Scott M. Mourtgos

Scott M. Mourtgos

Assistant Professor

University of South Carolina

Scott M. Mourtgos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. His applied research focuses on policing and criminal justice policy. In particular, he is interested in public perceptions of police use-of-force, crime deterrence policies, police personnel issues, and the application of Bayesian statistics in criminal justice research. He has over twenty peer-reviewed publications on these and related topics, and his work has been published in the top general interest journals of both criminal justice and public administration, including Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Public Administration Review. He is committed to integrating police practice with high-quality scientific evidence, an aim that is supported by his appointment as a 2020 NIJ LEADS Scholar. He also serves on the Research Advisory Board for the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), is an affiliate of the Police Staffing Observatory at Michigan State University, a member of the Police Accountability and Policy Evaluation Research (PAPER) lab at the University of South Carolina and University of Utah, and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Criminal Justice and Police Practice & Research: An International Journal.

His public-facing communication has appeared in multiple written, radio, and podcast outlets. He is a past doctoral fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (2022), and an FBI National Academy graduate (Session 280), having served in various capacities in policing for two decades, including as a police executive.

Interests

  • Policing
  • Criminal Justice Policy
  • Bayesian Statistics
  • Text Analytics

Education

  • PhD Political Science

    University of Utah, 2024

  • MA in Forensic Psychology

    University of North Dakota, 2016

  • BSc in Criminal Justice

    Weber State University, 2004

  • Graduate Certificate in Criminal Justice Education

    University of Virginia, 2021

For inquiries, please contact Scott at smourtgos@gmail.com

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Featured Publications

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Interrogation Duration and the Estimation of False Confession Wrongful Conviction Risk: A Reply to Smith and Colleagues

Scott M. Mourtgos, Ian T. Adams

Journal of Criminal Justice (forthcoming) (2026)

Smith et al. (2026) independently reconstructed our inverse probability analysis of false confession wrongful conviction (FCWC) risk and reproduced its results. Their replication confirms the central point of our original article: the existing literature does not provide reliable estimates of how often interrogation tactics occur in FCWC and non-FCWC cases and therefore cannot identify the population risk associated with them. Smith et al. then pivot to a different question, whether FCWC risk varies with interrogation duration, and report risk of FCWC at approximately 10% at six hours and 25% at twelve hours. We examine whether the available evidence supports those estimates. The duration likelihoods combine different populations, outcomes, units of observation, and duration measures. At twelve hours, changing only which false confession study is used to construct the likelihood moves the estimated risk from 26.3% to 72.6%, while a comparison using both groups from the same study produces an estimate of 4.0% and never reaches 10% at any evaluated duration. These results do not establish that prolonged interrogations are safe. They show that the reported thresholds are not stable estimates of population risk. Our findings may be unpopular in a field devoted to preventing serious harm, but the importance of the outcome does not alter the underlying statistical constraint. Bayes' theorem can update probabilities using evidence, but it cannot supply the denominator that more than 45 years of false confession research never collected.

What Do Laboratory False Confession Paradigms Measure? A Calibration Meta-Analysis

Scott M. Mourtgos, Ian T. Adams

Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2026)

In the most widely used laboratory false confession paradigm, 37% of participants “confess,” typically under procedures involving little more than an accusation. As a calibration benchmark, that baseline rate would correspond to more than a quarter-million false confessions annually in the United States under conservative assumptions, far above the cumulative historical count of known false confession exonerations. We reanalyze 99 experimental conditions drawn from 41 studies using hierarchical Bayesian estimation, random effects meta-analysis, publication-bias diagnostics, calibration simulations, dose–response analysis, and statistical power calculations. The pooled false confession rate is 41%, with a 95% prediction interval spanning 3% to 93% (I² = 93%), a level of instability difficult to reconcile with measurement of a stable psychological construct. Calibration simulations show that the observed laboratory means are statistically compatible only with real-world prevalence rates well above the range supported by available estimates. Interrogation tactics account for less than 1% of the variation in confession rates; design features other than the coercive manipulation account for most of the observed variation, with the no-tactic baseline alone explaining 60% of the false evidence ploy rate. Power calculations help explain why high-baseline paradigms are experimentally useful: they make relative tactic comparisons feasible at ordinary laboratory sample sizes, but that same feature limits the field relevance of the absolute magnitudes. These findings raise construct and ecological validity concerns: dominant laboratory paradigms appear to capture low-stakes compliance more readily than interrogation-induced false confession. Substantial caution is therefore warranted when extrapolating experimental results to legal, policy, or forensic contexts.

