Exploring the Relationship Between Remorse and Amnesty in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Abstract

Accepted legal doctrine dictates that full disclosure of the crimes committed by an amnesty applicant before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the only factor for the Commission to consider when deciding whether to grant that individual amnesty. South African law expressly limited the granting of amnesty to such situations, and international law supported this limitation. However, legal realism provides an alternative perspective, with its notion that decision makers naturally are subject to their own opinions and biases, regardless of what the law might require. An electronically searchable dataset of all amnesty applicants’ publicly accessible amnesty hearing transcripts has allowed this project to apply methodological rigor to the analysis of amnesty decision-making by the Commission like never before. This article explores specifically whether there is a relationship between the frequency of remorse per word of an amnesty applicant’s testimony and the granting of amnesty. Linear regression analysis of this population did not reveal a statistically significant relationship between frequency of remorse and the granting of amnesty. However, an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test showed that amnesty applicants who expressed “more” remorse during their oral testimony in the amnesty hearings absolutely had a higher chance of receiving amnesty. The results from the ANOVA test are enough of a finding to reject the accepted legal doctrine and to set future researchers down a path that emphasizes legal realism and empiricism when this and other transitional justice mechanisms.