Allison D Redlich

Allison D Redlich
George Mason University | GMU · Department of Criminology, Law and Society

About

149
Publications
193,550
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
6,414
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2015 - present
George Mason University
Position
  • Professor (Full)
September 2008 - August 2015
University at Albany, State University of New York
Position
  • Professor (Associate)

Publications

Publications (149)
Article
Full-text available
Executive Summary Throughout the world, confessions serve an important function in law enforcement and the administration of criminal justice. Analyses of wrongful convictions in the United States and elsewhere, however, have shown that admissions and confessions drawn from innocent people—a highly counterintuitive phenomenon—are a major contributi...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Some exonerees receive compensation and aid after being exonerated of their wrongful convictions, and some do not. Looking beyond differences in state statutes, we examined possible reasons for biases in receiving compensation (via statutes or civil claims) and other reintegration services. More specifically, we examined how two unique t...
Article
Full-text available
Background False confessions are often the product of an interrogation process, and the method by which an interrogation is conducted likely affects both the rate of truthful confessions and false confessions. An optimal interrogation method will maximize the former and minimize the latter. Objectives The current study was a partial update and ext...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Alford pleas allow defendants to profess innocence while simultaneously pleading guilty. In Study 1, we addressed two research questions: (1) Does the case processing length in Alford plea cases differ from traditional guilty plea cases? and (2) Do the sentencing outcomes (i.e., length of sentence, reduction in sentence, incarceration) i...
Chapter
In this book, eminent scholars from varied disciplines detail how developmental science and the law shape one another across the lifespan. The chapters address fundamental questions about how human development influences laws and practices in the legal system and how the law and its practices influence development. The chapters also reveal how the...
Chapter
In this book, eminent scholars from varied disciplines detail how developmental science and the law shape one another across the lifespan. The chapters address fundamental questions about how human development influences laws and practices in the legal system and how the law and its practices influence development. The chapters also reveal how the...
Article
Full-text available
Research Summary Using data from the National Registry of Exonerations, we examined how the presence of confession evidence impacts prosecutors’ tendency in order to (1) commit misconduct in any form (e.g., permitting perjury and witness tampering) and (2) specifically withhold exculpatory evidence (i.e., evidence favorable to the defense). We asse...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives This study examines how confession (versus eyewitness) evidence and guilt status impacts mock defendants’ plea decisions and perceptions of their probability of conviction (PoC) and the strength of evidence (SoE), key elements of the shadow-of-the-trial model. Methods In a simulated mock-theft scenario, adult participants (n = 239) were...
Article
Full-text available
The wrongful conviction of innocent individuals is a growing problem for those unjustly convicted and the integrity of our legal system, with exonerees often struggling post-exoneration. Yet, too little is known about the long-term impact of wrongful convictions on those unjustly convicted. Thus, we investigated the effect of wrongful conviction on...
Article
Full-text available
In this article, we situate results from our survey of state court judges in the context of current challenges facing the courts (e.g., attorney caseloads) and psychological research on behavior and decision-making (e.g., stress and responsiveness). We then offer evidence-based suggestions that judges can apply to help assess knowing, intelligent,...
Article
Full-text available
This is the protocol for a Campbell systematic review. The objective is to assess the effects of interrogation approach on confession outcomes for criminal (mock) suspects.
Article
Full-text available
Research has established six “canonical” factors underlying wrongful convictions including: mistaken witness identification (MWID), false confession (FC), perjury or false accusation (P/FA), false or misleading forensic evidence (F/MFE), official misconduct (OM), and inadequate legal defense (ILD). While we know these factors do not occur in isolat...
Chapter
The field of psychology–law is extremely broad, encompassing a strikingly large range of topic areas in both applied psychology and experimental psychology. Despite the continued and rapid growth of the field, there is no current and comprehensive resource that provides coverage of the major topic areas in the psychology–law field. The Oxford Handb...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives The “cheating paradigm” is an often-used procedure that randomly assigns participants to cheat (guilty) or not cheat (innocent). However, not all participants conform to their assigned condition. We investigated the potential impact of including non-conformers in analyses under an intent-to-treat model (ITT) on decisions to confess, plea...
