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How could someone really claim that they have done it, when they have no clue about it? What provokes them to? What are the psychological reasons for such false confessions? Who are vulnerable? Is it to be blamed the functioning of the law and enforcement entities??

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"The psychology behind false confessions more difficult to comprehend than suicide,"

said Kassin, a distinguished professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

His research helps to explain why people implicate themselves. He's found, for example, that vulnerable suspects, including teenagers, people with intellectual impairments and those with mental illness, are more likely to make false confessions, especially if they are under pressure from interrogators. Police are permitted to lie about evidence and imply promises and threats through subtle but lawful tactics.

Kassin has also found that prolonged, sleepless interrogation sessions and trauma can lead innocent people to believe they committed a crime.
Read more:

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Of all the convicted people who have been exonerated by DNA testing, almost 30 percent confessed to crimes they didn't commit, according to the nonprofit legal rights group The Innocence Project.

What's behind these false confessions? False confessions expert Saul Kassin, PhD, discussed what we know about that behavior at a congressional briefing hosted on April 29 by APA's Science Government Relations Office.

The psychology behind false confessions "is more difficult to comprehend than suicide," said Kassin, a distinguished professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "Not having a similar experience themselves, [people don't] fundamentally understand that they can be broken into doing things they would never dream of doing."

His research helps to explain why people implicate themselves. He's found, for example, that vulnerable suspects, including teenagers, people with intellectual impairments and those with mental illness, are more likely to make false confessions, especially if they are under pressure from interrogators. Police are permitted to lie about evidence and imply promises and threats through subtle but lawful tactics.

Kassin has also found that prolonged, sleepless interrogation sessions and trauma can lead innocent people to believe they committed a crime. For example, in 1988 Martin Tankleff was convicted of murdering his parents on Long Island. Detectives told Tankleff - who was 17 at the time - that they had found a lock of his hair in his dead mother's hand. They also falsely reported that his father said Tankleff had committed the crime before losing consciousness and later dying. Both assertions were lies.

Tankleff initially believed he must have done it, saying, "My father never lies."

"False evidence is disorienting and confusing. And here is someone who had just seen his parents bludgeoned, stabbed, and lying in pools of blood," he said. A New York State appeals court vacated Takleff's conviction in 2007 based on new evidence in the case, and charges against him were dropped in 2008.

Once a confession is made, it's difficult to prove the confessor did not commit the crime, Kassin said.

"A confession is the functional equivalent of a conviction," he said. "Once a confession works its way into evidence, there are no safety nets."

Kassin has made policy recommendations based on his work, including recommending mandatory videotaping of entire interrogations, a practice that has been adopted by the FBI, more than 20 states and the District of Columbia. APA also recommended videotaping interrogations in a 2014 resolution.

- Stacy Lu

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self implication of crimes one did not commit

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Why do people admit to crimes they didn't commit?

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Of all the convicted people who have been exonerated by DNA testing, almost 30 percent confessed to crimes they didn't commit, according to the nonprofit legal rights group The Innocence Project. What's behind these false confessions? False confessions expert Saul Kassin, PhD, discussed what we know about that behavior at a congressional briefing hosted on April 29 by APA's Science Government Relations Office.

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Former Georgia Death Row Prisoner Is Released after 43 Years for a Murder He Did Not Commit, Due to New DNA Evidence - May 27,2020

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Former Georgia Death Row Prisoner Is Released after 43 Years for a Murder He Did Not Commit, Due to New DNA Evidence - May 27,2020

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He initially confessed to the crime, but his attorneys said that detectives coerced the confession and took advantage of Gates’ naivete and low IQ.

The highest rates of false confessions occur among the intellectually disabled, juveniles, and the mentally ill.

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By Murcel Rahimi
GEORGIA - Johnny Lee Gates is set free, 43 years after being sentenced to death in Georgia for a murder he has steadfastly maintained he did not commit.

More than 40 years after he was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white Columbus, Georgia, jury for the rape and murder of a 19-year-old white woman, Johnny Lee Gates will be getting a new trial. On March 13, 2020, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously held that DNA, which contained physical evidence that police and prosecutors had withheld for decades, raised "significant doubt" as to Gates' guilt.

The court's 9-0 decision rejected an appeal by state prosecutors of a January 2019 trial court ruling that had set aside Gates' convictions in the 1976 killing. DNA testing of physical evidence that police and prosecutors had falsely claimed no longer existed excluded Gates as the source of DNA on a bathrobe belt and several neckties that the killer had used to bind his victim. The decision was the culmination of decades of court proceedings that litigated Gates' innocence and intellectual capacity, amid systemic race discrimination by the prosecution.

On May 15, 2020, Gates entered a so-called "Alford plea" on charges of manslaughter and armed robbery, meaning that he did not admit guilt, but conceded that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him. He was sentenced to 20 years on each charge, but was credited with time served and immediately released.

"I've fought for 43 years for this day," Gates said. "I always had faith it would come, even when others weren't sure. I am an innocent man. I did not commit this crime. What happened to me is something that should never happen to any person. But I am not bitter. I thank God that I am here, and I am happy to be free."

Gates had spent the first 25 years of his incarceration on death row. His death sentence was vacated in 2003 based on evidence of his intellectual disability. At that time, he was granted a jury trial to determine whether his intellectual impairments made him ineligible for the death penalty. When that trial concluded in a mistrial, the prosecution and defense reached an agreement to resentence Gates to life without parole.

During the appeal process, Gates' lawyers discovered jury selection notes from seven death-penalty cases tried by his prosecutors, which showed that they had systematically excluded Black prospective jurors from every capital trial to empanel all-white or nearly all-white juries.

The prosecutors' notes from Gates' case showed that they had tracked the race of jurors, struck every black juror they could, and repeatedly wrote derogatory comments about black people and black prospective jurors, whom they described as "slow," "old+ignorant," "cocky," "con artist," "hostile," and "fat."

White jurors were marked with the letter "W," while black jurors were marked with the letter "N." A Georgia Tech mathematics professor provided expert testimony that the probability that black jurors had been removed for race-neutral reasons was infinitesimally small-0.000000000000000000000000000004 percent.

"Race discrimination undermines the credibility and reliability of the justice system," said Patrick Mulvaney, managing attorney for capital litigation at the Southern Center for Human Rights. "Mr. Gates is entitled to a new trial that is fair and free of race discrimination."

Gates has maintained his innocence in the 1976 murder of Katharina Wright for more than four decades. He initially confessed to the crime, but his attorneys said that detectives coerced the confession and took advantage of Gates' naivete and low IQ. Prosecutors withheld key evidence in the case from the defense and systematically removed African Americans from the jury because of their race.
The highest rates of false confessions occur among the intellectually disabled, juveniles, and the mentally ill. These individuals are often vulnerable to the pressures of coercive police interrogation techniques because they are less likely to understand the charges against them and the consequences of confessing. Astonishingly more than one out of four people wrongfully convicted but later exonerated by DNA evidence made a false confession or incriminating statement.

