False Confession to Justice Miscarriage: Perspectives and the Truth
For a society that is greatly influenced by Crime Scene Investigation, Criminal Minds and Bones, a confession of the offender is seen as an ultimate checkmate of a case. A confession, especially the ones with detailed account and perfect representation of emotions (Leo, 2008), implies the guilt of the confessor, outweighs the evidences of innocence and stirs the case against the accused (Kassin & Wrightsman, 1985). However, not all confessions are true. The public, law enforcers and justice officials believe that they are open-minded about the possibility of false confession but in reality, everyone have biases that infers guilt to the suspect which often leads to wrongful conviction. According to Drizin and Leo (2004), false confession is the primary cause of law miscarriage (Drizin & Leo, 2004). False confessors lived many years in jail before being discharge while others remain imprisoned (Drizin & Leo, 2004).
Once introduced as evidence, a confession causes a negative chain of reaction in the justice system. The law enforcers and justice officials often include their biases in their judgment, which leads to justice miscarriage. The process of false confession starts with the law enforcement officials (Davis & Leo, 2011). According to Kassin, Meissner, and ReNorwick (2005), investigators have a high confidence in knowing a true confession but their accuracy is the same as that of the public. The
“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).
“The wall street Journal noted in Sept. 8, 2013 report, National Registry of Exonerations statistics suggest that young people in particular are more prone to admitting guilt for crimes they did not commit. Thirty-eight percent of exonerations for crimes allegedly committed by youth under 18 in the quarter century involved false confessions.” (John Wihbey and Margaret Weigel,2015,Para.3) False confession is the admission of being guilty for a crime that they did not commit. In the interrogation, Police officers may question witness or victims who may have information on a specific crime. The officers may lead a group of questions about the event or evidence of the crime scene. The suspects or victims may know information about it, however,
One of the ways in which the Norfolk Four and Guilford Four cases can be most discernibly connected is through the use of coercive interrogation techniques by the detectives involved in obtaining confessions. While all eight of these individuals have now been fully pardoned, the long painful process of trials, prison, and clemency petitions became necessary due to false confessions that wrongfully convicted these innocent individuals. False confessions can be divided into three subcategories, two of which are relevant in the Norfolk Four and Guilford Four cases. In both cases, there are examples of coerced-compliant as well as coerced-internalized confessions (Hart, Roesch, & Zapf, 2010). It
When questioning witnesses of a crime, detectives may choose a specific technique; one technique is the Reid Technique. The Reid Technique is a multi-step questioning method that pressures the witnesses or the accused to admit to the crime. It is used in North America. According to Professor Brent Snook, a psychologist at the Memorial University in Newfoundland, the Reid Technique is “Starsky and Hutch”, where two hot head detectives “beat up” their suspects to encourage them confess (http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/25/youre-guilty-now-confess-false-admissions-put-polices-favourite-interrogation-tactic-under-scrutiny/). This paper will examine the steps of the Reid Technique, as well as reveal substantial evidence that this technique should be banned. This technique has led to false confessions. Not only does this mean that someone has been punished that isn’t guilty, but it also means the real criminal has not been found and punished. The arguments against the use of this technique are the following:
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
Before the experiment was conducted previous research was studied to ensure consecutive results throughout their own trials. This research revealed that most of the sociological world has ignored the issue of exoneration and when the criminology section was reviewed, little interest was shown on the topic. The few studies found in the criminology section shared some of the same findings as later expressed in the article. Mainly that wrongful convictions are due mostly to faulty eyewitness’s testimony, perjury and if the person was convicted of a prior crime. However, no literature that focused on sociological variables including race,
Of the 121 participants, three primary areas were measured, whether or not the participant found the defendant guilty or not, to what degree the participant found the defendant guilty on a 1 to 7 scale, and the severity of punishment the participant thought the defendant should receive with 5 choices. This was done by the use of four different surveys, a black discredited witness, a white discredited witness, a black witness, and a white witness. Descriptives were done on guilt rating (M = 4.55, SD = 1.539) and punishment rating (M = 2.43, SD = 1.255). Then the descriptives were broken down even more into four categories for each dependent variable in regards to the independent variables, credible witness guilt rating (M = 4.88) and
Chapman’s article explains the truth behind coerced false confessions, which involves suspects admitting to a crime they did not commit. With true examples and specific explanations and descriptions, Chapman shows just how suspects feel their only option is a fabricated confession. Through interrogations, police can involve threats, manipulation, persuasion, and several other methods to make a person confess. Factors such as stress and fear can also cause suspects to confess. In some cases, innocent suspects even come to believe they are guilty due to incorrect interrogation methods. This article is not all about police forcing people to confess though, it also explains how police are put under a tremendous amount of pressure to get a confession out of someone, any person who will confess. Therefore, they do anything they can to get the confession they so
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.
