Confession evidence is among the most important evidence in determining the guilt of a defendant in a criminal trial. Because spontaneous confessions are rare, police often utilize specific psychological interrogation techniques to induce a confession during interrogation. Recent research has examined the conditions under which coercive interrogation tactics influence potential jurors’ perceptions of a confession’s reliability, including personality-based and situational factors. This research will examine a situational factor associated with coercive interrogations, the length of the interrogation, which has been associated with confession reliability in past research using surveys and mock jury methods. This research will use a vignette-approach to assess the effects of interrogation length on mock jurors’ perceptions of coerced confession reliability. Participants were drawn from a population of students enrolled in Psychology classes at the University of North Carolina Asheville. Participants were given a description of a crime and an excerpt of an alleged suspect’s confession during a moderately coercive interrogation that was described as lasting either 4 hours or 20 hours, followed by a perceptions-based questionnaire. Results indicated that length of interrogation did not alter jurors’ perceptions of the confession’s reliability, as was hypothesized.