If the prosecution's theory of the crime, which asserted that the perpetrator had acted alone and had been barehanded when he tied up the victim, was true, the killer would have left DNA from skin cells on the fabric. However, DNA testing showed that Gates' DNA was not present on the items. The appeals court found that, while the state's evidence of Gates' guilt appeared strong in the absence of the DNA results, he "could have much more effectively countered" the state's case with the now-available DNA evidence.

Claire Gilbert, one of Gates' attorneys from the Georgia Innocence Project, said, "Today, in the wake of the Georgia Supreme Court's decision to vacate his conviction based on exculpatory DNA evidence, Johnny Gates an innocent man is free at last. Mr. Gates has survived the unimaginable: 43 long years in prison for a crime he did not commit, with 26 of those years on death row. We are thrilled to welcome Mr. Gates home, and to introduce him to our community of released clients."
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Former Georgia Death Row Prisoner Is Released after 43 Years for a Murder He Did Not Commit, Due to New DNA Evidence | Davis Vanguard

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By Murcel Rahimi GEORGIA - Johnny Lee Gates is set free, 43 years after being sentenced to death in Georgia for a murder he has steadfastly maintained he did not commit. More than 40 years after he was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white Columbus, Georgia, jury for the rape and murder of a 19-year-old white woman, Johnny Lee Gates will be getting a new trial.

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Is Chicago Really the ‘False Confession Capital’? - September 22, 2017

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Is Chicago Really the ‘False Confession Capital’? - September 22, 2017

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Innocence Project co-founder Peter Neufeld, in a 2012 “60 Minutes” segment called “Chicago: The False Confession Capital,” described the rate of false confessions in the city in stark terms: “Quite simply, what Cooperstown is to baseball, Chicago is to false confessions. It is the Hall of Fame.”

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Adam Gray took his first steps as a free man in more than 20 years in May. Now in his late 30s, Gray was only 14 years old when he was arrested in 1993 in the arson death of a brother and sister in Brighton Park.

Gray was convicted three years later - in part because investigators relied on flawed forensic evidence that pointed to arson - but also because Gray himself confessed after seven hours of interrogation. Though he later recanted, his confession was introduced at trial and Gray was sentenced to life in prison.

Only after advancements in forensic fire investigations were made years later was Gray's conviction called into question.

Gray is one of 11 Illinois inmates who has been exonerated so far in 2017. False confessions were involved in some way in six of those cases.

Innocence Project co-founder Peter Neufeld, in a 2012 "60 Minutes" segment called "Chicago: The False Confession Capital," described the rate of false confessions in the city in stark terms: "Quite simply, what Cooperstown is to baseball, Chicago is to false confessions. It is the Hall of Fame."

That statement was met with controversy and blowback at the time - including a letter to CBS from then-Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez, who was included in the segment. But a question lingers about the claim: do the numbers back it up?

The National Registry of Exonerations - a project at the University of Michigan that seeks to document and study exoneration cases based on publicly available information - has logged nearly 2,100 wrongful convictions nationwide. Of those, 193 - some 37 percent - came from Illinois. Based on those numbers, Illinois has a false confession rate more than three times higher than the national average of 12 percent.

In fact, of the roughly 250 recorded cases in the U.S. involving a false confession, more than 28 percent come from the state of Illinois. And nearly 1 in 4 come from Cook County.
Map: U.S. exonerations involving false confessions by county, based on data for 245 recorded incidents. Red indicates the highest concentration, followed by yellow and, at the lowest frequency, green. In the past 25-plus years, there have been 248 recorded exonerations involving false confessions, according to data from The National Registry of Exonerations. Of the 71 that originated in Illinois, 59 came from Cook County.
"There seemed to be a culture in Chicago of solving cases by confession," said Maurice Possley, a senior researcher at the National Registry of Exonerations. "And once you got that confession, everything that might have pointed to someone else was considered a red herring or was just discarded."

It's almost impossible to talk about exonerations in Illinois, or Chicago, without mentioning Jon Burge. The disgraced former Chicago Police Department detective was responsible for beating, electrocuting and otherwise torturing primarily African-American suspects in the 1970s and '80s before his termination in the early '90s.

Those cases have led to at least a dozen exonerations, but Karen Daniel, director of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions, stresses that Burge and his subordinates weren't the only ones who built cases on false confessions.

"In Chicago, in particular, false confessions (are) a huge problem," she said, "and we are the false confession capital of the country."
Wrongful convictions
Opened in 1999, NU's Center on Wrongful Convictions is one of a handful of organizations statewide focused exclusively on getting convicts out of prison. Since its inception, attorneys from the CWC and its sister organization - the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth - have helped free more than 30 wrongfully convicted men and women.

Those cases include sexual assaults and rapes, assaults and arson, attempted homicides and quadruple murders. All were convicted. All were later released - thanks to DNA, witness recantations or some other evidence.
Defendants have a right to a speedy trial. But after a conviction, inmates have no right to a hasty follow-up investigation into their innocence.
A Harvard grad and former public defender, Karen Daniel has worked at the center since 2000 and says it receives hundreds of letters from inmates seeking their aid each month.

"A project like mine ... tends to take the heavy-duty murder cases, armed robbery, sexual assaults," she said, "in part because the sentences are longer, and the people keep fighting and fighting and fighting them. And 10, 15, 20 years later, they're still in prison. And that might be when we get involved.

"I think there is a huge number of wrongful convictions, innocent people being convicted, in the so-called lower-stakes cases - drug cases on down - but the people are in, they get out relatively quickly and they're not fighting them so much. Those types are harder to fight."

Perhaps that explains why seven of the 11 exonerations that have occurred so far this year in Illinois involved inmates convicted of murder. In fact, over the past decade, more than 2 out of every 3 exonerations in Illinois have involved murder convictions - a rate nearly twice that of the national average.

"One would think when the stakes are that high - when the sentence is death - those would be the cases where police and prosecutors are the most careful to get it right," Daniel said. "And yet we kept seeing again and again that they were getting it wrong."
'The more we look, the more we find'
Nearly 1 out of every 6 murder exonerations that's taken place nationwide over the past decade has occurred in Illinois. Of the Prairie State's 102 total exonerations from 2008 through August 2017, 68 percent of them have been murder cases, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, which each year publishes annual reports detailing the lastest exoneration cases.

Only Texas and New York have freed more wrongfully convicted inmates over the past 10 years than Illinois. But even those states have overturned far fewer murder convictions.

For instance, Texas has more than twice the number of total exonerations over that period (247) as Illinois (102), but only 9 percent of those are for murder cases (23).

Texas, though, remains a unique example in that it has driven up record numbers of exonerations nationwide in recent years with dozens of low-level drug convictions that have been overturned within a single county.

Prior to that spike, Illinois had led the nation in wrongful convictions for decades. Between 1989 and 2011, Illinois recorded 101 exonerations, according to registry data, making it the only state to surpass the century mark. The next highest total was New York with 88.

