False Confessions In The Criminal Justice System

In this article, Richard Leo examines false confession cases, investigating the wonder of false confessions, the effect of confessional proof, and the reasons for false confessions. Police interrogations can be intimidating to people who are in desperate situations. Some people are bullied into making false confessions and end up getting convicted, even though they are innocent. If the Court convicts someone using testimonies and confessions, the defendant didn’t get the right to a fair trial.

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

During interrogation, police are allowed to make accusations, lie about or make up evidence, yell at the suspects or get in their faces. According to the law, police are allowed to use the tactic trickery or lying to receive a confession from the suspect. The assumption the police officers make is that no matter how many lies told, a person will not state they are guilty if they truly did not commit the crime. In the case shown in the video, Confession, the police told one of the men that he had failed a polygraph (lie detector) test, even though he had passed it. I believe this tactic is unjust. I admit, I tend to do this to people because I want to know if they are telling me the truth. However, when it comes to a person potentially being convicted and receiving the death penalty or time in jail, I believe the tactic that was used was not right. Joe Dick was interrogated for eight hours. He claimed that he was told every thirty seconds that he was lying and he was going to be sentenced to the death penalty. In Confession, Richard Leo made a valid point stating that people who are tortured will say anything to make the pain stop. Also, people who have the torture mechanism waved in their face will state that they are guilty to avoid being tortured. Joe had the death penalty waved in his face. He was given an ultimatum of the death penalty or tell the truth? In addition, the police officers repeated told Joe that he was lying and the lie detector proved this. What other

Cassell, Paul G. "Protecting The Innocent From False Confessions And Lost Confessions - And From Miranda." Journal Of Criminal Law & Criminology 88.2 (1998): 497-556. Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 Nov. 2014.

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

The first reason is that people trust confession is because of self-serving behavior and taking people at their face value (Kassin, 2005). The second reason is that detecting deception is a learned skill not a normal one that most people have. The third and final reason that people trust confession is that will being interrogated people can be coached what to say that aligns with the crime or they may overhear parts about the crime. Because of the amount of false confessions and the trust people put in believing them there needs to be some reform made in interrogation procedures. Three areas in particular need to be looked at and the first is the length of time for the interrogation. Many factors play a role in a person

False confessions and wrongful convictions have been around forever. In medieval times and long before, torture was used as a way to try to get information from people. It often worked/’ in

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.

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.

So she wanted to find indicators of false confessions, however this study is very difficult as she found out. She wanted to find out if the usage of nouns, verbs, and adjectives would have any indication of a false confession. She made all of her participants take the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS), to determine

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.

False confessions that fall under coerced-internalized correlate most with memory distrust (Gudjonsson et al., 2014). Memory distrust on some instances is internally caused, but is most commonly a result induced by police over the course of a lengthy and forcefully influential interrogation. These interrogations break down the suspect’s denial and opposition, using drawn out, cunning and repetitive interviewing that could potentially make the suspect distrust their memory and falsely confess to a crime they did not commit (Gudjonsson et al., 2014). It concerns me that police are so eager and set on a particular person being guilty, that they would rather force the potentially innocent person into falsely confessing instead of listening to their alibi and reconsidering a new suspect. This research is immensely important to both psychology and law because no man should be imprisoned for a crime he or she did not commit, and no man should be manipulated into confessing to a crime to escape a strenuous situation. It is also rather unsettling to know that some men or women who committed crimes, no matter the degree, are walking free because the law failed in catching the actual

A women might be more likely to falsely confess to a crime that they did not commit because of the pressure from being interrogated. In the interrogation process, the detectives and other interrogators can be very aggressive and pretty hostile at times. I feel as if people in general, but mainly women can become very sensitive to the point where they fall for anything. At this point when a women feels so broken, she say whatever the interrogator wants to hear. In this case, it is falsely committing to a crime that they did not commit.

False confessions is a major flaw in the criminal justice system that must be addressed through videotaping and audio recording with the help of outside viewers. There are a few cause to this problem and society as a whole can change them to solve the problem of false confessions. Throughout this paper, it will address the problem the cause and give a few solutions to fix this issue that is present.

In order to reduce false confessions, experts have encouraged investigators to limit the time of the interrogation process. Usually interrogations last for more than ten hours, which causes the suspect to become mentally exhausted, forcing them to sign a false confession. The other suggestion that experts give investigators is to maintain a competent adult in the room when interrogating a juvenile or an individual who has a mental disability. However, the most important and most beneficial tactic to implement would be to video record the interrogation process. This would give the judge a clear view of how the suspect was treated and will create more credibility to their initial confession. According to the Innocence Project (n.d), more than