We at this blog, and as a consequence you as an observant reader, have known for quite some time now that false confessions are an underrated scourge in the world of wrongful convictions. Some 15-20% of all exonerations have seen the original convictions brought about by these false confessions. The causes of false confessions have been explored before: mental acuity, extremely long interrogations, psychological manipulation and outright lies.
What I want to do in this (extremely lengthy) post is to highlight some of the important and relevant points of the paper, but let me assure you: nothing I write here will be an adequate substitute for you actually reading the paper. It is that good and that important.
The problem with confessions using our current models starts at the beginning: with police interrogation. As opposed to the UK, which uses a “fact-finding” model of interviewing suspects, US police departments for the most part use the “confession” model. The goal of most interrogations in the US is to confirm the suspicion of the interrogator by obtaining a confession. These “trained” interviewers rely essentially on hunches, which are based on flawed beliefs of body language:
Compounding the problem of these questionable police interrogation techniques is the apparent contradiction in US courts’ treatment of confessions in the criminal justice system: on one hand, courts recognize the awesome power of a confession and yet on the other seem indifferent to the voluminous research that tends to show that most techniques are coercive and unreliable. Originally governed by the corpus delicti rule, confessions are now viewed through the lens of the “trustworthiness” rule, after Opper v. United States (for a CT discussion see State v. Hafford). This rule is intended to permit the admission of only those confessions that can be independently corroborated. However, in practice, the rule doesn’t provide the benefits it seeks to:
In practice, however, the rule has not worked to screen out false confessions. Because investigators sometimes suggest and incorporate crime details into a suspect’s confession, whether deliberately or inadvertently, many false confessions appear highly credible to the secondhand observer. Without an electronic recording of the entire interrogation process, courts are thus left to decide a swearing contest between the suspect and the detective over the source of the details contained within the confession. Moreover, the quantum of corroboration in most jurisdictions that apply the trustworthiness doctrine is very low, allowing many unreliable confessions to go before the jury (Leo et al., 2006).
In addition, while courts have taken a hard line stance condemning physically abusive tactics during interrogations, their rulings in the area of psychologically abusive tactics can be best seen as condoning the methods. The psychologically abusive tactics can be briefly categorized as: maximization and minimization, false-evidence ploy and other forms of deception (most notably not objected to in Frazier v. Cupp).
When dealing with a case that involves confessions, it is important to know the different types of false confessions and how they are induced. This paper classifies them into three types (drawing on an earlier taxonomy by Kassin): voluntary, coerced-compliant, and coerced-internalized.
Voluntary false confessions
This is where the subject intentionally confesses to a crime he did not commit. The reasons are varied: notoriety, a breakdown in reality monitoring and most frequently to protect the real perpetrator.
Compliant false confessions
These are the types of false confessions one most frequently associates with this concept. Think of it as acquiescing to the color of authority. This is the kind of false confession that also poses the greatest problem for both defense attorneys and jurors. The prevalent thinking is that one would never confess to a crime they did not commit, no matter how persuasive the interrogator and thus if there is a confession, it must be true. Yet the psychology of the human mind stands at odds with this assumption.
Demonstrating the form of influence observed in classic studies of social influence (e.g., Asch, 1956; Milgram, 1974), this type of confession is an act of mere public compliance by a suspect who knows that he or she is innocent but bows to social pressure, often coming to believe that the short-term benefits of confession relative to denial outweigh the long-term costs. Based on a review of a number of cases, Gudjonsson (2003) identified some very specific incentives for this type of compliance—such as being allowed to sleep, eat, make a phone call, go home, or, in the case of drug addicts, feed a drug habit. The desire to bring the interview to an end and avoid additional confinement may be particularly pressing for people who are young, desperate, socially dependent, or phobic of being locked up in a police station. The pages of legal history are filled with stories of compliant false confessions.
Internalized false confessions
This is third type, where not only does the suspect confess, but also starts to believe that he or she has actually committed the crime in question.
So what causes people to falsely confess? As I mentioned above, it seems incongruous to you and me that a person who knows that he is innocent would nevertheless confess to a crime. The answer begins with basic human psychology: we are highly responsive to reinforcement and subject to the laws of conditioning and of course our behavior is influenced by our perceptions of short-term rather than long-term consequences.
A voluminous body of research has shown that people make choices that they think will maximize their well-being given the constraints they face, making the best of the situation they are in—what Herrnstein has called the ‘‘matching law’’ (Herrnstein, Rachlin, & Laibson, 1997). With respect to a suspect’s response to interrogation, studies on the discounting of rewards and costs show that people tend to be impulsive in their orientation, preferring outcomes that are immediate rather than delayed, with delayed outcomes depreciating over time in their subjective value (Rachlin, 2000).