But even those numbers provide only a snapshot of the full scope of exonerations.

"The number we've had for each year has grown," said Possley, who worked as a criminal justice reporter at the Chicago Tribune for nearly 25 years before joining the registry. "I think in part that's because courts and prosecutors are more open to these things. And with the creation of things like the Conviction Integrity Units, they're becoming a little bit more proactive in that area. I also think that because we've been out there, people do come to us, and I think we're just better at finding them."

Still, he refers to the numbers included in the registry's annual reports as a "basement figure," saying nobody knows the full number of exonerations from each of the nation's 3,000-plus counties. Part of his job is going back and finding cases the registry has missed. Some of the cases added most recently date back to the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"The more we look," Possley said, "the more we find, so to say."
'It takes years'
With thousands of aid requests each year, it's a difficult process to pick out specific cases to handle, Karen Daniel said.

The Center on Wrongful Convictions is made up of less than a half-dozen attorneys, along with a few additional staff positions and three attorneys handling youth cases. Law students from Northwestern's Pritzker School of Law also provide a helping hand.

If they feel they have the capacity to take on a case, they'll first look at the path to a successful exoneration.

Is there a legitimate claim of innocence? Is there a clear legal track forward through the courts or a petition for executive clemency? If the answer to both of those questions is "yes," then CWC staff begin the investigation into the crime itself and the trial.

But none of this happens quickly.
Related: How Dana Holland Became the Country's First Double Exoneree
"It takes years," Daniel said, "in all but in a very small number of cases it's going to take years. And that's, to be honest, one of the most frustrating aspects of the case."

Twelve years, in fact. That's the average length of time from the point of conviction to a successful exoneration, according to a registry report.

Before a person is convicted of a crime, they have a right to a speedy trial. But after a conviction, inmates have no right to a hasty follow-up investigation into their innocence.

"A lot of times there's not a whole lot of interest in it," she said. "The different offices that often deal with these cases - the state's attorney's office, the public defender's office, even the judges - they're understaffed, and so the cases languish. And it's very, very frustrating.

"If it's a case that involves DNA testing and the person is relying on state Police Crime Lab to do the testing, they're underfunded so even if DNA testing is approved, the case can sit there for a year or more waiting for DNA testing.
"One would think when the sentence is death - those would be the cases where police and prosecutors are the most careful to get it right."
"And also it can take a long time to properly investigate an old wrongful conviction case, so I won't lay it all on those systemic problems."

Early on, the center would look at cases only if inmates had at least 10 years remaining on their sentences, but that's no longer their policy. Daniel says they will look at any case, including those where the entire sentence has already been served.
A 'fragile' system?
"Even if the person is out of prison, if they have a murder conviction on their back or a sex crime on their back, their life is still hell and there's still a lot of consequences," she said, "and then there's still a lot of value in erasing that if it's a wrongful conviction."

It's been a few years since he left the Tribune, but Possley has no trouble rattling off case after case he covered locally that included a false confession or a wrongful conviction.

There was Daniel Taylor, who gave a false confession to a 1992 double homicide that occurred while he was already in police custody for disorderly conduct. He was convicted anyway and spent 20 years in prison before he was eventually exonerated. There was Eddie Huggins, a 15-year-old who spent more than a year in prison awaiting trial after confessing to stabbing a woman, even though the medical examiner found "no evidence of a stabbing."

And there was Rolando Cruz, who was on death row when he won an appeal at the state Supreme Court for a third trial only after some turnover on the bench. DNA evidence later proved Cruz was not guilty of a 1983 rape and murder.

"To me, it demonstrated the fragility of the system," Possley said. "Here is a case where, because one justice retires and another one gets appointed, this case comes back - not because of some new discovery prior to then. I keep using the word fragile, but it's just, it was a fluke in a way. And for me it demonstrated that maybe some of these cases deserve a closer look."

In response to the false confession findings, Chicago Police Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said: "Judicial and investigative integrity is perhaps one of the most important values for the CPD." He also referred questioning to the state's attorney's office, which did not respond to a request for comment.

In explaining her own "false confession capital" claim, Daniel pointed to the prevalence of the Reid Method of interrogation - a common technique used by officers for decades - which she said can be used to psychologically coerce almost anybody into giving a confession, particularly younger suspects or those with mental handicaps.

The technique was created by John Reid, a former Chicago police officer. And John E. Reid & Associates, which offers nearly a dozen different training programs on the technique to police, military and attorneys, is headquartered in downtown Chicago.

Instead of using violence or intimidation, officers using the Reid Method can break suspects down through hourslong interrogations and a multistep process in which a suspect is repeatedly told the evidence of the case proves their guilt.

Reid & Associates say that when used properly, this interrogation method can be extremely effective. A survey on Reid's website notes a majority of their clients reported seeing confession rates jump more than 25 percent after using their technique.

But Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates - a consulting and interrogation training firm that's worked with CPD and other departments across the country - announced earlier this year it will no longer teach the Reid Method after more than 30 years of instruction.

In doing so, the firm noted that almost one-third of U.S. convictions since 1989 overturned through the use of DNA evidence have involved a false confession. Though it said the technique can be effective when used correctly, WZ acknowledged that its improper use, coupled with intense emotional pressure, can have "catastrophic results."

In response, Reid & Associates said its method is still seen as " the gold standard" by the law enforcement community, adding that the company also works with the Innocence Project to help free wrongfully imprisoned suspects who gave a false confession after the Reid technique was used incorrectly.

Daniel added that it's hard to say whether there really have been that many more wrongful convictions in Chicago, or if authorities here are just better at rooting them out. And Possley said it's impossible to tease out a single cause for the number of false confessions.
Follow Matt Masterson on Twitter: @ByMattMasterson Related stories: 15 Men Seek Exoneration in Lawsuit Claiming Chicago Police Corruption
"It's easy to say yeah, cause I think just about everybody used the Reid technique," he said. "I wasn't there, you know? We didn't have video tape of interrogations, so it's hard to know."
'Making a Murderer' Defense Attorney on Broken Justice System
Sept. 13: More than a dozen residents of the former Ida B. Wells housing project say they were framed and intimidated by a former Chicago Police Department sergeant. Now they are seeking to have their convictions overturned.
Outgoing Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez Reflects on Office
March 20: One of Steven Avery's defense attorneys from Netflix's "Making a Murderer" discusses his new book "Illusion of Justice."

Sept. 8, 2016: With only a few months left in office, does Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez wish she had done anything differently? She joins us in discussion.

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Is Chicago Really the 'False Confession Capital'?

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Adam Gray took his first steps as a free man in more than 20 years in May. Now in his late 30s, Gray was only 14 years old when he was arrested in 1993 in the arson death of a brother and sister in Brighton Park.

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Expert: Teens in Jones’ case apt to falsely confess - March 12, 2020

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Expert: Teens in Jones’ case apt to falsely confess - March 12, 2020

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An expert told the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission on Thursday that the five teenage boys convicted of killing Nathaniel Jones, NBA star Chris Paul’s grandfather, were highly susceptible to making false confessions.