The causes of wrongful convictions are easy to identify: irregularities and incompetence at the investigatory, pre-trial, trial and appellate stages of the criminal justice system. More particularly, Kaiser identifies the following contributory factors, among others: false accusations, misleading police investigative work, inept defense counsel, misperceptions by Crown prosecutors of their role, factual assumption of an accuser’s guilt by actors in the criminal justice system, community pressure for a conviction, inadequate identification evidence, perjury, false confessions, inadequate or misinterpreted forensic evidence, judicial bias, poor presentation of an appellate case, and difficulty in having fresh evidence admitted at the appellate stage. Each instance of determined wrongful conviction illustrates a different combination of failures in the criminal justice system that has
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.
Being accused of a crime is one thing, but being wrongfully convicted of the crime is another. In fact, according to a research done by a National Geographic journalist, Virginia Hughes, about 4.1 percent prisoners convicted were wrongfully imprisoned. The justice system in modern society has its own flaws that can impact the outcome of whether a defendant is guilty or not guilty. It is a reality that the legal system faces and that we draw our attention to details why it failed on some people. Wrongful conviction is the occurrence of an innocent defendant who goes to a trial and is found guilty due to different circumstances. The people of the jury and the people behind the investigation of a case can lead to such convictions. In
False convictions are an incontrovertible flaw of the legal system, and the focus of most legal psychologists is to find a way to lessen the number of innocent people who are falsely convicted of crimes. Murder on a Sunday Morning follows the trial of Brenton Butler, a young African American teenager accused of robbing and murdering a tourist, the sixty-five-year-old Mary Ann Stevens, outside a Ramada in Jacksonville, Florida. Although Butler was ultimately found innocent of the crime, from a legal psychology perspective many details of the case (investigator biases, factors that may have led to false or inaccurate eyewitness evidence, and interrogatory factors that may have led to Brenton Butler’s false confession), under different circumstances may have led to a false conviction.
Duhaime defined Wrongful Conviction as “A conviction of a person accused of a crime which, in the result of subsequent investigation, proves erroneous. Persons who are in fact innocent but who have been wrongly convicted by a jury or other court of law” (Duhaime, 2017). But even establishing an acceptable definition of “wrongful conviction” is difficult. Wrongful convictions are happening nationwide, however the more frequent it becomes makes it seem like it isn’t an accident anymore. In 2015, researchers found that 149 people were cleared for crimes they didn’t commit. So, we must ask ourselves what is the cause of wrongful convictions? In 2010, a young man by the name of Kalief Browder was wrongfully convicted of a crime he did not commit and in 2008, Adrian Thomas was convicted of killing his son by threatening him to confess or else they would arrest his wife. But where is the justice for these two men?
People know that false confessions are possible, however, most do not understand the severity. 66% of people said that if a person signed a confession, they were most likely guilty (Henkel, Coffman, & Dailey, 2008). Only 11% disagreed that a person might confess to a crime they did not commit. Furthermore, only 42% of participants said that the police might lie about the police having evidence. Henkel, Coffman, and Dailey report an overwhelming majority of the participants claimed that they would never confess during an interrogation.