Alibi Believability: The Effect of Prior Convictions and Judicial Instructions

You don't know: knowledge as supportive alibi evidence

Until now, supportive evidence for alibis has been conceptualised into two distinct types: witness and physical evidence. The present study examined whether knowledge, as a third type of supportive evidence, can contribute to the understanding of evidence for alibis. Three experiments were conducted in which police detectives, laypersons and undergraduate students were asked to evaluate four alibis with witness, physical or knowledge supportive evidence, or with no supportive evidence. The results from the three experiments show that knowledge evidence is equally believable as strong witness evidence. We also found that not all items of strong physical evidence are evaluated as equally strong and believable. We therefore suggest adjusting the criteria to determine the strength of physical evidence and conducting more research on knowledge evidence.

Alibi believability: Corroborative evidence and contextual factors

A disbelief in alibis is one contributor to wrongful convictions. One reason that triers-of-fact may disbelieve alibis is that they lack evidence to corroborate the whereabouts of the suspect at the time of the crime. Contextual factors, such as when the alibi was disclosed and what was the nature of the crime, can also affect alibi believability. This paper outlines two studies where mock jurors evaluated an investigation and trial description online and rated alibi believability, defendant character trait ratings, and verdicts. Both studies examined the impact of corroborative alibi evidence and the timing of the alibi disclosure. In addition, Study 1 included the type of crime and Study 2 included the number of alibi corroborators as additional independent variables. We hypothesized that alibis would be viewed more positively when they were disclosed earlier rather than later, were corroborated by strong physical evidence and multiple corroborators, and involved less violent offenses. As hypothesized, in both studies, alibis with strong physical evidence were thought to be more believable than those with no physical evidence but the number of corroborators and type of crime did not affect any dependent measures. Delayed timing had some negative effects on views of the defendant's character. Corroborative physical evidence affected alibi believability consistently, and contextual factors mattered less. Both implications and suggestions for future research are further discussed.

From Suspect Statement to Legal Decision Making

Abstract. Notwithstanding that confessions are considered the “Queen of evidence,” how judges actually weigh suspects’ statements in reaching their decision remains relatively unknown. This study sought to examine how Belgian judges determine the evidential value of a suspect’s statement, specifically how they evaluate the statement’s: (a) admissibility and validity and (b) interaction with other pieces of evidence. To shed light on this legal decision-making process, 100 Belgian burglary case files were examined, and semi-structured interviews were undertaken with ten Belgian judges. The findings suggest that: the judge’s evaluation of a suspect’s statement differs depending on the outcome of the statement; how a statement is obtained does not appear to be an essential aspect of evidence evaluation; judges expend more effort to falsify denials than confessions; and only when they fail to falsify the denial is an acquittal granted.

Quality vs. quantity: the effect of relationship and number of corroborators on alibi assessments

The effect of the suspect-corroborator relationship and number of corroborators on alibi assessments was examined across two experiments. In both experiments, we explored the effect of relationship type and number of corroborators on believability, likelihood of guilt, and decision to retain the suspect as the primary suspect; we increased the social distance between the alibi provider and suspect and the size of difference between the number of corroborators in Experiment 2. Collectively, our results support Olson and Wells' taxonomy of alibi believability as (a) any form of person evidence mitigates pre-alibi judgments of guilt (although there is a ceiling effect), and (b) alibis corroborated by non-motivated others were judged more favourably than those corroborated by motivated others. Our results lend support toward extending the original taxonomy to include the number of corroborators. The implications for the alibi assessments are discussed.

Emotions, Crime Seriousness, and Alibi Believability

In the current study the impact of victim age, crime seriousness, and social influence on perceptions of alibi believability, victim responsibility, confidence, and emotions was examined. Participants (N = 141) read a brief crime-scenario vignette and a summary of the suspect's alibi, followed by a series of closed-ended questions. The alibi was held constant across all conditions. Eighty percent of participants rated the suspect's alibi as moderately believable or less than moderately believable. A significant interaction of Victim Age × Crime Seriousness on perceptions of alibi believability was found. Additionally, those individuals who reported greater feelings of certain negative emotions tended to rate the crime as being more serious and the suspect's alibi as less believable. Furthermore, participants' self-reported feelings of sadness, pleasure, and fear could significantly predict participants' alibi believability ratings. These results offer additional support for the legal relevance of emotions, particularly with respect to alibi assessment.

Memory Errors in Alibi Generation: How an Alibi Can Turn Against Us

Alibis play a critical role in the criminal justice system. Yet research on the process of alibi generation and evaluation is still nascent. Indeed, similar to other widely investigated psychological phenomena in the legal system - such as false confessions, historical claims of abuse, and eyewitness memory - the basic assumptions underlying alibi generation and evaluation require closer empirical scrutiny. To date, the majority of alibi research investigates the social psychological aspects of the process. We argue that applying our understanding of basic human memory is critical to a complete understanding of the alibi process. Specifically, we challenge the use of alibi inconsistency as an indication of guilt by outlining the "cascading effects" that can put innocents at risk for conviction. We discuss how normal encoding and storage processes can pose problems at retrieval, particularly for innocent suspects that can result in alibi inconsistencies over time. Those inconsistencies are typically misunderstood as intentional deception, first by law enforcement, affecting the investigation, then by prosecutors affecting prosecution decisions, and finally by juries, ultimately affecting guilt judgments. Put differently, despite the universal nature of memory inconsistencies, a single error can produce a cascading effect, rendering an innocent individual's alibi, ironically, proof of guilt. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Why Errors in Alibis Are Not Necessarily Evidence of Guilt

Laypeople, police, and prosecutors tend to believe that a suspect’s alibi, if truthful, should remain consistent over time (see Burke, Turtle, & Olson, 2007 ; Culhane & Hosch 2012 ; Dysart & Strange, 2012 ). However, there is no empirical evidence to support this assumption. We investigated (a) whether some features of an alibi – such as what was happening, who with, where, and for how long – are more likely to produce errors than others; and (b) whether consistency in alibi stories is correlated with particular phenomenological characteristics of the alibi such as a person’s confidence and sense of reliving the event. We asked participants to imagine they were suspected of a crime and to provide their truthful alibi for an afternoon 3 weeks prior and to complete questions regarding the phenomenological characteristics of their memory. We also asked participants to locate evidence of their actual whereabouts for the critical period. Participants returned a week later, presented their evidence, re-told their alibi, and re-rated the phenomenological characteristics of the alibi. Our results revealed that participants were largely inconsistent across all aspects of their alibi, but there was variability across the different features. In addition, those who were inconsistent were less confident, recollected the time period in less detail and less vividly, and were less likely to claim to remember the time period. We conclude that inconsistencies are a normal byproduct of an imperfect memory system and thus should not necessarily arouse suspicion that a suspect is lying.