“This case has the most indicators of false confession that I have seen so far,” said Cleary, who testified before the innocence commission by video.

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An expert told the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission on Thursday that the five teenage boys convicted of killing Nathaniel Jones, NBA star Chris Paul's grandfather, were highly susceptible to making false confessions.

Hayley Cleary, an associate professor of criminal justice at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va., also said she saw startling similarities between this case and the famous case of the five black and Hispanic teenagers in New York who were exonerated in 2002 after being convicted in 1990 in the rape and brutal beating of a female jogger in Central Park in 1989. That case, she said, is a documented example of teenagers who were coerced into making false confessions.

Cleary said it's not her role to determine if confessions are false but to see whether there were risk factors that often lead juveniles to make false confessions. In the Jones case, she said, she saw plenty of those risk factors.

"This case has the most indicators of false confession that I have seen so far," said Cleary, who testified before the innocence commission by video.

Cleary said that in general, teenagers' minds are less developed than adults. That means they are more likely to make impulsive decisions without considering the long-term consequences of their actions, she said. Unlike adults, teenagers might confess to something they didn't do if they think making that statement means they can go home, Cleary said. And teenagers are more vulnerable to police investigators yelling at them, threatening them with the death penalty, and providing them with either misleading or false information to make them think there is more evidence against them than actually exists, Cleary said.

Nathaniel Cauthen and his brother, Rayshawn Banner, and three others - Christopher Bryant, Jermal Tolliver and Dorrell Brayboy - were all convicted of killing Jones, 61, a friendly church-going man who owned a gas station. Jones was found lying in his carport of his home on Moravia Street on Nov. 15, 2002. Prosecutors said the five boys, who were 15 and 14 at the time, gagged and bound Jones and beat him until he died from heart arrhythmia. Cauthen, Banner, Bryant and Tolliver have filed claims of innocence with the innocence commission; Brayboy had proclaimed his innocence but did not file a claim with the commission before he died from a stabbing last year.

The innocence commission, which started operating in 2007, rarely holds hearings - just 15 to date. Twelve people have been exonerated through the commission process. Five out of eight commissioners must agree that sufficient evidence of factual innocence exists in order for this case to move to the next level - a panel of three Superior Court judges who would hold a hearing in Forsyth County and determine if all four men should be exonerated. The innocence commission hearing started Monday and is scheduled to end today.

Cleary said she saw many similarities between this case and the so-called Central Park Five case. The two cases involved racial minorities - the boys were black and Hispanic in the Central Park case and the boys are all black in the Jones case.

Both cases, she said, were marked by allegations that police investigators took advantage of the teens' age and intimidated them into making confessions.

"The similarities are astonishing," Cleary said. "In both of these cases, investigators questioned the youth separately and sometimes for extended periods of time," she said.

And in both cases, investigators used audio clips of one suspect's statement to get another suspect to confess, Cleary said.

She also said that in both cases, there was little to no physical evidence that linked the teenage boys to the crime scene - fingerprints, blood or DNA evidence. The only incriminating evidence, Cleary said, was the boys' statements.

Jessicah Black, the key witness who testified at two trials that led to the boys' convictions, has recanted that testimony and told the commission that Winston-Salem police investigators coerced a false statement out of her. During the trials, attorneys for the teenagers said their confessions were coerced.

At least two of the teens were wrongly told they could face the death penalty if convicted in Jones' death, two Winston-Salem police detectives involved in the case testified Wednesday before the innocence commission.

Juveniles cannot face the death penalty.

Cleary said mentioning the death penalty and keeping the teenagers in interview rooms for long periods of time increased the possibility that the statements were false.

And the boys also made inconsistent statements that often did not fit the physical evidence found at the crime scene, she said.

Some of the boys also had certain intellectual limits that made it hard for them to understand what was happening, and police investigators failed to follow up other leads in the case that could have pointed to another suspect, she said.

"Once the confessions were secured," she said, "it seems the investigation stopped".

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Expert: Teens in Jones' case apt to falsely confess

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An expert told the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission on Thursday that the five teenage boys convicted of killing Nathaniel Jones, NBA star Chris Paul's grandfather, were highly susceptible to making false confessions.

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‘I’ll help you boys as much as I can': How eagerness to please can result in a false confession 

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‘I’ll help you boys as much as I can': How eagerness to please can result in a false confession 

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Read about the article (pdf below):
This article describes the case of a 25-year-old man (Mr J) who confessed during police interviewing to having set a series of fires whilst he worked as a voluntary fireman.

The factors that determine whether or not the substance of a false confession is going to become internalised are not fully understood. The two main factors appear to be the type of interrogation techniques utilised by the police and the psychological vulnerabilities of the individual.

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I ll help you boys as much as I can How eagerness to please can result in a false confession

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False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications (Read more article link below)

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False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications (Read more article link below)

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Causes of False confessions

The Misclassification Error

The first mistake occurs when detectives erroneously decide that an innocent person is guilty.

The Coercion Error

Once detectives misclassify an innocent person as a guilty suspect, they often subject him to an accusatorial interrogation.

Vulnerable Suspects

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.

An article worth reading:

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Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law

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Abstract

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. In this article, empirical research on the causes and correlates of false confessions is reviewed. 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. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of empirical research for reducing the number of false confessions and improving the accuracy of confession evidence that is introduced against a defendant at trial.

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. Many, though not most, of these exonerations occurred after postconviction DNA evidence established innocence of those convicted. 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. 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). Although researchers and scholars have long documented the problem of wrongful conviction, the use of DNA testing to exonerate innocent prisoners and the sustained media attention that it has received has increased public recognition that the criminal justice system often convicts the wrong people. Although the number of wrongful convictions continues to mount, the DNA exonerations represent only a small part of a much larger problem. For in most criminal cases, there was and is no DNA evidence available for testing.

Nevertheless, the DNA exonerations provide a window into the causes of erroneous prosecution and wrongful conviction. A disturbing number of these cases involved false confessions given by innocent defendants during a psychologically coercive police interrogation. 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. In 15 to 20 percent of the DNA cases, police-induced false confessions were the primary cause of the wrongful conviction. 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. They also do not include false confessions that were dismissed or disproved before trial, those that resulted in guilty pleas, those given for crimes that were not subject to postconviction review (especially less serious crimes), and those given in cases that contain confidentiality provisions (e.g., juvenile proceedings).

False confessions raise important questions for social scientists, mental health professionals, policy-makers, and the public. They are consistently one of the leading, yet most misunderstood, causes of error in the American legal system and thus remain one of the most prejudicial sources of false evidence that lead to wrongful convictions. In this article, I will review and analyze the empirical research on the causes and correlates of false confessions, the psychological logic and various types of false confession, and the consequences of introducing false-confession evidence at trials.