DOI PDF

Do Deceptive Interrogation Bans Affect Case Resolution? Evidence from Juvenile Justice Reforms

Scott M. Mourtgos, Ian T. Adams

Crime & Delinquency (2026)

This study examines whether state laws restricting deceptive interrogation tactics with juveniles reduce case resolution. Using NIBRS data from 2021 to 2024 and staggered adoption across nine states, we estimate effects on arrest clearances and prosecution-declined exceptional clearances for juvenile-involved serious offenses. Across Bayesian difference-in-differences, state-specific Bayesian synthetic control models, placebo tests, and robustness checks, arrest clearances do not decline after adoption within the study period. Estimates are null to modestly positive, including within individual treated states. Prosecution-declined clearances fall in treated states, but adult-offender placebo and triple-difference analyses show this pattern is not juvenile-specific. The findings suggest that juvenile deception restrictions do not impose a measurable system-level cost in case resolution.

DOI

If the face fits: predicting future promotions from police cadets' facial traits

Ian T. Adams, Scott M. Mourtgos, Christopher A. Simon, Nicholas P. Lovrich

Journal of Experimental Criminology (2023)

Can police cadets' facial traits predict whether they will be promoted in their careers? Using archival photographs of police cadets and machine learning-based facial analysis, we examine whether perceived facial traits (competence, dominance, attractiveness, trustworthiness) are associated with future career advancement. Our results suggest that perceived facial competence, but not other traits, is positively associated with promotion.

DOI PDF

Recent Posts

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Does a Six-Hour Interrogation Carry a 10% Risk of Wrongful Conviction? A Reply to Smith and Colleagues, Forthcoming in the Journal of Criminal Justice

Smith et al. replicated our analysis of false confession wrongful conviction risk, then extended it to ask whether that risk rises with interrogation duration, reporting roughly 10% at six hours and 25% at twelve. Changing only which false confession study supplies one of the two duration distributions moves the twelve-hour estimate from 26.3% to 72.6%. A comparison drawn from both groups of a single study never reaches 10% at any duration we evaluated.

false confessions interrogation wrongful convictions Bayesian

What Do Laboratory False Confession Paradigms Actually Measure?

Across 99 experimental conditions, 41% of innocent participants signed a false confession. More strikingly, 37% did so in control conditions where the experimenter typically did little more than accuse them. Our new paper asks what behavior these experiments are actually measuring, and how far their results can be carried into real interrogations, courts, and policy.

false confessions interrogation meta-analysis construct validity

Do Deceptive Interrogation Bans Affect Juvenile Case Resolution? Nine-State Results, Now Out in Crime & Delinquency

Nine states banned deceptive interrogation tactics for juveniles between 2022 and 2024, raising concerns among some that the tradeoff would be fewer cases solved. Across 510,582 juvenile-involved incidents in NIBRS (2021-2024), arrest clearances did not decline after adoption --- estimates are null to modestly positive across every method --- and prosecution declinations, the one measure that fell, fell for adults in the same states too.

juvenile justice interrogation deception bans NIBRS

Seeing Confessions Clearly: Why the Standard Score for Interrogation Methods Rewards Silence

For two decades, interrogation research has graded techniques with a single ratio: true confessions divided by false confessions. That ratio cannot tell the difference between a method that is better at separating guilty from innocent suspects and one that simply makes confessing harder for everyone. An interactive dashboard demonstrates the problem.

false confessions interrogation signal detection theory measurement

Interactive Dashboards

Did Banning Deceptive Interrogation Tactics Affect Juvenile Case Outcomes?

Nine states banned deceptive interrogation of juveniles, raising concerns among some that the tradeoff would be fewer cases solved. Across 510,582 juvenile-involved incidents (NIBRS 2021–2024), arrest clearances did not decline after adoption — and the drop in prosecution declinations is not juvenile-specific. Companion to Mourtgos & Adams (2026), Crime & Delinquency.

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