Like the developmentally disabled, juveniles also have limited language skills, memory, attention span, and information-processing abilities compared with normal adults. Three images of the trial: their implications for psychological research, in Psychology in the Legal Process. Second, even if one could identify a set of possibly false confessions, it is not usually possible as a practical matter to obtain the primary case materials (e.g., police reports, pretrial and trial transcripts, and electronic recordings of the interrogations) necessary to evaluate the unreliability of these confessions. proposed a taxonomy that distinguished three types of false confessions: voluntary, compliant, and internalized. As Davis and Leo point out, “the path to false confession begins, as it must, when police target an innocent suspect…. 2008), who was accused and ultimately convicted of raping an elderly woman and was exonerated by DNA evidence many years later, police pressured Lowery to admit to having committed the rape because he had recently discovered that his wife was having an affair with another man, and they promised him psychological counseling in lieu of prison, if he admitted to that motive].7 In addition, interrogators encourage the suspect to attribute the decision to confess to an act of conscience and urge him to express remorse about committing the crime. Charles Montaldo is a writer and former licensed private detective who worked with law enforcement and insurance firms investigating crime and fraud. The classic example of this type of false confession is the Lindbergh kidnapping case. Interrogation techniques are meant to cause the suspect to perceive that his guilt has been established beyond any conceivable doubt, that no one will believe his claims of innocence, and that by continuing to deny the detectives’ accusations he will only make his situation (and the ultimate outcome of the case against him) much worse. Highly suggestible or compliant individuals are not the only ones who are unusually vulnerable to the pressures of police interrogation. Voluntary, compliant, and internalized false confessions are distinguished and a sequence of three processes is articulated as responsible for these confessions … Voluntary false confessions are thus explained by the internal psychological states or needs of the confessor 9 or by external pressure brought to bear on the confessor by someone other than the police. In recent years, the media have reported numerous high-profile cases in which individuals were convicted of and incarcerated for serious crimes they did not commit, only later to be exonerated.1 Many, though not most, of these exonerations occurred after postconviction DNA evidence established innocence of those convicted.2 In some of these cases, such as the Central Park Jogger case in New York City, the DNA evidence established the innocence of multiple defendants who had been wrongly prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated. False confessions are therefore the most incriminating and persuasive false evidence of guilt that the state can bring against an innocent defendant. The five teenagers had confessed under extreme pressure from investigators simply because they wanted the brutal interrogations to stop and they were told they could go home if they confessed. Another group of people who are susceptible to false confessions is those who are developmentally handicapped. Facing an overbearing interrogator who refuses to take no for an answer, he may reason that telling the interrogator what he wants to hear is the only way to escape.21. A case of Munchausen syndrome associated with habitual voluntary false confessions is described. It was known to the two juries that later convicted the boys. The detective's goal is to elicit a persuasive account that successfully incriminates the suspect and leads to his conviction. First, the interrogator causes the suspect to doubt his innocence. Police Interrogation and American Justice. After a description of the three sequential processes that are responsible for the elicitation of false confessions—misclassification, coercion, and contamination—the three psychologically distinct types of false confession (voluntary, compliant, and persuaded) are discussed along with the consequences of introducing false-confession evidence in the criminal justice system. They also tend to occur primarily in high-profile murder cases and to be the product of unusually lengthy and psychologically intense interrogations.7 Once he is removed from the interrogation environment and its attendant influences and pressures, the persuaded false confessor typically recants his confession.9,20 Some recant even before the interrogation terminates. Understanding Organized Crime and the RICO Act, Why Do We Yawn? These have been referred to as the misclassification error, the coercion error, and the contamination error.7. So are the developmentally disabled or cognitively impaired, juveniles, and the mentally ill. Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (ed 2). Once specific suspects are targeted, police interviews and interrogations are thereafter guided by the presumption of guilt” (Ref. NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person you are recommending the page to knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. Coerced-compliant false confessions are the most common type of false confession. Although 10 states (Alaska, Minnesota, Illinois, Maine, New Mexico, Wisconsin, New Jersey, North Carolina, Maryland, and Nebraska) and the District of Columbia now require that police record interrogations in their entirety in some or all criminal cases, most police departments, as well as the FBI, still do not record interrogations, and there remains resistance to the idea in many quarters of law enforcement.60 Researchers have proposed other reforms as well, including