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. Although other researchers have also documented and analyzed numerous false confessions in recent years, we do not know how frequently they occur. A scientifically meaningful incidence rate cannot be determined for several reasons. 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. 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. Finally, even in disputed confession cases in which researchers are able to obtain primary case materials, it may still be difficult to determine unequivocally the ground truth (i.e., what really happened) with sufficient certainty to prove the confession false. In most alleged false-confession cases, it is therefore impossible to remove completely any possible doubts about the confessor's innocence.

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. 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. Nevertheless, researchers have documented approximately 300 proven false confessions in recent decades. Researchers have also categorized cases involving likely, but nonproven, false confessions as highly probable or probable false confessions.

Despite substantial documentation and analysis by scholars,the phenomenon of police-induced false confessions remains counterintuitive to most people. Most lay people believe in what has been referred to as the myth of psychological interrogation: that an innocent person will not falsely confess to police unless he is physically tortured or mentally ill. This belief has been noted by several scholars and documented in public surveys. The myth of psychological interrogation persists because most people do not know what occurs during police interrogations, and because they wrongly assume that individuals do not act against their self-interest or engage in self-destructive behavior, such as falsely confessing to a crime that they did not commit.

The Causes of False Confession: Misclassification, Coercion, and Contamination

There is no single cause of false confession, and there is no single logic or type of false confession. Police-induced false confessions result from a multistep process and sequence of influence, persuasion, and compliance and usually involve psychological coercion. 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. To understand why criminal suspects give false confessions, we must first understand how police investigators target criminal suspects and how police interrogation works as a psychological process, before eliciting a suspect's admission and in the postadmission stage of interrogation.

There are three sequential errors, which occur during a police-elicited false confession, that lead to a wrongful conviction. Investigators first misclassify an innocent person as guilty; they next subject him to a guilt-presumptive, accusatory interrogation that invariably involves lies about evidence and often the repeated use of implicit and explicit promises and threats as well. Once they have elicited a false admission, they pressure the suspect to provide a postadmission narrative that they jointly shape, often supplying the innocent suspect with the (public and nonpublic) facts of the crime. These have been referred to as the misclassification error, the coercion error, and the contamination error.

The Misclassification Error

The first mistake occurs when detectives erroneously decide that an innocent person is guilty. As Davis and Leo point out, "the path to false confession begins, as it must, when police target an innocent suspect.... Once specific suspects are targeted, police interviews and interrogations are thereafter guided by the presumption of guilt" (Ref. 14, p 124). Whether to interrogate or not is therefore a critical decision point in the investigative process. If police did not erroneously interrogate innocent people, they would never elicit false confessions. 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.

There are many cognitive errors that lead police to classify an innocent person mistakenly as a guilty suspect. Perhaps the most prominent stems from poor and erroneous investigation training. American police are taught, falsely, that they can become human lie detectors capable of distinguishing truth from deception at high, if not near perfect, rates of accuracy. (The Chicago-based firm Reid and Associates, for example, claims that detectives can learn to discriminate truth and deception accurately 85 percent of the time, although this rate seems to be represented in their training seminars as 100 percent.) Detectives are misleadingly taught, for example, that the subject who averts his gaze, slouches, shifts his body posture, touches his nose, adjusts or cleans his glasses, chews his fingernails, or strokes the back of his head is likely to be lying and thus is guilty. The subject who is guarded, uncooperative, and offers broad denials and qualified responses is also believed to be deceptive and therefore guilty. 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. Most people get it right at rates that are no better than chance (i.e., 50%) or the flip of a coin. Moreover, specific studies of police interrogators have found that they cannot reliably distinguish between truthful and false denials of guilt at levels greater than chance; indeed, they routinely make erroneous judgments. The method of behavior analysis taught by the police training firm Reid and Associates has been found empirically to lower judgment accuracy, leading Kassin and Fong to conclude that "the Reid technique may not be effective-and, indeed, may be counterproductive-as a method of distinguishing truth and deception" (Ref. 17, p 512). 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. As Kassin and Gudjonsson note, police detectives and other professional lie-catchers are accurate only 45 to 60 percent of the time.

Innocent persons may be mistakenly targeted for suspicion and misclassified as guilty suspects for other reasons. The suspect may, for example, simply be the most readily noticed person who fits a very general description given by an eyewitness or others. Although many may fit the description, the target may be chosen simply because he happens to be noticed by the police, reported by someone who had seen a police sketch or falsely identified from a mug shot or lineup, or he fits an official profile of the perpetrator. A suspect may also be targeted based on widespread crime-related schemas, including likely motives for the crime as well as the perpetrators likely to have such motives. Family members, for example, have been led to confess falsely to murdering wives, children, or parents, largely because police start with the assumption that most such murders are committed by family and proceed by ruling out family before looking for other suspects.

The Coercion Error

Once detectives misclassify an innocent person as a guilty suspect, they often subject him to an accusatorial interrogation. Getting a confession becomes particularly important when there is no other evidence against the suspect, especially in high-profile cases in which there is great pressure on police detectives to solve the crime, there is no other source of potential evidence to be discovered, and typically there is no credible evidence against an innocent but misclassified suspect. It is perhaps not surprising that most documented false confessions occur in homicides and high-profile cases.

Once interrogation commences, the primary cause of police-induced false confession is psychologically coercive police methods. 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. Usually these amount to the same thing. Psychologically coercive interrogation techniques include some examples of the old third degree, such as deprivations (of food, sleep, water, or access to bathroom facilities, for example), incommunicado interrogation, and induction of extreme exhaustion and fatigue. In the modern era, however, these techniques are rare in domestic police interrogations. Instead, when today's police interrogators employ psychologically coercive techniques, they usually consist of (implicit or express) promises of leniency and threats of harsher treatment. As Ofshe and Leo have written, "the modern equivalent to the rubber hose is the indirect threat communicated through pragmatic implication" (Ref. 21, p 1115). Threats and promises can take a variety of forms, and they are usually repeated, developed, and elaborated over the course of the interrogation. Most documented false confessions in recent decades have been directly caused by or have involved promises or threats.

The second form of psychological coercion, causing a suspect to perceive that he has no choice but to comply with the wishes of the interrogator, is not specific to any one technique but may be the cumulative result of the interrogation methods as a whole. If one understands the psychological structure and logic of contemporary interrogation, it is not difficult to see how it can produce this effect. The custodial environment and physical confinement are intended to isolate and disempower the suspect. Interrogation is designed to be stressful and unpleasant, and it is more stressful and unpleasant the more intense it becomes and the longer it lasts. 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. The suspect may perceive that he has no choice but to comply with the detectives' wishes, because he is fatigued, worn down, or simply sees no other way to escape an intolerably stressful experience. Some suspects come to believe that the only way they will be able to leave is if they do what the detectives say. Others comply because they are led to believe that it is the only way to avoid a feared outcome (e.g., homosexual rape in prison). 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.