In addition to the intrinsic factors of human psychology that lead to false confessions, one must also be on the lookout for the external circumstances that can result in these confessions. Kassin breaks them down into two parts, each with subparts: the situational risk factors and the dispositional risk factors.
Situational risk factors include interrogation time, false evidence and minimization. Interrogation time, obviously, is the length of time that a suspect is interrogated. Some fun facts: the average interrogation lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours. Interestingly in a 2004 study of 125 proven false confessions,
in cases in which interrogation time was recorded, that 34% lasted 6– 12 hours, that 39% lasted 12–24 hours, and that the mean was 16.3 hours.
When you get into those kinds of numbers, it’s easy to see why one should heed the red flags. Sleep deprivation can lead people to do – and say – almost anything.
False evidence
Once the interrogation has begun, the interrogator will try to convey to the suspect that resistance is futile. Basic psychology tells us that once people see an outcome as inevitable, cognitive and motivational forces conspire to lead people to accept, comply with and even endorse the outcome. Over the years, across a range of subdisciplines, basic research has revealed that misinformation renders people vulnerable to manipulation.
The forensic literature on confessions reinforces and extends this classic point, indicating that presentations of false evidence can lead people to confess to crimes they did not commit
…
That this tactic appears in proven false confession cases makes sense. In self-report studies, actual suspects state that the reason they confessed is that they perceived themselves to be trapped by the weight of evidence (Gudjonsson & Sigurdsson, 1999; Moston, Stephenson, & Williamson, 1992).
Here’s an example via a study conducted by Kassin:
In one study, Kassin and Kiechel (1996) accused college students typing on a keyboard of causing the computer to crash by pressing a key they were instructed to avoid. Despite their innocence and initial denials, subjects were asked to sign a confession. In some sessions but not others, a confederate said she witnessed the subject hit the forbidden key. This false evidence nearly doubled the number of students who signed a written confession, from 48 to 94%.
The most famous real-life example of such a confession is that of Marty Tankleff.
Minimization
The final situational risk factor is one we’ve all seen during interrogations: the officer convinces the suspect that confessing is in his best interest. That he is the suspect’s friend and that he can help him if he just confesses; that the judge and prosecutor will understand why he committed the crime, etc. The ultimately exonerated defendants in the Central Park jogger rape case reported feeling that they would be allowed to go home if they just confessed to the crime. Two core psychological phenomena underlie this factor: us being susceptible to reinforcement and and our eschewing long-term consequences in favor of short-term benefits.
Taken together, basic research showing that people are highly influenced by perceived reinforcements and that people process the pragmatic implications of a communication suggests the possibility that suspects infer leniency in treatment from minimizing remarks that depict the crime as spontaneous, accidental, pressured by others, or otherwise excusable—even in the absence of an explicit promise.
Dispositional risk factors are those that are defendant specific, such as the age and maturity level, the mental and cognitive abilities of a particular defendant and whether the defendant suffers from any psychological disorders. You can easily imagine how any of these (or all) would play a significant role in inducing false confessions.
Interestingly, this paper notes another new and perhaps surprising risk factor: innocence. Yes, it does seem counter intuitive, but apparently recent studies have shown that innocence is a factor that can lead people to falsely confess. This is the “I did nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide” problem which leads innocent people to waive the rights and speak with police, subjecting themselves to the coercive interrogation techniques.
The[...] findings suggest that people have a naive faith in the power of innocence to set them free. This phenomenology was evident in the classic case of Peter Reilly, an 18-year-old who falsely confessed to the murder of his mother. When asked years later why he did not invoke his Miranda rights, Reilly said, ‘‘My state of mind was that I hadn’t done anything wrong and I felt that only a criminal really needed an attorney, and this was all going to come out in the wash’’ (Connery, 1996, p. 93).
The consequences of false confessions are pretty obvious, starting with police inaction. Once the police obtain a confession from someone they already strongly believe to the be the culprit, they close the investigation, don’t follow up on other leads and ignore exculpatory evidence even if the confession is internally inconsistent, contradicted by external evidence, or the product of coercive interrogation. This, the studies seem to show, spill over onto prosecutors as well, who refuse to accept the idea of false confessions.