improved police training about false confessions, pretrial reliability hearings to exclude false-confession evidence, putting time limits on interrogations, prohibiting certain interrogation techniques, greater provision of expert witness testimony and cautionary jury instructions at trial, and providing additional safeguards for vulnerable populations such as the developmentally disabled and juveniles.7. This is typically a by-product of an intense, lengthy, and deceptive accusatorial interrogation in which the interrogator repeatedly accuses the suspect of committing the crime, relentlessly attacks the suspect's denials (as implausible, illogical, contradicted by the known facts, or simply wrong because of the interrogator's alleged superior knowledge or authority) and repeatedly confronts the suspect with fabricated (but allegedly irrefutable) evidence of his guilt. A scientifically meaningful incidence rate cannot be determined for several reasons. A false confession is an admission (“I did it”) plus a postadmission narrative (a detailed description of how and why the crime occurred) of a crime that the confessor did not commit. Convicting the Innocent: Errors of Criminal Justice. They may provide vivid scene details that appear to corroborate the suspect's guilty knowledge and thus confirm his culpability. They simply lack the psychological resources to withstand the same level of pressure, distress, and anxiety as mentally normal individuals.26,27 As a result, they tend to avoid conflict. If police did not erroneously interrogate innocent people, they would never elicit false confessions. As Salas points out: “Mental illness makes people suggestible and susceptible to the slightest form of pressure; coercion can take place much more easily, and in situations that a ‘normal’ person might not find coercive” (Ref. Because misclassifying innocent suspects is a necessary condition for all false confessions and wrongful convictions, it is both the first and the most consequential error that police make. The fact is that false confessions are one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions. Once the suspect has accepted responsibility for the crime, the interrogator pushes him to supply the details of how and why he did it. The individual may want fame or notoriety, want absolution from guilt over imagined acts, have a desperate need for self-punishment or have the inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. More than 200 people came forward to confess that they had kidnapped the baby of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. If one understands the psychological structure and logic of contemporary interrogation, it is not difficult to see how it can produce this effect. The interrogation may span hours, as often occurs with compliant false confessions, weakening a suspect's resistance, inducing fatigue, and heightening suggestibility. They literally tell the person who is questioning them what they believe the questioner wants to hear. Why Do Innocent People Confess to Crimes They Did Not Commit?" False confessions can be categorized into three general types, as outlined by American Saul Kassin in an article for Current Directions in Psychological Science: Voluntary false confessions are those that are given freely, without police prompting. Kassin and Wrightsman33 initially defined a voluntary false confession as one that is offered in the absence of police interrogation. In their study of 60 false confessions, Leo and Ofshe8,56 found that 73 percent of all false confessors whose cases went to trial were erroneously convicted; this number went up to 81 percent in the study of Drizin and Leo5 of 125 false confessions. The postadmission narrative makes the story appear, at least on its face, to be a compelling account of the suspect's guilt. 59, p 134). Whether to interrogate or not is therefore a critical decision point in the investigative process. False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications, Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online. In the Central Park Jogger case, for example, all five juveniles falsely confessed after lengthy unrecorded interrogations in which they were yelled at, lied to, threatened, and promised immunity in exchange for their admissions to participating in the assault and rape.5 In 15 to 20 percent of the DNA cases, police-induced false confessions were the primary cause of the wrongful conviction.6,7 Here too, however, the documented cases appear to represent the proverbial tip of the iceberg, as the DNA exonerations again do not include most cases in which there is no DNA to test. Miranda's Waning Protections: Police Interrogation Practices After Dickerson. The third degree and the origins of psychological police interrogation in the United States, in Interrogations, Confessions, and Entrapment. Persons at risk during interviews in police custody: the identification of vulnerabilities. The most potent psychological inducement is the suggestion that the suspect will be treated more leniently if he confesses and more punitively if he does not. Such reforms, however, are likely to occur slowly in the United States. But there are other reasons that people make voluntary false confessions: In the other two types of false confession, the person basically confesses because they see confessing as the only way out of the situation they find themselves in at the time. This classification scheme most accurately captures the psychological logic and variation in false confessions. On the other hand, a spontaneous or voluntary false confession involves a person confessing to a crime he or she did not commit, absent police interrogation. Their limited intellectual intelligence translates into a limited social intelligence as well: they do not always fully comprehend the context or complexity of certain social interactions or situations, particularly