Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol 32(2), May 2026, 128-143; doi:10.1037/law0000474
Over 3,500 people have been exonerated in the United States (National Registry of Exonerations, 2024). An overlooked phenomenon among exonerated individuals is that many are convicted of a subsequent criminal offense after their release (Mandery et al., 2013). We investigated the possibility that a prior wrongful conviction increases the likelihood of reconviction by biasing evaluations of exonerees under suspicion, investigation, or prosecution for a subsequent crime. We conducted an initial test of this idea in two experiments in which laypeople served as mock jurors evaluating a defendant in a criminal trial. In Experiment 1 (N = 120), mock jurors evaluated a defendant with no prior convictions, an exoneree, or a parolee. Mock jurors were more likely to convict the parolee than the exoneree or the defendant without prior convictions and more likely to convict the exoneree than the defendant without prior convictions; this bias against the exoneree was robust across a variety of individual-difference measures. In Experiment 2 (N = 378), we investigated mechanisms underlying biased evaluations of an exoneree and tested a policy intervention that might serve to mitigate this bias: the provision of compensation and an apology. Mock jurors were less likely to exhibit bias against an exoneree who had received compensation and an apology, which was associated with decreased negative character attributions and increased perceptions that the exoneree had suffered an injustice. The provision of compensation and an official apology to exonerees is a promising policy intervention for preventing a compounding injustice for exonerated individuals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)