Vulnerable Suspects

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. All other things being equal, those who are highly suggestible or compliant are more likely to confess falsely. Individuals who are highly suggestible tend to have poor memories, high levels of anxiety, low self-esteem, and low assertiveness, personality factors that also make them more vulnerable to the pressures of interrogation and thus more likely to confess falsely. Interrogative suggestibility tends to be heightened by sleep deprivation, fatigue, and drug or alcohol withdrawal. Individuals who are highly compliant tend to be conflict avoidant, acquiescent, and eager to please others, especially authority figures.

Highly suggestible or compliant individuals are not the only ones who are unusually vulnerable to the pressures of police interrogation. So are the developmentally disabled or cognitively impaired, juveniles, and the mentally ill. The developmentally disabled are more likely to confess falsely for a variety of reasons. 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. They often lack the ability to think in a causal way about the consequences of their actions. 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. They are not, for example, likely to understand that the police detective who appears to be friendly is really their adversary or to grasp the long-term consequences of making an incriminating statement. They are thus highly suggestible and easy to manipulate. 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. It is therefore easy to get them to agree with and repeat false or misleading statements, even incriminating ones.

Second, as many researchers have noted, the developmentally disabled are eager to please. They tend to have a high need for approval and thus are prone to being acquiescent. They have adapted to their cognitive disability by learning to submit to and comply with the demands of others, again especially those of authority figures. Because of their desire to please, they are easily influenced and led to comply in situations of conflict. Some observers refer to this as "biased responding." The developmentally disabled answer affirmatively when they perceive a response to be desirable and negatively when they perceive it to be undesirable. They literally tell the person who is questioning them what they believe the questioner wants to hear. A related trait is the cheating-to-lose syndrome. The developmentally disabled eagerly assume blame or knowingly provide incorrect answers to please, curry favor with, or seek the approval of an authority figure. It is not difficult to see how their compliance and submissiveness, especially with figures of authority, can lead the developmentally disabled to make false confessions during police interrogations.

Third, because of their cognitive disabilities and learned coping behaviors, the developmentally disabled are easily overwhelmed by stress. They simply lack the psychological resources to withstand the same level of pressure, distress, and anxiety as mentally normal individuals. As a result, they tend to avoid conflict. They may experience even ordinary levels of stress, far below that felt in an accusatorial police interrogation, as overwhelming. 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. The point at which they are willing to tell a detective what he wants to hear to escape an aversive interrogation is often far lower than that of a mentally normal individual, especially if the interrogation is prolonged. There have been numerous documented cases of false confessions from the developmentally disabled in recent years.

Youth is also a significant risk factor for police-induced false confessions. Many of the developmental traits that characterize the developmentally disabled may also characterize young children and adolescents. Many juveniles too are highly compliant. They tend to be immature, naively trusting of authority, acquiescent, and eager to please adult figures. They are thus predisposed to be submissive when questioned by police. Juveniles also tend to be highly suggestible. Like the developmentally disabled, they are easily pressured, manipulated, or persuaded to make false statements, including incriminating ones. Youth (especially young children) also lack the cognitive capacity and judgment to understand the nature or gravity of an interrogation or the long-term consequences of their responses to police questions. Like the developmentally disabled, juveniles also have limited language skills, memory, attention span, and information-processing abilities compared with normal adults. And juveniles too are less capable of withstanding interpersonal stress and thus are more likely to perceive aversive interrogation as intolerable. All of these traits explain why they are more vulnerable to coercive interrogation and more susceptible to making false confessions.

Finally, people with mental illness are also disproportionately likely to make false confessions, especially in response to police pressure. The mentally ill possess a range of psychiatric symptoms that make them more likely to agree with, suggest, or confabulate false and misleading information and provide it to detectives during interrogations. These symptoms include faulty reality monitoring, distorted perceptions and beliefs, an inability to distinguish fact from fantasy, proneness to feelings of guilt, heightened anxiety, mood disturbances, and a lack of self control. In addition, the mentally ill may suffer from deficits in executive functioning, attention, and memory; become easily confused; and lack social skills such as assertiveness. These traits also increase the risk of falsely confessing. While the mentally ill are likely to make voluntary false confessions, they may also be easily coerced into making compliant ones. 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. 31, p 264). As a result, "the mentally ill are especially vulnerable either to giving false confessions or to misunderstanding the context of their confessions, thus making statements against their own best interests that an average criminal suspect would not make" (Ref. 31, p 274).

It is important to emphasize, however, that police elicit most false confessions from mentally normal individuals. For example, Drizin and Leo, in a study of 125 proven false confessions, showed that more than 70 percent were given by mentally normal individuals (i.e., neither developmentally disabled nor mentally ill).

The Contamination Error

Psychologically coercive police methods (and how they interact with an individual's personality) may explain how and why a suspect is moved, often painstakingly, from denial to admission, but a confession is more than an "I did it" statement. It also consists of a subsequent narrative that researchers have referred to as the postadmission narrative. The narrative contextualizes and attempts to explain the "I did it" statement and transforms the fledgling admission into a fully formed confession. The postadmission narrative makes the story appear, at least on its face, to be a compelling account of the suspect's guilt. The content of and rhetorical force of a suspect's postadmission narrative explains, in part, why confessions are treated as such powerful evidence of guilt and sometimes lead to the prosecution and conviction of the innocent.

Police detectives understand the importance of the postadmission phase of interrogation. They use it to influence, shape, and sometimes even script the suspect's narrative. The detective's goal is to elicit a persuasive account that successfully incriminates the suspect and leads to his conviction. For example, in false-confession cases, interrogators have been adept at inventing, suggesting, or eliciting an account of the suspect's motivation; indeed, they often use scenario-based inducements as a method of attributing a motive to the suspect, typically one that minimizes his culpability, one that the suspect agrees to and then repeats, even if it is completely inaccurate. [In the case of Lowery v. County of Riley, 522 F.3d 1086 (10th Cir. 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]. 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. They may provide vivid scene details that appear to corroborate the suspect's guilty knowledge and thus confirm his culpability. 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.

Interrogators help create the false confession by pressuring the suspect to accept a particular account and by suggesting facts of the crime to him, thereby contaminating the suspect's postadmission narrative. Unless he has learned the details of the crime scene from community gossip or the media, an innocent person would not know either the mundane or the dramatic details of the crime. The innocent suspect's postadmission narrative should therefore be replete with errors when he responds to questions for which the answers cannot easily be guessed by chance, unless, of course, the answers are implied, suggested, or explicitly provided to the suspect, which, in fact, does occur, whether advertently or inadvertently, in many false-confession cases. If the entire interrogation is captured on audio or video recording, then it may be possible to trace, step by step, how and when the interrogator implied or suggested the correct answers for the suspect to incorporate into his postadmission narrative. If, however, the entire interrogation is not recorded-and most documented false-confession cases are not-then there may be no objective way to prove that the interrogator contaminated the suspect's postadmission narrative.

The contamination of the suspect's postadmission narrative is thus the third mistake in the trilogy of police errors that, cumulatively, lead to the elicitation and construction of a suspect's false confession.