adversarial ones, including a police interrogation. Although other researchers have also documented and analyzed numerous false confessions in recent years, we do not know how frequently they occur. The inability to distinguish fact from fiction. Kassin calls such false confessions… Most false confession cases involve police interrogations. Police-induced false confessions result from a multistep process and sequence of influence, persuasion, and compliance and usually involve psychological coercion.13 Police are more likely to elicit false confessions under certain conditions of interrogation, however, and individuals with certain personality traits and dispositions are more easily pressured into giving false confessions. The developmentally disabled are more likely to confess falsely for a variety of reasons.24,25 First, because of their subnormal intellectual functioning, low intelligence, short attention span, poor memory, and poor conceptual and communication skills, they do not always understand statements made to them or the implications of their answers. 34 Most voluntary false confessions appear to result from an underlying psychological disturbance or psychiatric disorder. Persuaded false confessions occur when police interrogation tactics cause an innocent suspect to doubt his memory and he becomes temporarily persuaded that it is more likely than not that he committed the crime, despite having no memory of committing it.20 Persuaded false confessions typically unfold in three sequential steps. Police detectives understand the importance of the postadmission phase of interrogation. Unfortunately, some of these confessions are false and result in the conviction of an innocent person. Beginning with the Salem witch trials of 1692, numerous false confessions surfaced when it was later discovered that the confessed crime had not been committed (e.g., the alleged victim turned up alive) or that it was physically impossible (e.g., the confessor was demonstrably elsewhere) or when the real perpetrator was apprehended (e.g., by ballistics evidence). This chain reaction starts with the police. [In the case of Lowery v. County of Riley, 522 F.3d 1086 (10th Cir. Put simply, the suspect comes to perceive that the benefits of confessing (e.g., release from custody, mitigated punishment) outweigh the costs of denial (e.g., arrest, aggravated punishment). As Kassin and Wrightsman33 point out, individuals volunteer false confessions in the absence of police questioning for a variety of reasons: a desire for notoriety or fame, the need to expiate guilt over imagined or real acts, an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, or a pathological need for acceptance or self-punishment. Such false … Finally, people with mental illness are also disproportionately likely to make false confessions,30 especially in response to police pressure. "The Psychology of Confession Evidence," American Psychologist, Vol. He may then begin to experience dissonance because he cannot reconcile the obvious contradiction between his knowledge that he is innocent and his belief that the police are truthfully reporting unmistakable evidence of his guilt. When a suspect perceives that he has no choice but to comply, his resultant compliance and confession are, by definition, involuntary and the product of coercion.20, Even though psychological coercion is the primary cause of police-induced false confessions, individuals differ in their ability to withstand interrogation pressure and thus in their susceptibility to making false confessions.9 All other things being equal, those who are highly suggestible or compliant are more likely to confess falsely. They may experience even ordinary levels of stress, far below that felt in an accusatorial police interrogation, as overwhelming. However, social scientific studies have repeatedly demonstrated across a variety of contexts that people are poor human lie detectors and thus are highly prone to error in their judgment about whether an individual is lying or telling the truth. A ‘voluntary false confession’ is a self-incriminating statement that is offered without external pressure from the police. By using ThoughtCo, you accept our, Escobedo v. Illinois: Supreme Court Case, Arguments, Impact, What Is Racketeering? "False Confessions By Adults" Justice: Denied Magazine. This categorization scheme has provided a useful framework for the study of false confessions and has been adopted by other researchers in the field. Although there was never any evidence that he ever committed such crimes, Ingram confessed after he went through 23 interrogations, hypnotism, pressure from his church to confess, and was provided graphic details of the crimes by a police psychologist who convinced him that sex offenders often repress memories of their crimes. A false confession can be defined as 'a criminal act that the confessor either did not commit or is ignorant of having committed'. The Reid-based Behavioral Analysis Interview, which primarily consists of asking 15 to 20 questions designed to evoke particular behavioral (verbal, nonverbal, and paralinguistic) responses from which the interrogator can allegedly discern whether a suspect is telling the truth or lying, has its origins in the polygraph and like the polygraph has been empirically shown to have high rates of error.7 As Kassin and Gudjonsson note,12 police detectives and other professional lie-catchers are accurate only 45 to 60 percent of the time. Robin Warder. Ofshe and Leo20 have called this the grammar of confabulation. Innocent suspects knowingly falsely confessed to avoid or end physical assaults, torture sessions, and the like.38 In the modern era, psychological coercion is the primary source of compliant false confessions. Dahlman, C., Wahlberg, L. and Sarwar, F. Robust Trust in Expert Testimony 2015 - Humana Mente. Like the developmentally disabled, they