Article
Law enforcement’s ability to obtain accurate and complete disclosures from trafficked minors is crucial for the identification of victims and prosecution of perpetrators. Yet, little is known about how this population is questioned by investigators. The purpose of this study was to assess the techniques and approaches investigators endorse to quest...
Article
Full-text available
Despite significant increases in attention during the past two decades to the problem of sex trafficking, especially of minors, little is known about how investigators identify, engage, and ultimately question suspected victims. Here we address this gap by surveying investigators in the United States about their interactions with and beliefs about...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: In guilty plea hearings, judges must determine whether defendants' plea decisions were made knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily. Little is known, however, about how plea hearings unfold, especially in juvenile court, where hearings are generally closed to the public. In this study, we had the unique opportunity to systematically o...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives It is well established that defendants who plead guilty receive reduced sentences compared to the likely outcome if convicted at trial. Prominent theories of plea bargaining posit that the plea discount is determined by the strength of the evidence against the defendant. Research on this claim has produced mixed findings, however, and ot...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives The “shadow of the trial” (SOT) theory posits that plea decisions result from mathematical predictions of probability of conviction (POC) at trial and potential trial sentence (TS). Tests of the SOT model often find support in the aggregate, but not at the individual level. This study examines the factors that account for adherence to, o...
Article
Full-text available
The topic of judicial involvement in plea negotiations is a controversial issue, with potential benefits (e.g., ensuring that the process is fairer) and risks (e.g., inducing an innocent defendant to plead guilty). Currently, 20 jurisdictions explicitly prohibit judicial involvement in plea negotiations, whereas eight permit some type of involvemen...
Article
In the present study, attachment-related differences in long-term memory for a highly emotional life event, child sexual abuse (CSA), were investigated. Participants were 102 documented CSA victims whose cases were referred for prosecution approximately 14 years earlier. Consistent with the proposal that avoidant individuals defensively regulate th...
Chapter
Examines the potential positive and negative effects of legal involvement in children.
Article
Full-text available
Objectives Prosecutors’ decisions to provide discovery can have vast implications for defendants. When prosecutors do not provide exculpatory information in the context of trials, they place innocent defendants at risk for wrongful convictions (Brady v. Maryland, 1963). Open-file discovery policy, in which prosecutors broadly share evidence with th...
Article
Full-text available
Since the majority of criminal cases end in a guilty pleas, there is growing research on issues related to the plea process, including ways in which the court determines the validity of guilty pleas. Ideally, plea validity evaluations would be consistent across courts and jurisdictions. However, prior research on felony plea hearings suggests that...
Article
Full-text available
The current article presents a series of commentaries on urgent issues and prospects in reforming interrogation practices in Canada and the United States. Researchers and practitioners, who have devoted much of their careers to the field of police and intelligence interrogations, were asked to provide their insights on an area of interrogation rese...
Article
Full-text available
The disclosure of evidence, primarily from the prosecutor to the defense (i.e., discovery) is key to a fair and just legal system. Restrictive discovery policies have been criticized for contributing to innocent defendants pleading guilty (Alkon, 2014) and to uninformed plea decisions (Friedman, 1971). Open-file policies, in which prosecutors broad...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives Pragmatic implication is the phenomenon that individuals process information “between the lines” and hear things that are implied but not asserted. In interrogation settings, whereas explicit statements of leniency are impermissible, implicit statements are allowed. In this study, we compare juveniles’ and adults’ perceptions of interrog...
Article
Despite a body of confessions research that is generally accepted in the scientific community, courts often exclude experts on the ground that such testimony would not assist the jury, which can use its common sense. To examine whether laypeople know the contents of expert testimony on confessions, we asked 151 lay participants to indicate their be...
Article
Full-text available
Systematic reporting of data about wrongful conviction cases in the United States typically begins with 1989, the year of the country’s first post-conviction, DNA-based exonerations. Year-end 2018 thus concludes a full thirty years of information and marks a propitious time to take stock. In this article, we provide an overview of known exoneration...
Article
Full-text available
Exonerees are stigmatized, especially those who have falsely confessed. False confessions prompt a series of negative perceptions that ultimately undermine people’s willingness to support reintegration aids. We extended the nascent body of literature on exoneree stigma by exploring first whether false guilty pleas can precipitate a similar series o...
