The Contaminating Effect of Confession Evidence on Jurors’ Judgments: Does It Depend on Defendant Age?

• In Event: Race, Ethnicity, Age, and Sanctions: Disparate Sentencing and Biased Perceptions of Offenders

Abstract

Confessions can have a contaminating effect such that the presence of confession evidence makes other evidence seem more inculpatory than in cases without a confession. Jurors tend to be more sensitive to the possibility of false confessions in cases involving juveniles than adults, however. Thus, juveniles’ coerced confessions might have an inoculating effect on how jurors perceive other evidence. We used an experimental mock trial design to observe how a defendant’s age affects mock jurors’ decision making in cases involving confession evidence. We hypothesized that jurors would be more likely to discount juveniles’ than adults’ confessions, and predicted that coerced confessions would have a contaminating effect on perceptions of other evidence in cases involving an adult defendant, but an inoculating effect in cases involving a juvenile defendant. Results demonstrated that jurors discounted a defendant’s coerced confession in their decision-making, especially when the defendant was a juvenile. Jurors were also influenced by an adult’s coerced confessed to view other evidence as more inculpatory than if there was no confession, and, conversely, perceived other evidence as less inculpatory when the coerced confession came from a juvenile defendant. Implications will be discussed.

Authors

• Jennifer Weintraub, University at Albany, SUNY

• Cynthia J Najdowski, University at Albany, State University of New York

• George Redder, University at Albany, SUNY