False Confession - Causes

Causes

False confessions can be categorized into three general types, as outlined by Saul M. Kassin in an article for Current Directions in Psychological Science:

• Voluntary false confessions are those that are given freely, without police prompting. Sometimes they may be sacrificial, to divert attention from the actual person who committed the crime. For instance, a parent might confess to save their child from jail. In some cases, people have falsely confessed to having committed notorious crimes simply for the attention that they receive from such a confession. Approximately 60 people are reported to have confessed to the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the "Black Dahlia."
• Compliant false confessions are given to escape a stressful situation, avoid punishment, or gain a promised or implied reward. Interrogation techniques such as the Reid technique try to suggest to the suspect that he will experience a feeling of moral appeasement if he chooses to confess. Material rewards like coffee or the cessation of the interrogation are also used to the same effect. People may also confess to a crime they did not commit as a form of plea bargaining to avoid a harsher sentence. People who are easily coerced score high on the Gudjonsson suggestibility scale.
• Internalized false confessions are those in which the person genuinely believes that they have committed the crime, as a result of highly suggestive interrogation techniques.

According to the Innocence Project, approximately 25% of convicted criminals ultimately exonerated had, in fact, confessed to the crime. In Canada, courts of law have recognized as valid confessions that were acquired, even though the interrogators lied by suggesting they had substantial evidence against a given suspect when in fact they did not, something known as the "bluff" technique. The high pressure generated may push innocent individuals to produce a confession.

A 2010 study from CUNY's John Jay College of Criminal Justice used laboratory experiments that test how the bluff technique correlates with confessions gained from innocent parties. Subjects were instructed to complete a task on a computer, then were falsely accused of a transgression such as crashing the computer or collaborating with a colleague to improve their task performance. Bluff evidence, false evidence, and unreliable witnesses were used to test their effect. In the first test, 60% of the subjects confessed to the experimenter to pressing a computer key they had been instructed to avoid when, in fact, they had not; an additional 10% admitted to pressing the key to a study observer. A second group that tested subject reactions to charges of cheating produced nearly identical percentages of false confessions. The authors note, "innocent people who stand accused believe that their innocence will become apparent to others ... which leads them to waive their Miranda right to silence and to an attorney."

False confessions greatly undermine the due process rights of the individual who has confessed. As Justice Brennan noted in his dissent in Colorado v. Connelly, 49 U.S. 157 (1986), "Our distrust for reliance on confessions is due, in part, to their decisive impact upon the adversarial process. Triers of fact accord confessions such heavy weight in their determinations that "the introduction of a confession makes the other aspects of a trial in court superfluous, and the real trial, for all practical purposes, occurs when the confession is obtained." No other class of evidence is so profoundly prejudicial. 'Thus the decision to confess before trial amounts in effect to a waiver of the right to require the state at trial to meet its heavy burden of proof.'

Coerced false confessions have been used for directly political purposes. The systematic use of coerced confessions of political prisoners to extract public recantations for propaganda purposes has occurred in the twentieth (and twenty first) century in Stalin's Soviet Union, Maoist China, and most recently the Islamic Republic of Iran.