Article
Full-text available
Several controversies surround Veterans Treatment Courts (VTCs), such as excluding veterans who commit violent offenses and requiring a direct relationship between a veteran’s charges and mental health diagnosis. The aim of this study was to examine VTC actors’ perceptions of these issues via a national survey. VTC Judges, Coordinators, and Veteran...
Article
Full-text available
False confessions are a contributing factor in almost 30% of DNA exonerations in the United States. Similar problems have been documented all over the world. We present a novel framework to highlight the processes through which innocent people, once misidentified as suspects, experience cumulative disadvantages that culminate in pernicious conseque...
Article
Full-text available
Research Summary In this article, we examine criminal offending by true perpetrators after innocent people are arrested and convicted for their crimes. After investigating a set of cases in which DNA was used to exonerate the innocent and to identify the guilty party, we identified 109 true perpetrators, 102 of whom committed additional crimes. We...
Article
Full-text available
An alarming number of youth worldwide are victims of commercial sexual exploitation, particularly sex trafficking. Normative developmental processes and motivations across the adolescent period-the age when youth are at greatest risk for trafficking-combined with their history, make them highly likely to be reluctant to disclose their exploitation...
Chapter
The vast majority of criminal convictions in the United States are the result of a plea bargain, with 97 to 99 percent of convictions resulting from guilty pleas (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010; Kaban & Quinlan, 2004). It has been well established that defendants receive a discount for pleading guilty, and while criminologists have tended to us...
Article
Full-text available
Criminal and juvenile court cases are often resolved through plea bargaining. Although the courts have decreed that plea decisions must be made knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily, little is known about legal professionals’ broader perceptions of defendants’ engagement in the plea process; in other words, professionals’ views of whether defen...
Article
Full-text available
A psycholegal research agenda on guilty pleas is in its nascent stage. Multijurisdictional surveys of related law and policy may advance this research agenda by focusing investigators on the specifics of existing policies and motivating cross‐jurisdictional comparisons of diverse policies. We thus conducted a systematic, national survey of statutes...
Article
Full-text available
The concept of minimization has been a focal point of research on police interrogations in part because of its widespread use and endorsement in interrogation training. Minimization, however, refers to a wide range of specific techniques, and research into it has tended to focus almost exclusively on suspect admissions at the expense of other suspe...
Chapter
While a great deal of psycho-legal research has focused on the trial process—and the decision making of jurors and juries, in particular—trials are not reflective of the current system of justice in the United States. Instead, we find ourselves within a system of pleas ( Lafler v. Cooper , 2012) with a scarcity of social science research available...
Chapter
Full-text available
As with adult criminal court cases, almost all juvenile and criminal court cases involving youth are resolved by guilty plea. This chapter reviews the extant research on youth defendants and guilty pleas. The focus is on three areas: (1) the circumstances surrounding guilty plea decisions (e.g., access to attorneys, time to make decisions); (2) you...
Chapter
This volume has gathered together research from multiple disciplines, integrated into one overall picture of the current state of our justice system. The system of pleas that defendants inhabit means that while plea bargaining is thoroughly entrenched in our present-day notion of justice, the law has not caught up. In this concluding chapter of the...
Article
Full-text available
Introduces this special section of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law on the topic of guilty pleas. In this special section the editors have assembled six rigorous research and analytical papers that deepen the understanding of guilty pleas and introduce a number of important policy implications. Together, these studies examined the impact of multi...
Article
Full-text available
Suspect interviewing and interrogation practices have been studied in many different countries, including those in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. These studies have produced useful and interesting findings, while also leaving an opening for future inquiry. Specifically, previous research has noted that we might expect interrogation and...
Article
Full-text available
Eighty-seven experts on the psychology of confessions—many of whom were highly published, many with courtroom experience—were surveyed online about their opinions on 30 propositions of relevance to deception detection, police interrogations, confessions, and relevant general principles of psychology. As indicated by an agreement rate of at least 80...
Article
Full-text available
Mental health courts (MHCs) are diversion programs for offenders with mental illness. Research has demonstrated that MHC participants receive more treatment than traditional court participants. However, little is known about racial/ethnic disparities in community treatment utilization among MHC participants compared with traditional court participa...
