Lucrezia Rizzelli

Lucrezia Rizzelli is a Social Science Engagement Fellow at the Centre for Criminology, and a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant holder. She earned her Bachelor degree in Psychological Sciences and Techniques at the University of Florence. Then, she completed her MA in Forensic Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, where she joined Professor Saul Kassin's false confessions laboratory and conducted research on the linguistic style of false confessions. Lucrezia volunteered at the Innocence Project, and was an investigative intern at the New York City Department of Investigation. In 2017, she received the award of "Best Psychology Student" of the year.  

Her doctoral thesis focused on criminal decision making amongst Indonesian drug offenders and its links to the state's punitive stance against narcotic crimes. This project was supervised by Professor Carolyn Hoyle and supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Doctoral Training Partnernship (DTP) and Lincoln College's Kingsgate Scholarship. 

Lucrezia recently concluded her role as Research Officer for the Death Penalty Research Unit (DPRU), where she analysed interviews with drug offenders in Indonesia, both in the community and on death row. She is now beginning research on personal attitudes towards agency and decisions to offend or abstain from crime, funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant. Alongside this work, she is collaborating with the Death Penalty Project (DPP) and LEDAP (Legal Defence and Assistance Project) on the development of an interview tool to assess experiential, psychological, and circumstantial factors among Nigerian death row inmates, supported by a Social Science Engagement Fellowship.