are easily pressured, manipulated, or persuaded to make false statements, including incriminating ones. Stress20 and police pressure9 are also causes. First, researchers cannot identify (and thus cannot randomly sample) the universe of false confessions, because no governmental or private organization keeps track of this information. More than 1 out of 4 people exonerated by DNA evidence had made a false confession or incriminating statement prior to being convicted. Anchored Narratives: The Psychology of Criminal Evidence. The classic example of this type of false confession is the Lindbergh kidnapping case. The suspect offers up the remaining basis for his belief in his innocence: that he has no memory of committing the crime. The suspect remains in an uncertain belief state, because he still has no memory of committing the crime. Psychologically oriented interrogation techniques are just as capable of eliciting compliant false confessions as are physical ones. A Retrospective Review of the Use of Clozapine in Restoration of Competency to Stand Trial, Florida Law Enforcement Policies for and Experience With, Knowledge and Attitudes of Psychiatrists About the Gun Rights of Persons With Mental Illness, by The American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, The Causes of False Confession: Misclassification, Coercion, and Contamination, The Consequences of Police-Induced False Confessions, American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. 17, p 512). More than 200 people came forward to confess that they had kidnapped the baby of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. To date, more than 220 individuals have been exonerated by postconviction DNA testing and released from prison, some from death row (e.g., see the Innocence Project at www.innocenceproject.org). Social science research on wrongful convictions, however, has demonstrated that there are four ways to prove a confession is false: (1) when it can be objectively established that the suspect confessed to a crime that did not happen (e.g., the presumed murder victim is found alive); (2) when it can be objectively established that the defendant could not have committed the crime because it would have been physically impossible to have done so (e.g., he was in another location at the time of the crime); (3) when the true perpetrator of a crime is identified and his guilt can be objectively established; or (4) when scientific evidence, in recent years most commonly DNA evidence, conclusively establishes the confessor's innocence.8 Despite these four possibilities, only a small number of alleged false confessions contain the independent case evidence or circumstances that allow the confessor to prove his innocence beyond dispute. While the mentally ill are likely to make voluntary false confessions, they may also be easily coerced into making compliant ones. Usually, the persuaded false confessor recants either during the interrogation or shortly after being removed from the interrogation environment. Compliant false confessions are those in which the person confesses: The classic example of a compliant false confession is the 1989 case of a female jogger was beaten, raped and left for dead in New York City's Central Park in which five teenagers gave detailed videotaped confessions of the crime. Voluntary false confessions are thus explained by the internal psychological states or needs of the confessor9 or by external pressure brought to bear on the confessor by someone other than the police.34 Most voluntary false confessions appear to result from an underlying psychological disturbance or psychiatric disorder. Regardless, ordinary police interrogation is not strong enough to produce a permanent change in the suspect's beliefs.20, Confessions are the most incriminating and persuasive evidence of guilt that the state can bring against a defendant. Most false confession cases involve police interrogations. In 1985 social psychologists Saul Kassin and Lawrence Wrightsman,33 drawing on case studies and social psychological theories of attitude change, first identified three distinct types of false confession, which they called voluntary (occurring “in the absence of elicitation”), coerced-compliant (occurring when “the suspect publically professes guilt in response to extreme methods of interrogation, despite knowing privately that he or she is truly innocent”), and coerced-internalized (occurring when the suspect “actually comes to believe that he or she committed the offense”). 21, p 1115). Usually, the persuaded false confessor's postadmission narrative is replete with errors. In Spite of Innocence: Erroneous Convictions in Capital Cases. Scientists say these kinds of false confessions are prompted by a pathological desire for notoriety, meaning they are the result of some mentally disturbed condition. The consequences of these false confessions are disastrous for innocent individuals who are wrongfully convicted and incarcerated. It is perhaps not surprising that most documented false confessions occur in homicides and high-profile cases.2,5, Once interrogation commences, the primary cause of police-induced false confession is psychologically coercive police methods.20 Psychological coercion can be defined in two ways: police use of interrogation techniques that are regarded as inherently coercive in psychology and law, or police use of interrogation techniques that, cumulatively, cause a suspect to perceive that he has no choice but to comply with the interrogators’ demands. This may be especially true for those suspects who naively believe that the fact of their innocence will, in the end, exonerate them.42. Unfortunately, some of these confessions are false and result in the conviction of an innocent person. Tales from the juvenile confession front: a guide to how standard police interrogation tactics can produce coerced and false