The courts may refuse to admit in evidence, on the grounds that it was coerced, a confession which the police have obtained from a prisoner by threatening to beat him. But the prisoner's accomplices, who are compromised by his confession, are less likely to agree that he was genuinely coerced into confessing. They may feel, perhaps justifiably, that he made a reprehensible choice and that he acted badly: he ought to have accepted the beating rather than to have betrayed them. Thus sometimes, though not always, the use of the term “coercion” conveys an exclusion of moral responsibility. A person who acts under coercion is for that reason regarded as not having acted freely, or of his own free will. It may be established that a person is not to be credited or blamed for what he has done, then, by showing that he was “coerced” into doing it.

A person is sometimes said to have been coerced even when he has performed no action at all. Suppose that one man applies intense pressure to another man's wrist, forcing him to drop the knife in his hand.