The Different Types of False Confession

In 1985 social psychologists Saul Kassin and Lawrence Wrightsman, 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"). Ofshe and Leo extended and modified the initial typology of Kassin and Wrightsman to include five distinct types of false confession: voluntary, stress-compliant, coerced compliant, coerced-persuaded, and noncoerced-persuaded. This classification scheme most accurately captures the psychological logic and variation in false confessions. For simplicity, researchers have dropped the various prefixes and simply refer to voluntary, compliant, and persuaded false confessions. It is important to understand that there are three conceptually distinct psychological processes at work in the production and elicitation of false confessions.

Voluntary False Confessions

Kassin and Wrightsman initially defined a voluntary false confession as one that is offered in the absence of police interrogation. Voluntary false confessions are thus explained by the internal psychological states or needs of the confessor or by external pressure brought to bear on the confessor by someone other than the police. Most voluntary false confessions appear to result from an underlying psychological disturbance or psychiatric disorder. As Kassin and Wrightsman 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. But voluntary false confessions need not be rooted in psychological maladies. A person may, for example, provide a voluntary false confession out of a desire to aid and protect the real criminal, to provide an alibi for a different crime or norm violation, or to get revenge on another person. High-profile crimes, such as the Lindbergh kidnapping in the 1930s, the Black Dahlia murder in the 1940s, and the JonBenet Ramsey and Nicole Brown Simpson murders in the 1990s, tend to attract a large number of voluntary false confessions. Detectives tend to be far more skeptical and less accepting of voluntary false confessions than of police-induced false confessions. Put differently, police more readily recognize and discount voluntary false confessions than those they elicit.

Compliant False Confessions

A compliant false confession is one given in response to police coercion, stress, or pressure to achieve some instrumental benefit-typically either to terminate and thus escape from an aversive interrogation process, to take advantage of a perceived suggestion or promise of leniency, or to avoid an anticipated harsh punishment. Perhaps the most distinct aspect of compliant false confessions is that they are made knowingly: the suspect admits guilt with the knowledge that he is innocent and that what he says is false. Compliant false confessions are typically recanted shortly after the interrogation is over.

There are several reasons that suspects give compliant false confessions. Kassin and Wrightsman first suggested that compliant false confessions arise "through the coerciveness of the interrogation process" (Ref. 33, p 77). In the pre-modern era of American interrogation, physical coercion, the so-called third degree, was the primary cause of such confessions. Innocent suspects knowingly falsely confessed to avoid or end physical assaults, torture sessions, and the like. In the modern era, psychological coercion is the primary source of compliant false confessions. Psychologically oriented interrogation techniques are just as capable of eliciting compliant false confessions as are physical ones. Ofshe and Leo have identified "classically coercive influence techniques" (i.e., threats and promises, explicit or implied) as the root cause of most compliant false confessions in the modern era.

Coerced-compliant false confessions are the most common type of false confession. As Kassin notes, "the pages of legal history are filled with stories of coerced-compliant confessions" (Ref. 39, p 225). 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. 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.

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. Unlike most police interrogation techniques, promises and threats are neither standard nor legal; rather, they are regarded as coercive in both psychology and law. It is not hard to understand why such threats and promises in combination with standard interrogation techniques, such as repeated accusations, attacks on a suspect's denials, lies about nonexistent evidence, pressure, and inducements, may cause a suspect to confess knowingly to a crime he did not commit. 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). This may be especially true for those suspects who naively believe that the fact of their innocence will, in the end, exonerate them.

Although psychologically coercive threats and promises may be the primary sources of compliant false confessions, they are not the only ones. Stress and police pressure are also causes. Custodial interrogation is inherently stressful, anxiety-provoking, and unpleasant. The interrogator's interpersonal style may also be a source of distress: he may be confrontational, insistent, demanding, overbearing, deceptive, hostile, and manipulative. His accusatorial techniques are also designed to induce distress by attacking the suspect's self-confidence, by not permitting him to assert his innocence, and by causing him to feel powerless and trapped. The interrogation may span hours, as often occurs with compliant false confessions, weakening a suspect's resistance, inducing fatigue, and heightening suggestibility.

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. 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.

Persuaded False Confessions

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. Persuaded false confessions typically unfold in three sequential steps. First, the interrogator causes the suspect to doubt his innocence. 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. 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. At some point, however, the suspect realizes that they are not going to credit his assertions of innocence. 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. The suspect offers up the remaining basis for his belief in his innocence: that he has no memory of committing the crime.

To convince the suspect that it is plausible, and likely, that he committed the crime, the interrogators must supply him with a reason that satisfactorily explains how he could have done it without remembering it. This is the second step in the psychological process that leads to a persuaded false confession. Typically, the interrogator suggests one version or another of a "repressed" memory theory. 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.

The suspect can only be persuaded to accept responsibility for the crime if he regards one of the interrogators' explanations for his alleged amnesia as plausible. Once the suspect is convinced, he comes to believe that it is more likely than not that he committed the crime. The suspect remains in an uncertain belief state, because he still has no memory of committing the crime. Despite his lack of memory, once the suspect is over the line, he is ready for the third and final step in the making of a persuaded false confession: the construction of the postadmission narrative. 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 suspect does not know the facts; he is in the paradoxical situation of believing he committed an act that he wants to confess to but cannot remember. He may believe that if he thinks hard enough, searches his mind, or tries to imagine himself committing the crime, he will somehow be able to remember it and supply the desired details; but he does not remember the crime. Instead, the suspect either guesses or confabulates about how the crime could have occurred, repeats the details that the police have suggested to him, knowingly makes up the details, or tries to infer them from the interrogators' suggestions.

Usually, the persuaded false confessor's postadmission narrative is replete with errors. Reasoning from inference rather than actual knowledge, his confession is given in hypothetical, tentative, and speculative language. His use of equivocal language reflects his uncertain belief state, confusion, and lack of memory. Assuming that the suspect is lying, however, the interrogators sometimes reject his speculations and pressure him to use declarative rather than conditional language and to provide the details of the crime that they continue to believe he knows. Some persuaded false confessors bend to the demands of their interrogators and confess in declarative language (e.g., "I did" instead of "I must have done"), even though they lack any knowledge or memory of the crime; others continue to use equivocal, speculative, and uncertain language ("I must have done it," "I probably did it," "I guess I did it," "I could have done it"), insisting that they still do not know or remember the details. Ofshe and Leo have called this the grammar of confabulation. This language of uncertainty is present in all persuaded false confessions. Usually, the persuaded false confessor recants either during the interrogation or shortly after being removed from the interrogation environment.

Persuaded false confessions appear to occur far less often than compliant false confessions. They also tend to occur primarily in high-profile murder cases and to be the product of unusually lengthy and psychologically intense interrogations. Once he is removed from the interrogation environment and its attendant influences and pressures, the persuaded false confessor typically recants his confession. Some recant even before the interrogation terminates. Regardless, ordinary police interrogation is not strong enough to produce a permanent change in the suspect's beliefs.

