Tactics are Not Likely to Elicit False Confessions: Will Expert Witness Testimony Inform Them Otherwise?

Iris Blandon-Gitlin, Kathryn Sperry, and Richard A. Leo

Psychology, Crime & Law, 2009 

Situational factors - in the form of interrogation tactics - have been reported to unduly influence innocent suspects to confess. This study assessed jurors’ perceptions of these factors and tested whether expert witness testimony on confessions informs jury decision-making. In Study 1, jurors rated interrogation tactics on their level of coerciveness and likelihood that each would elicit true and false confessions. Most jurors perceived interrogation tactics to be coercive and likely to elicit confessions from guilty, but not from innocent suspects. This result motivated Study 2 in which an actual case involving a disputed confession was used to assess the influence of expert testimony on jurors’ perceptions and evaluations of interrogations and confession evidence. The results revealed an important influence of expert testimony on mock-jurors decisions.

Hat tip to to Marc Ambinder's blog on The Atlantic web site.  [MG]