But there’s another consequence that is even more troubling for you and I. And that is the effect that a confession has on people’s perception of the remainder of the evidence even when told that the confession was coercively obtained and false! The results of studies in this area are extremely frightening and must be given a lot of though going forward:
In a second study, Hasel and Kassin (2009) staged a theft and took photographic identification decisions from a large number of eyewitnesses who were present. One week later, individual witnesses were told that the person they had identified denied guilt, or that he confessed, or that a specific other lineup member confessed. Influenced by this information, many witnesses went on to change their identification decisions, selecting the confessor with confidence, when given the opportunity to do so.
Mock jury studies show essentially the same results. The fact of a confession may be the single most powerful piece of evidence introduced in a trial to begin with. We learn that people (jurors) may not even fully discount the confession if told that it was coerced (going back to the “why would anyone confess if they didn’t do it, so there must be some reliability or some morsel of truth in it” problem).
For example, Kassin and Sukel (1997) presented mock jurors with one of three versions of a murder trial transcript. In a low-pressure version, the defendant was said to have confessed to police immediately upon questioning. In a high-pressure version, participants read that the suspect was in pain and interrogated aggressively by a detective who waved his gun in a menacing manner. A control version contained no confession in evidence. Presented with the high-pressure confession, participants appeared to respond in the legally prescribed manner. They judged the statement to be involuntary and said it did not influence their decisions. Yet when it came to the all-important verdict measure, this confession significantly increased the conviction rate. This increase occurred even in a condition in which subjects were specifically admonished to disregard confessions they found to be coerced.
There are several reasons for this – three, primarily:
- that people still have a hard time believing that even coercive techniques result in false confessions because they are more likely to take behavior at face value than to account for situational factors;
- that people are terrible at deception detection: both cops and laypeople exhibit accuracy rates that range between 42 and 64% – no better than chance.
- that confessions often include content cues presumed to be associated with truthfulness.
As Kassin concludes: Uninformed, however, this spectator mistakes illusion for reality, not realizing that the taped confession is scripted by the police theory of the case, rehearsed during hours of unrecorded questioning, directed by the questioner, and ultimately enacted on paper, tape, or camera by the suspect.
So what is the solution? How do we prevent false confessions from occurring, from being entered into evidence and from jurors continuing to be deceived by them? The single most important reform is videotaping of all custodial interrogations (which I’ve argued for before). Videotaping not only permits an entirely accurate record of everything to be maintained, it permits the jury to see how the confession was obtained, not just the content of the confession itself. It also deters interrogators from using the most blatant and obvious methods of coercion.
While initially meeting with resistance, the police departments whose jurisdictions have adopted videotaping are now strongly in support of it:
Among the collateral benefits they often cited were that recording permitted detectives to focus on the suspect rather than take copious notes, increased accountability, provided an instant replay of the suspect’s statement that sometimes revealed incriminating comments that were initially overlooked, reduced the amount of time detectives spent in court defending their interrogation practices, and increased public trust in law enforcement.
In addition to the videotaping of interrogations, Kassin proposes several others reforms in the method of interrogations: limiting the time of such interrogations, a ban on fabricated evidence but not false assertions (as a compromise), moving from a “confession” model to a “fact finding” model of interviewing suspects and eliminating the use of legal consequence minimization in interrogations.
But the bulwark against false confessions remains the recording of interrogations. While most states do not require the videotaping (only 2 do), several others have lately indicated that such videotaping would be a good idea. In addition to Alaska (Stephan v. State, 1985) and Minnesota (State v. Scales, 1994), seven additional jurisdictions—Illinois, Maine, New Mexico, New Jersey, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and the District of Columbia— have joined in requiring recordings of custodial interrogations in some circumstances (Robertson, 2007; Sullivan, 2004). In several other states, supreme courts have stopped short of requiring recording but either have issued strongly worded opinions endorsing recording—e.g., New Hampshire (State v. Barnett, 2002) and Iowa (State v. Hajtic, 2007)—or, in the case of Massachusetts, held that where law enforcement officers have no excuse for the failure to record interrogation, defendants are entitled to a strongly worded instruction admonishing jurors to treat unrecorded confessions with caution (Commonwealth v. DiGiambattista, 2004).
In Connecticut, however, there is no such requirement. Our Supreme Court recently heard oral argument in State v. Julian Lockhart, in which it is being asked to hold that videotaping interrogations is required under the State constitution. I’m not holding my breath.
In the meantime, however, I strongly urge you to read the entire paper by Kassin and every time you have a case that involves a confession, look closely for the presence of these risk factors. I might even go so far as to say that one should make it a practice to consult with an expert in cases involving confessions.
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