The Consequences of Police-Induced False Confessions

Confessions are the most incriminating and persuasive evidence of guilt that the state can bring against a defendant. False confessions are therefore the most incriminating and persuasive false evidence of guilt that the state can bring against an innocent defendant. Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan's observation that "no other class of evidence is so profoundly prejudicial" is amply supported by social science research. Confessions exert a strong biasing effect on the perceptions and decision-making of criminal justice officials and lay jurors alike because most people assume that a confession, especially a detailed confession, is, by its very nature, true. Confession evidence therefore tends to define the case against a defendant, usually overriding any contradictory information or evidence of innocence.

A suspect's confession sets in motion a seemingly irrefutable presumption of guilt among justice officials, the media, the public, and lay jurors. 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. He is significantly more likely to be incarcerated before trial, charged, pressured to plead guilty, and convicted. Moreover, the presence of a confession creates its own set of confirmatory and cross-contaminating biases, leading both officials and jurors to interpret all other case information in the worst possible light for the defendant. For example, a weak and ambiguous eyewitness identification that otherwise may have been quickly dismissed in the absence of a confession is treated instead as corroboration of the confession's underlying validity. As the case against an innocent false confessor moves from one stage to the next in the criminal justice system, it gathers more collective force, and the error becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.

This chain reaction starts with the police. Once they obtain a confession, they typically close their investigation, clear the case as solved, and make no effort to pursue any exculpatory evidence or other possible leads, even if the confession is internally inconsistent, contradicted by external evidence, or the result of coercive interrogation. Even when other case evidence subsequently emerges suggesting or demonstrating that the suspect's confession is false, police almost always continue to believe in the suspect's guilt and the underlying accuracy of the confession. American police interrogators are poorly trained about the risks of psychological interrogation and the phenomenon of police-induced false confession, and, like most people, they tend to assume that virtually all confessions are true and thus assume that virtually all who confess are guilty.

The presumption of guilt and the tendency to treat more harshly those who confess extends to prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges as well. Like police, prosecutors rarely consider the possibility that an entirely innocent suspect has falsely confessed; some prosecutors are so skeptical of the idea of police-induced false confession that they stubbornly refuse to admit that it occurred, even after DNA evidence has unequivocally established the defendant's innocence. Once a suspect has confessed, prosecutors tend to charge him with the highest number and types of offenses and set his bail at a higher amount (especially in serious or high profile cases), and they are far less likely to initiate or accept a plea bargain to a reduced charge. The confession becomes the centerpiece of the prosecution's case against the defendant. Even defense attorneys treat suspects who confess more harshly, often pressuring them to accept a guilty plea to a lesser charge to avoid the higher sentence that will inevitably follow from a jury conviction. As the California Supreme Court has noted, "the confession operates as a kind of evidentiary bombshell which shatters the defense." American judges too tend to presume that a defendant who has confessed is guilty and, accordingly, treat him more punitively. Conditioned to disbelieve defendants' claims of innocence or police misconduct, judges rarely suppress confessions, even highly questionable ones.

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. False confessions are highly likely to lead to the wrongful conviction of the innocent. In their study of 60 false confessions, Leo and Ofshe 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 Leo of 125 false confessions. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that a false confession is a dangerous piece of evidence to put before a judge or jury, because it profoundly biases their evaluation of the case in favor of conviction, so much so that they may allow it to outweigh even strong evidence of a suspect's factual innocence. The Leo and Ofshe and Drizin and Leo studies show that real-world jurors simply fail to discount false-confession evidence appropriately, even when the defendant's uncorroborated confession was elicited by coercive methods and the other case evidence strongly supports his innocence. Thus the false-confession evidence is highly, if not inherently, prejudicial to the fate of any innocent defendant in the American criminal justice system. As Welsh White notes, "the system does not have safeguards that will prevent the jury from giving disproportionate weight to such confessions" (Ref. 41, p 155).

The findings from these field studies of aggregated false-confession cases are consistent with those from experiments and public opinion surveys. They all converge on the same conclusion: that, as the U.S. Supreme Court stated in the case of Arizona v. Fulminante, "a confession is like no other evidence." It is "uniquely potent" in its ability to bias the trier of fact in favor of the prosecution, overwrite contradictory or exculpatory case evidence, and lead to the wrongful conviction of the innocent. Researchers have demonstrated that mock jurors find confession evidence more incriminating than any other type of evidence. Kassin and Sukel found that confessions powerfully increased the conviction rate even when mock jurors viewed the confession as coerced, even when they were instructed to disregard the confession as inadmissible, and even when they reported that it had no influence on their verdict. Confessions, especially detailed confessions, are devastating to a defendant's case because, as Welsh White notes, "jurors are often unwilling to believe that anyone would confess to a crime that they did not commit" (Ref. 59, p 134).

Conclusions

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. The consequences of these false confessions are disastrous for innocent individuals who are wrongfully convicted and incarcerated. As a result, empirical researchers have also suggested ways to minimize both the number of false confessions that police elicit and the number of false confessions that, once elicited, lead to wrongful convictions. Mandatory electronic recording of police interrogations in their entirety is the single most important policy reform available because it creates an objective, comprehensive, and reviewable record of the interrogation that all parties-police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, juries, and even the public in high-profile cases-can review. 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. 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.

Such reforms, however, are likely to occur slowly in the United States. Great Britain has adopted several reforms, based on growing documentation and awareness of the problem of false confessions. American law enforcement, however, remains steeped in the use of investigative methods and interrogation techniques that continue to cause the three errors that produce false confessions, and the American public continues to believe in the myth of psychological interrogation. Until the misconception that innocent suspects do not confess in response to psychological interrogation is dispelled, police detectives will continue to elicit false confessions that lead to wrongful convictions. As a result, social scientists and mental health professionals must continue to conduct empirical research and educate the public about the increasing documentation of false confessions and the interrogative influences that promote them and ultimately lead to the conviction of the innocent.

Acknowledgments

I thank Alan Law for research assistance.

View Abstract

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False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications

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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. In this article, empirical research on the causes and correlates of false confessions is reviewed.

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Why teens confess to crimes they didn't commit | Lindsay Malloy

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According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 27 percent of people in the registry who were accused of homicide gave false confessions, and 81 percent of people with mental illness or intellectual disabilities did the same when they were accused of homicide.

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Sometimes people confess crimes that they didn't do  in order to save their loved ones like parent accepts that he did a crime in order to save his son and protect him from the further legal consequences at a very young age .....this could be out of the bonds between family and also the son may had to commit a crime under some circumstances where he had no choice.....  so if we look from one side this may be right as any parent when they reach such a situation may do it ,we never know but that may have its own consequences maybe in later stages of life he may try to commit ever bigger crimes on the hope of his parents to come and save him.

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In some cases, people have falsely confessed to having committed notorious crimes simply for the attention that they receive from such a confession. ... People may also confess to a crime they did not commit as a form of plea bargaining in order to avoid the risk of a harsher sentence after trial.