Forensic Victimology 2nd Edition Chapter Ten: False Confessions

False Confessions A false confession is an involuntary statement of guilt made under duress, or as the result of coercion. False confessions are far from rare. Those most at risk for a false confession share one characteristic: they are naive to police procedure. This can be due to chronological age, mental age or life experience.

False Confessions Anyone can be induced to give a false confession under the right circumstances. One of the most obvious ways to document, if not prevent, a false confession is to videotape all suspect interrogations in their entirety.

Confession Law Confessions are expected to be free of “compulsion or inducement”. The use in a state criminal trial of a defendant’s confession obtained by coercion is forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment. Brown v. Mississippi (1936) held that convicted resulting solely from confessions obtained through “brutality and violence” violated due process. However, psychological coercion was not deemed unconstitutional. The legal onus was on the defendant to be able to provide the confession was extracted through violence.

Confession Law In 1966 the Miranda Warning was introduced. This required police to advise a subject in police custody that they had a right to an attorney and that they did not have to answer questions and, further, that they had the right not to incriminate themselves.

Types of False Confessions Voluntary false confession A confession to a crime given by an individual who either knows they did not commit the crime, but nonetheless has made a decision to confess, or through no pressure from police has come to believe they committed the crime they are confessing to. Coerced-Compliant confession: A confession to a crime given by an individual who knows he or she is innocent, but due to conditions of the interrogation, says what they believe is necessary to placate the interrogator and end the situation.

Types of False Confessions Coerced-Internalized confession: A confession to a crime given by an individual who comes to actually believe they may have committed the crime.

Interviewing and Interrogation Many styles of questioning are either directly from, or based to a significant degree, on the Reid technique, a nine-step technique of interviewing and interrogation that is outlined in the fifth edition of Criminal Interrogations and Confessions (Inbau, etal, 2013). The authors of the Reid Technique purport to present a system of interrogations that would minimize false confessions, when it is designed only to get confessions. This chapter identifies several issues with this technique.