Article
Full-text available
The adjudication of crime by guilty plea has been on the rise globally for at least the last 30 years. Few countries, however, have accepted pleas to the degree of the United States, whose highest court recently acknowledged a criminal justice system near-synonymous with a "system of pleas, not a system of trials" (Lafler v. Cooper, 2012, p. 3). Th...
Article
Full-text available
The influence on confession evidence in trials is quite strong; triers of fact who hear confession evidence find these self-incriminating statements hard to ignore and in turn, vote to convict more often. However, most cases do not see the inside of a courtroom, but rather are resolved via plea bargains. In the present study, we examined how confes...
Article
Full-text available
Every day, thousands of defendants, prosecutors, and defense attorneys must make guilty plea decisions, such as whether to accept a plea offer or proceed to trial. Most defendants opt to plead guilty; approximately 95% of state and federal convictions result from guilty pleas. In light of a newly emerging body of research and recent Supreme Court d...
Article
As more innocents are exonerated and researchers learn more about the causes of wrongful convictions, criminal justice practices have been altered to reduce the number of erroneous convictions, although reforms have varied widely in scope and substance throughout the nation. In this article, we provide an analysis of state-level investigative refor...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives Approximately 95 % of convictions in the United States are the result of guilty pleas. Surprisingly little is known about the factors which judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys consider in these decisions. To examine the legal and extralegal factors that legal actors consider in plea decision-making, we replicated and improved upon...
Chapter
Full-text available
The overwhelming majority of convictions in the U.S. are the result of guilty pleas. In theory, for guilty pleas to be valid, plea decisions should be made knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily, and by defendants who are factually guilty. In this chapter, I examine the validity of pleading guilty. Validity here concerns (1) knowingness and inte...
Article
Full-text available
In a criminal justice system in which almost every adjudicated defendant, regardless of age, pleads guilty, it becomes important to understand the decision-making process underlying this choice. In the present research, we examined how age (juvenile vs. young adult), guilt versus innocence, and plea comprehension influenced the decision to plead gu...
Article
Full-text available
Building on a substantial body of literature examining interrogation methods employed by police investigators and their relationship to suspect behaviors, we analyzed a sample of audio and video interrogation recordings of individuals suspected of serious violent crimes. Existing survey research has focused on the tactics reportedly used, at what r...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: A core component of mental health courts (MHCs) is the provision of community treatment in order to reduce arrests. However, research on the components of treatment received by MHC participants is rare. This study examined the impact of community treatment on arrests in an MHC sample (N=357) and a sample from the traditional criminal ju...
Chapter
Summary: Police have many responsibilities in their roles to protect and serve: crime prevention; crime intervention; and crime investigation. This chapter discusses characteristics of juvenile delinquents and police practices. Research on juvenile delinquency finds that minorities and economically disadvantaged males are overwhelmingly represented...
Article
Full-text available
The overwhelming majority of criminal convictions in the United States are obtained through guilty pleas. To be constitutionally valid, guilty pleas must be knowing, voluntary, and intelligent. The information the defendant relies on to make a knowing, voluntary, and intelligent plea decision may be conveyed to the defendant through several modes,...
Article
Full-text available
The current study sought to examine the 6 domains conceptualized in a recent taxonomy of interrogation methods (Kelly, Miller, Redlich, & Kleinman, 2013): rapport and relationship building, context manipulation, emotion provocation, confrontation/competition, collaboration, and presentation of evidence. In this article, the domains are first situat...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives: We completed a systematic review and meta-analysis of the available empirical literature assessing the influence of accusatorial and information-gathering methods of interrogation in eliciting true and false confessions. Methods: We conducted two separate meta-analyses. The first meta-analysis focused on observational field studies that...
Article
Full-text available
A great deal of research in the past two decades has been devoted to interrogation and interviewing techniques. This study contributes to the existing literature using an online survey to examine the frequency of use and perceived effectiveness of interrogation methods for up to 152 military and federal-level interrogators from the USA. We focus on...
