Browsing by Author "Kaplan, Jeffrey"

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Development of the Interview and Interrogation Assessment Instrument
(2023-04-01) Kaplan, Jeffrey; Leach, Amy-May; Cutler, Brian; Eastwood, Joseph
Confession evidence factors heavily in judicial decision making, and courts may call an expert social scientist to assess the coercive pressures of an interrogation and risk factors for false confession. At present, there exists no standardized methods for performing this task, and each expert uses their own unstructured professional judgment. To address this lack of standardization, we have developed a psychological instrument for evaluating videotaped interrogations: the Interview and Interrogation Assessment InstrumentTM. We begin with a discussion of the benefits of standardized measurement and proceed to an overview of the conceptualization and initial development of our instrument. In Study 1, we established the bases for the instrument’s items and scoring by surveying expert populations. In Study 2 we assessed interrater reliability and explain our instrument refinements based on our results. In Study 3, we examined convergent validity. Social science experts reviewed interrogation videos and rated the coercive pressures along multiple dimensions. We correlated the expert ratings with our instrument’s measures. We conclude that the newly developed instrument demonstrates preliminary reliability and convergent validity and appears to be a promising tool for future research and expert consultation in contested confession cases.
Perceptions of coercion: a comparison of perspectives
(2018-05-01) Kaplan, Jeffrey; Cutler, Brian
When a confession is retracted, issues of coercion and voluntariness are important and often contested matters in criminal courts. Counsel may wish to call an expert witness to testify about the coercive pressures of certain interrogation tactics, personal traits that increase suspect vulnerability, and the possibility of false confession. Such testimony must meet certain criteria (e.g., Daubert v. Merrell Dow, 1993; R v. Mohan, 1994), and is often ruled inadmissible on the grounds that it does not inform the jury beyond their common knowledge (Cutler, Findley, & Loney, 2014; Kassin et al., 2018). To investigate common understanding of coercion in interrogation, I examined jury-eligible laypersons' (n= 50) perceptions of the coerciveness of items representing minimization techniques, maximization techniques, prohibited tactics, and suspect risk factors. Their ratings were compared with those of two groups of content experts: social scientists specializing in interrogation and confession (n = 50) and criminal justice officials experienced in conducting interrogations or evaluating confession evidence (n= 20). The two groups of content experts showed a high level of agreement, though laypeople gave significantly lower ratings to the coercive potential of all sets of items representing interrogation techniques. Given the disparities between laypersons' and experts' perceptions of coercion in interrogation, and the connection between coercion and false confession (Drizin & Leo, 2004; Kassin et al., 2010; Leo & Ofshe, 1998), the results suggest the need for expert guidance to inform jurors about coercive factors which may render a confession unsafe and unreliable.