Examples Of False Confessions

“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).

Although lying seems unimportant, it can be much more powerful than one might think. Arthur Miller’s tragic play The Crucible recites the story of the Salem Witch trials of 1692, in which the false accusations of a few young girls resulted in over 20 casualties. Many different characters, including Parris, Abigail, and John Proctor, hide the truth to preserve their reputations. Despite their diverse social statuses and positions, they each have something to hide. They constantly omit or deny things in their testimonies to save their names.

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

An example would be during the Nazi’s reign in World War Two where the Jews were persecuted by Nazi Germany. Benevolent and intrepid neighbours would often choose to protect their Jewish friends through weaving elaborate webs of falsehood and truth. They had to live under the constant threat of death hanging over their heads, wondering if today was the day that the Gestapo would come banging on the door, carrying loaded guns at the ready. They must live the lies that they tell day and night; their truths buried deep underneath layers of deceit. Yet without these cozenage, more Jews would have been found and killed and the goal of Hitler to eradicate this race may have succeeded. Deception during times such as these are

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.

The Crucible is written by Arthur Miller. In the play The Crucible, there are a lot of themes shown throughout the play. The one theme that sticks out the most to me is lies and deceit. This play has a lot of scenes where there are lies being told and deceit towards others.

A lie is an inaccurate statement to convey a false impression. A person tells an average of at least 2 lies per day. A lie can cause happiness but can also cause multiple tragedies in many different lives. The person telling the lie is not the only one being affected, many other people can get involved and their lives will be changed forever. Arthur Miller's classic The Crucible is written upon all different types of lying, and how a single lie can cause tragedies to many people.

Consequences and stress are a common outcome of lies, yet people still commit them to deliberately hide the truth. “...Brad Blanton says you’re unnecessarily complicating your life.” Lies that are told often are intended to keep another’s feelings from being hurt, and in the end cause even more damage. Stress and other mental

Richard A. Leo, the author of “False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications” states, “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.” From this, we can see that in some instances, investigators have already made up their mind that someone is guilty, so they do anything to get their

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.

On very rare occasions false memories can be harmful to someone and the people around them. In some cases children can create a false memory that they were touched inappropriately because they misinterpret things. The child might remember being touched by a caretaker, but excludes the details that it was to change a diaper or to change clothes because they soiled them. These events could create legal cases and could ruin someone's life, all because of a false memory. Children are very susceptible to false memories because the can be influenced very easily by the people around them. This type of influence can affect someone because the child's testimony could very well be affected by the bias unknowingly planted in them. A false memory can affect an adult's life as well, an example of this could be rape or abuse that they believe occurred and because of it

Interrogators convince the suspect that they committed the crime, even though they didn’t. Interrogators accomplish this by first making the suspect question their innocence. Then, the interrogator explains why the suspect would’ve committed the crime, and how they could’ve forgotten they ever committed it. Often times, the suspect recants his confession once they leave the interrogation and have time to themselves to think it over (Leo, 2009). In these cases, interrogators are able to successfully convince the suspect that they committed a crime that they didn’t actually commit, but this belief usually only lasts for a short amount of time before the suspect takes back

False confessions have been a leading factor in destroying the lives of many innocent people. Since the advances of technology, victims of false confessions have been exonerated from the charges previously placed on them while others are still fighting for innocence or died a criminal. One technological advance that has exonerated many individuals is DNA testing. According to Randy James, DNA testing was discovered in 1985 and was first used in court to convict Tommie Lee Andrews (Time, 2009). Today many Americans are convicted because of false confessions that have not yet been overturned with new evidence (Kassin, 2014). Although DNA testing has led to freedom for many innocent Americans, there are still many innocent people who are locked

What are false confessions? According to Ayling (1984) there are two ways of defining false confessions, one is when a suspect is completely innocent of the crime they are said to have committed, the second is when a suspect is involved in a criminal act but overstates his or her part in the involvement of the crime during a police investigation (Gudjonsson, 2002). Another definition given by (Ofshe, 1989), defines false confessions to be a provoked response to a demand for a confession and is either intentionally made-up or is not based on actual knowledge of the facts that form its content. Confessions are a very important form of evidence in investigative psychology. This may be due to the fact that most people characterise a confession as an actual guilt whilst disregarding situational factors such as intimidation, pressure from the individual interrogating the suspect in question who may not be apparent to the observer (Gilbert & Malone, 1995). Criminal psychologists Theodor Reik, states that a belief of false statements originates from the unconscious compulsive need to confess (Israel, M. 2006).

Researchers have shown that the bluff techniques used by interrogators to induce guilty suspects to confess also increased the chances that innocent suspects will do the same in hopes that the evidence that the interrogator is bluffing about will prove their innocence. To test this, researchers conducted an experiment which led to two other on this matter. The first experiment was conducted to find answers to three things: how bluffing effects subjects’ internalization and willingness to make confessions that are untrue, does having a witness that also confirms the subjects’ innocent prevent the suspect from making a fake confession, and to make comparisons between two tactics, presenting fake evidence and bluffing.