Article
Bargaining in the “shadow of the trial,” which hinges on the expectations of trial outcomes, is the primary theory used by noncriminologists to explain variation in the plea discount given to defendants who plead guilty. This study develops a formal mathematical representation of the theory and then presents an empirical test of the theory using an...
Book
In Examining Wrongful Convictions: Stepping Back, Moving Forward, the premise is that much can be learned by “stepping back” from the focus on the direct causes of wrongful convictions and examining criminal justice systems, and the sociopolitical environments in which they operate. Expert scholars examine the underlying individual, systemic, and s...
Article
Mental health courts (MHCs) are an ever-growing popular solution to a well-documented problem - the overabundance of persons with mental illness in the criminal justice system. MHCs are but one of several types of specialty courts designed to improve the practices and effectiveness of criminal justice. This chapter summarizes what is known about pa...
Chapter
Full-text available
Trevaskes S (2010) The shifting sands of punishment in the era of 'harmonious society'. Law Policy 32:332–361 Wang ZF (1989) (ed) Theory and practice of comprehensive management of public order in China. Masses Press, Beijing (in Chinese) Welsh B, Hoshi A (2002) Communities and crime prevention. In: Sherman L, Farrington DP, Welsh BC, MacKenzie DL...
Article
Full-text available
Research demonstrates that mental health courts (MHCs) lead to improved outcomes compared to traditional criminal court processes. An underlying premise of MHCs is therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ). However, no research, to our knowledge, has examined whether MHC outcomes are predicted by TJ principles as theorized. In the present study, we examined w...
Article
Full-text available
With a few notable exceptions, the research on interrogation, suspect interviewing, and intelligence collection has been predominantly focused on either broad categories of their methods (e.g., information gathering vs. accusatorial models) or very specific techniques (e.g., using open-ended questions, appealing to the source's conscience). The bro...
Article
Full-text available
We conducted a systematic review of the published and unpublished literatures on the interview and interrogation of suspects. Our focus was to examine the impact of accusatorial versus information gathering approaches on the elicitation of confessions. Two meta‐analytic reviews were conducted: one that focused on observational and quasi‐experimenta...
Article
Full-text available
Formal diversion programs are increasingly popular options for offenders with mental illness. Diversion is recommended, and often assumed, to be swift in that eligible persons should be quickly identified and enrolled. In this study, the authors examine the length from initial arrest to enrollment into mental health court and compare it to time fro...
Article
Full-text available
When defendants plead guilty, they are asked a series of questions (the plea inquiry) in open court to ascertain whether pleas are made knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily. There is a wealth of research on adjudicative competence, but little to none on the plea inquiry. Whereas competence is relevant to whether one has the ability to make kno...
Article
Full-text available
It has been well established that a “plea discount” or “trial penalty” exists, such that defendants who plead guilty receive significant sentencing discounts relative to what they would receive if convicted at trial. Theorists argue that the exact value of this plea discount is determined by bargaining “in the shadow of a trial,” meaning that plea...
Article
Full-text available
This article collects and describes the legislative and other binding policy directives in effect in each of the fifty states that function as safeguards in the following areas against the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of innocent persons: (1) eyewitness identification; (2) forensics; (3) interrogation and confessions; (4) informant testimony...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past decade, knowledge on false confessions has grown tremendously. However, a similar knowledge base on true confessions has not. In the present study, independent, self-reported true and false confession experiences of persons with serious mental illness were compared. In addition to examining the crimes and police questioning that led t...
Article
We examined adults’ long-term autobiographical memory for a dramatic life event—participating as a child victim in a criminal prosecution because of alleged sexual abuse. The study is unique in several ways, including that we had extensive documentation concerning the sexual abuse allegations, the children's involvement in their legal case, and oth...
Article
Full-text available
Mental health courts are growing in popularity as a form of jail diversion for justice system-involved people with serious mental illness. This is the first prospective multisite study on mental health courts with treatment and control groups. To determine if participation in a mental health court is associated with more favorable criminal justice...
Article
A defining feature of mental health courts (MHCs) is the requirement that enrollees appear periodically for status review hearings before the MHC judge. Although the research base on these specialty courts is growing, MHC appearances have yet to be examined. In the present study, the authors followed more than 400 MHC clients from four courts. We e...