Confessions : Be Careful What You Say?

While people find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to a crime he or she did not commit, there are people who end up making a false confession. In the Central Park Five case, the police managed to get the young boys to admit to the crime with the false promise that they would be allowed to go home if they confessed (Kassin, 2002). For Martin Tankleff, while in an

Wakefield, H. & Underwager, R. (2014). Coerced or Non-voluntary Confessions: IPT Library Resources. Retrieved October 19, 2017, from

“It is difficult to prove a causal relationship between permissible investigative and interrogatory deception and testimonial deception.  Police freely admit to deceiving suspects and defendants.  They do not admit to perjury, much less to the rationalization of perjury.  There is evidence, however of the acceptability of perjury as a means to the end of conviction.  The evidence is limited and fragmentary and is certainly not dispositive” (Skolnick, 1982).

Many of today’s interrogation models being utilized in police investigations have an impact on false confessions. The model that has been in the public eye recently is the social psychological process model of interrogation known as the “The Reid Technique.” There are two alternatives used by the police today to replace the Reid Technique, one is the PEACE Model and the other is Cognitive Interviewing. These methods are not interrogation techniques like Reid but interview processes.

Wrongful convictions are common in the court-system. In fact, wrongful convictions are not the rare events that you see or hear on televisions shows, but are very common. They stem from some sort of systematic defect that lead to wrongful convictions such as, eyewitness misidentification testimony, unvalidated or improper forensic science, false confessions and incriminating statements, DNA lab errors, false confessions, and informants (2014). Bringing awareness to all these systematic defects, which result in wrongful, is important because it will better adjust the system to avoid making the same mistakes with future cases. However, false confession is not a systematic defect. It does not occur because files were misplaced or a lab technician put one too many drops. False confessions occur because of some of psychological attempt to protect oneself and their family. Thus, the courts responsibility should be to reduce these false confessions.

Determining a false confession proves difficult due to the multitude of dimensions involved. According to Kassin and Wrightsman’s (1985) survey of the literature, there are three main types of false confessions—voluntary, coerced-compliant, and coerced-internalized. Unlike coerced false confessions, voluntary false confessions arise as a result of someone willingly turning themselves into the police with an account of their crime (McCann, 1998). Voluntary false confessions can result from multiple motives, including an internalized need for punishment or to save someone else’s face. In contrast, coerced false confessions directly result from police interrogations. While coerced-compliant confessions are made to avoid interrogation, escape the stressful situation, or achieve some other reward, coerced-internalized confessions emerge when a suspects begins to

Our criminal justice system has over time implemented and changed the means of sentencing and punishment for crimes. In the United States plea deals are accountable for 90% of criminal cases. A plea deal is an agreement between prosecutor and defendant in whom the defendant accepts a guilty plea to a charge and in return receives some type of concession from the prosecution. As we have moved forward in the judicial system and now have the ability to look back on previous cases, plea deals have become more controversial. The majority of awareness in this area has been used to look deeper into false confessions, grazing right over the fact that false confessions are a large part plea deals. A controversy arose when many refused to believe that situational factors during interrogations and dispositional factors inherent to the suspects could result in false confessions. (Redlich, 2010)

Police interrogate suspects on a daily basis, but how can they tell if the confession is real? We have all heard, at one time or another of someone confessing to a crime they didn’t commit. Then your next thought is “I would never confess to something I didn’t do”. The only way you can be a 100% sure of that is if you have been through an interrogation before. This paper is going to define “confession” and tell how an innocent person will confesses to a crime they didn’t commit. This paper will also show the history of interrogations.

In recent years, there have been multiple high-profile cases of people being exonerated, often by DNA testing, after giving a false confession to a crime they did not commit. People who often fall into this trap are juveniles or those with a diminished mental capacity (Redlich, 2009). DNA testing has helped many innocent people that gave false confessions be free again. This trend brings up the question of how were they able to give a false confession.

Wrongful convictions occur when innocent defendants are found guilty in a criminal trial; When people are wrongfully convicted, they spend part of their life in prison while the criminal is free of punishment. The world has two million citizens incarcerated, about 20,000 people punished for crimes they did not commit (Ferner). Two thousand people are punished for crimes they did not commit, that is not a small number, so why do wrongful convictions occur? Wrongful convictions can occur for various reasons; the common causes are eyewitness misidentification, unvalidated or improper forensics science, false confessions, government misconduct, unprofessional lawyering, and informants or snitches.

Wrongful convictions occur when innocent defendants are found guilty in criminal trials or when defendants feel obligated to take a plea agreement in order to avoid extremely long sentences or the death penalty. The term wrongful conviction can also refer to cases in which a jury finds a person with a good defense guilty or where the conviction is reversed in violation of the defendants constitutional rights. The term actual or factual innocence is used to refer to persons who did not commit the crime. Miscarriage of justice is also used to describe wrongful convictions.

A false confession is when an innocent person is forced to admit to a crime they did not commit. False confessions were responsible for nearly a quarter of convictions reversed by DNA evidence. People are forced into false confessions by authorities, like police interrogators, who trick them into believing that it would be more beneficial if they confessed, regardless of their innocence. A major factor in false confessions is stress, those who are innocent actually feel less stress during an interrogation and they may drop their guard and not think about their words carefully.

One of the earliest recorded instances of a false confessions was the confession of Robert Hubert in 1666 after the Great London Fire. The London fire destroyed thousands of houses, businesses, 87 churches, and killed tens of thousands of people. And the man who confessed to starting it? A disabled man in a wheelchair who wasn't even in London on the day that it started. It is speculated that Robert Hubert, after slight suspicion on behalf of the king, was interrogated or even tortured for a confession. According to Rob Jones of History of Forensic Psychology, “Despite the many obvious flaws and impossibilities in Hubert's confession, a scapegoat was needed” (Jones 1). “Only around the 1980’s did psychologists and other social scientists begin to truly investigate the phenomena of the false

According to Forrest and Woody (2010), “False-evidence ploys raise particular concerns in the social science community because false-evidence ploys increase the likelihood of false confession in laboratory studies” (p. 9). Utilizing deception and trickery to gain false confessions from suspects will hinder an officer’s ethical decision making; furthermore, it can also create a lack of trust and confidence between the police and community they serve. When utilizing false-evidence ploys, there will be primary and secondary costs to society. False confessions are the primary cost for wrongful-imprisonment, and the wrongfully accused must suffer years or even decades of incarceration (Forrest & Woody, 2010). False confessions will also effect the community because the actual offender is still at large as police officers failed to apprehend the actual offender after a suspect untruthfully confesses (Forrest & Woody, 2010). The secondary costs of false-evidence ploys affect the legal system and society in various ways. First, deceptions that police officers utilize during interrogations could easily cause officers to lie in court proceeding, magistrates and internal affair detectives (Forrest & Woody, 2010). Secondly, deception will escalate anger in perpetrators who has been deceived and in return they will respond with great aggression and violence (Forrest & Woody, 2010). In order to prevent the aforementioned effects of false-evidence ploys, “defense attorneys should attempt to introduce an expert witness in the area of false confessions to educate jurors about the little-known, manipulative, and potentially deceptive nature of police interrogation” (Forrest & Woody, 2010, p.

When an admission is made it has to be proved. Admission tends to lean toward guilt however it is not sufficient enough to prove guilt. If there is no evidence to prove complete guilt at trial then more likely then not a judge will dismiss the case. On the other hand confessions are statements made by individuals who are taking responsibility for committing a crime.