confessions from juvenile suspects, in Interrogations, Confessions, and Entrapment. Physical and Psychological Reasons, The Crimes of Florida Death Row Inmate Tiffany Cole, Profile of Andrei Chikatilo, Serial Killer, Dickerson v. United States: Supreme Court Case, Arguments, Impact, The Difference Between Procedural Law and Substantive Law. III. They also lack self-confidence, possess poor problem-solving abilities, and have tendencies to mask or disguise their cognitive deficits and to look to others, particularly authority figures, for appropriate cues to behavior. If the defendant's case goes to trial, the jury treats the confession as more probative of the defendant's guilt than any other type of evidence (short of a videotape of the suspect committing the crime), especially if, as in virtually all high profile cases, the confession receives pretrial publicity.8,44,55 False confessions are highly likely to lead to the wrongful conviction of the innocent. False confessions raise important questions for social scientists, mental health professionals, policy-makers, and the public. Despite substantial documentation and analysis by scholars,8,9the phenomenon of police-induced false confessions remains counterintuitive to most people. Interrogators may also try to make the admission appear to be voluntary, portraying the suspect as the agent of his own confession and themselves merely as its passive recipient. All of these traits explain why they are more vulnerable to coercive interrogation and more susceptible to making false confessions. Voluntary false confessions No promoting or pressure. For in most criminal cases, there was and is no DNA evidence available for testing. In the past two decades, hundreds of convicted prisoners have been exonerated by DNA and non-DNA evidence, revealing that police-induced false confessions are a leading cause of wrongful conviction of the innocent. There are three sequential errors, which occur during a police-elicited false confession, that lead to a wrongful conviction. The Criminal Justice System and Mental Retardation: Defendants and Victims. On the other hand, a spontaneous or voluntary false confession involves a person confessing to a crime he or she did not commit, absent police interrogation. The classic example of this type of false confession is the Lindbergh kidnapping case. The combined effect of these multiple stressors may overwhelm the suspect's cognitive capacities such that he confesses simply to terminate what has become an intolerably stressful experience. Journal. offers no legal remedy should a jury convict a defendant based on voluntary false confessions, even if no corroborating evidence is admitted. Thank you for your interest in recommending The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law site. They are therefore less likely to resist the pressures of confrontational police questioning and more likely to comply with the demands of their accusers, even if this means knowingly making a false confession. Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas. Put differently, police more readily recognize and discount voluntary false confessions than those they elicit.9. It is suggested that voluntary false confessions may be an overlooked feature ofMunchausen syndrome. A suspect's confession sets in motion a seemingly irrefutable presumption of guilt among justice officials, the media, the public, and lay jurors.8 This chain of events in effect leads each part of the system to be stacked against the individual who confesses, and as a result he is treated more harshly at every stage of the investigative and trial process.45 He is significantly more likely to be incarcerated before trial, charged, pressured to plead guilty, and convicted. When first accused, the innocent suspect thinks that his interrogators are genuinely mistaken, and he counters by attempting to reason with them and persuade them of his innocence. As this article has shown, empirical researchers have documented and analyzed how and why contemporary methods of psychological interrogation can, and sometimes do, lead innocent individuals to confess falsely to serious crimes. Confession evidence, in The Psychology of Evidence and Trial Procedure. These are the sources and citations used to research voluntary false confessions. He or she may suggest, for example, that the suspect experienced an alcohol- or drug-induced blackout, a “dry” blackout, a multiple personality disorder, a momentary lapse in consciousness, or posttraumatic stress disorder, or, perhaps most commonly, that the suspect simply repressed his memory of committing the crime because it was a traumatic experience for him. Misinformation and wrongful convictions, in Wrongly Convicted: Perspectives on Failed Justice. Second, as many researchers have noted, the developmentally disabled are eager to please.26 They tend to have a high need for approval and thus are prone to being acquiescent. Compliant false confessions occur as a result of the sequenced influence process through which detectives seek to persuade a suspect that he is indisputably caught and that the most viable way to mitigate his punishment and escape his otherwise hopeless situation is by confessing.40 As has been well documented, American police use interrogation techniques that are designed, on the one hand, to convince a suspect that he is caught and that it is futile for him to deny the crime and, on the other hand, techniques that are designed to motivate him to perceive that it is in his interest to confess. Forward to confess that they are often wrong ; for them, agreeing is self-incriminating! Replete with errors reasons why false confessions arise “through the coerciveness of the person wanting to become.... Going to credit his assertions of innocence 1086 ( 10th Cir ( kassin & voluntary false confessions 1985. 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