False Confessions to a Crime: The Central Park Jogger

The Reid Technique is a nine step process which majority of the nine steps were employed in the Dassey interrogation. The first step is the confrontation, where the suspect is accused of the crime. The goal here is for the interrogator to present real, or fabricated evidence in order to make the suspect uncomfortable.The police began by saying they reviewed what he had said on the Monday prior and that where they are seeing that Brendan is okay from what he's said. The also state that they already know the truth and that they can tell when he is lying. They restate several times through the interview that they know the truth and they have all the evidence to know what the truth is they just want to hear it from Brendan. Brendan does not say

“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).

To develop an experimental paradigm to study the influence of psychologically based interrogation techniques on true and false confessions.

The officers that interrogated Cathy Woods used the Reid Model which is a nine step model of interrogation that is used to extract false confessions from suspects (Bennel,Forth,Pozzulo). The Reid model is the most used form of interrogation in the United States but has problems because the way it’s used puts a lot of stress on the suspects to confess to a crime they may not even have committed. For example, having interrogations that are hours even days long and denying suspects food, water and even being able to use the bathroom will make people confess just to end the interrogation, which is what happened to Cathy Woods. Cathy Woods’s false confession falls into the Coerced-compliant category because she confessed to a crime she knew she didn’t commit, but did it anyway to end the interrogation. Cathy Woods also vulnerable to false confessions because of her mental illness. To avoid false confessions such as Cathy Woods there must be safety nets in place that would be able to capture these inadequate interrogations. For instance, Saul Kassin a distinguished Professor of Psychology suggests we record all interrogations and have it reviewed by a judge before a trial starts. This way our chances of catching a false confession goes up and we can avoid people who are innocent from serving harsh

In the US, police often use the Reid Technique during interrogations. This technique was designed to elicit confessions from suspects. However, this technique can also lead to false confessions. One such case was the case of Michael Crowe, who was accused of murdering his sister. Michael, who was 14 at the time, was questioned by investigators until he eventually confessed to the murder, which he did not commit.

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

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.

Many of today’s interrogation models being utilized in police investigations have an impact on false confessions. The model that has been in the public eye recently is the social psychological process model of interrogation known as the “The Reid Technique.” There are two alternatives used by the police today to replace the Reid Technique, one is the PEACE Model and the other is Cognitive Interviewing. These methods are not interrogation techniques like Reid but interview processes.

However, it is not always the case that a confession is the end of a case, as there is always the chance that it was in fact a false confession. This is not something people usually suspect, as was mentioned previously that people assume no reasonable person would admit to guilt if they were innocent. Often times the false confession comes about through coercion and the tactics of police attempting to obtain a confession no matter if it is accurate or not. There is a vast array of options for police in trying to obtain a confession from a party that they feel is guilty – believing that the prospect of an accurate confession outweighs the possibility of obtaining a false one. It is very common for an officer to simply lie to a suspect who

Information is the lifeblood of a criminal investigation. The ability of investigators to obtain useful and accurate information from eyewitnesses of crimes is crucial to effective law enforcement, yet full and accurate recall is difficult to achieve (Stewart, 1985). Such elicitation of complete and accurate recall from people is important in many aspects of life; specifically, eyewitness recall may determine whether a case is solved. Principle advocates of the cognitive interview (Fisher, Geiselman, Holland & MacKinnon,

So how can we find out if they have given a false confession is the real question. In Villar’s study he conducted about remorse in oral and handwritten false confessions gives us a hint on what is a true confession to what is a false confession. The Study states, “Although it is impossible to determine the true rate of false confessions, it is estimated that as many as 12% of individuals interrogated by police in the United States might have provided a false confession (Gudjonsson, Sigurdsson, Asgeirsdottir, & Sigfusdottir, 2007)” (Villar 255). Just the estimation of 12% would mean that a good amount of confessions would be false.

Perhaps the most advantageous aspect of a confession is the closure it gives to everyone involved in the case, especially the victims and their families. Having said that, I still believe that conducting a thorough investigation is the best way to ensure that the right person was held accountable for the crime committed. Investigators should not be dependent on confessions. It would be unjust if an innocent man were incarcerated for a crime he did not commit and the real culprit was able to walk free.

perpetrators so that they may be punished. The virtue of electronic recording of custodial interrogations, and its strength as a public policy, lies not only in its ability to help guard against false confessions, but also in its ability to develop the strongest evidence possible to help convict the guilty.” (The Justice Project. (n.d.)). Arguments in favor of police deceit:

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.

The main technique that police use when interrogating a suspect is the Reid Technique. “The Reid Technique involves three components – factual analysis, interviewing, and interrogation” (James Orlando).