In law, a confession is a statement in an admission of guilt accompanied by a narrative account of the crime. Typically induced during police interrogations, confession evidence is common within the criminal justice system, is persuasive, and is highly incriminating in court—even if it was wrongfully obtained or coerced and later recanted. However, confessions are not infallible. Over the years, many innocent people have been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned after confessing to crimes that they did not commit. In 2017, the Innocence Project estimated that approximately 25% of all DNA exonerations involved a false confession.
Social, clinical, cognitive, and developmental psychologists, as well as other social scientists, have used a range of research methodologies in the empirical study of confessions. This research includes the study of individual cases, archival records, observations of police interrogations, surveys and other self-report methods, and laboratory and field experiments. Collectively, these studies have shed light on three sets of issues: the processes of police interrogation; personal and situational risk factors that can lead suspects to confess, even if they are innocent; and the consequences that follow from confessions, in terms of how the crimes are investigated and then adjudicated in court.
Inspired by the numerous wrongful convictions that have surfaced, psychologists are particularly interested in false confessions. Indeed, it is useful to distinguish between three types of false confessions: (1) voluntary, which arises when an innocent person volunteers a confession to police in the absence of any pressure (e.g., to protect someone else or to gain attention in a high-profile crime); (2) coerced-compliant, whereby an innocent person agrees to confess as an act of compliance in order to escape a stressful interrogation, avoid a threatened harm or punishment, or gain leniency or other perceived rewards; and (3) coerced-internalized, when an innocent person, during an interrogation in which police present false evidence of guilt, not only agrees to confess but also comes to believe that he or she committed the crime, a belief sometimes accompanied by false memories. This article focuses on false confessions, discussing the processes of police interrogation, the risk and consequences of false confessions, and policy and practices.
Processes of Police Interrogation
As embodied by the Reid technique—a U.S.-based psychological approach to interrogation that relies on confrontation, trickery, and deception— suspects are questioned in a two-step process. The first step consists of a preinterrogation interview designed to ascertain whether the suspect is telling the truth, and hence innocent, or whether the suspect is lying, and hence guilty. In this process, the detective asks a list of behavior-provoking questions that ostensibly evoke verbal and nonverbal behaviors in the suspect that are believed to betray deception (e.g., broken or avoided eye contact, overly rigid posture, slouching, fidgeting, and touching the face).
Although these verbal and nonverbal behaviors may seem to signal deception as a matter of common sense, research has consistently shown that these cues do not produce accurate deception detection. Overall, controlled studies show that people are not adept at distinguishing between truths and lies and are only about 54% accurate. Moreover, while training in the use of these verbal and nonverbal cues increases confidence, it does not increase accuracy. In the context of a preinterrogation interview, the result is that honest and innocent individuals are often misidentified for the second step of the process: interrogation.
Interrogation is an accusatory, guilt-presumptive process of questioning aimed at eliciting confessions from suspects whose denials were judged deceptive. During the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed physically coercive third-degree tactics that are likely to produce involuntary and possibly false confessions. As a result, police learned to use subtler, more psychologically oriented tactics. Although different approaches have evolved, all have three features in common. First, the suspect is physically isolated, questioned in a small, bare, windowless room. Second, police confront the suspect with accusations of guilt and presentations of incriminating evidence in an effort to communicate that denial is futile. As part of this confrontation, detectives in the United States are permitted by law to present false evidence (e.g., DNA, a fingerprint, hair sample, eyewitness identification, failed polygraph)—even if no such evidence exists. Third, police express sympathy and understanding and minimize the crime by offering the suspect moral justification and face-saving excuses. They may suggest, for example, that the crime was accidental, provoked, pressured by others, or otherwise attributable to external factors. By implying leniency in punishment, minimization makes it easier for a suspect to confess.
The Risk of False Confessions
When it comes to false confessions, it is clear that some individuals are more vulnerable to influence than others. Developmental psychology research shows that children and adolescents are particularly prone to make decisions that gratify immediate goals, often to the neglect of the harmful longer term consequences (e.g., agreeing to confess to a crime that they did not commit in order to escape a stressful interrogation) especially while under stress. Hence, it is not surprising that juveniles are disproportionately represented in the population of known false confessors. Also overrepresented are adults with intellectual impairments and/or certain types of mental illness who may not comprehend their rights, or grasp the consequences of confession, or who may be prone to social influences on compliance and internalization.
Although some individuals are at greater risk than others, no one is immune to the pressures of police interrogation—especially when tactics are excessively used. For example, one situational factor that can put innocent suspects at risk is a lengthy period of custody and interrogation. Observational studies show that most interrogations last between 30 min and 2 hr. Yet analyses of proven false confessions show that the interrogations in which they were elicited typically lasted for many hours.
A second interrogation factor that can lead innocent people to confess is the presentation of false evidence. As noted earlier, police in the United States are permitted to mislead suspects about the presence of incriminating evidence, even if there is no such evidence. The aim is to increase the anxiety associated with denial and create a state of despair. This tactic is found in numerous police-induced false confession cases. With strong roots in basic psychology, laboratory experiments using a variety of methods confirm what has been observed in actual cases: The presentation of false evidence significantly increases both the number of innocent people who agree to sign a confession and the number who come to internalize a belief in their own guilt. It is now clear that while this lawful technique can get guilty perpetrators to confess, it can also have devastating effects on those who are innocent.
A third interrogation factor seen in numerous proven false confession cases is minimization, the technique by which police minimize the seriousness of the crime. Minimization is designed to reduce the anxiety associated with confession by suggesting to the suspect that his actions were morally justifiable, the result of an accident, or someone else’s fault. Controlled experiments show that minimizing remarks lead people to infer a promise of leniency in sentencing, even when no such promise is explicitly made. These findings help to explain why many innocent people, once exonerated, claim they had confessed expecting to go home—or back to school, as in the case of 16-year-old Brendan Dassey, whose police-induced confession was seen in the 2015 documentary film Making a Murderer. Dassey was interrogated about a murder that the police suspected his uncle of committing. After hours of interrogation involving minimization, Dassey confessed to participating in the crime. Despite a lack of evidence against him, Dassey is living out a life sentence on the basis of his confession.
Consequences of Confession
Legal scholars have long known that confession is a powerful form of evidence in the criminal justice system. If a recanted confession is deemed voluntary by a judge at a pretrial suppression hearing, it is admitted as evidence against the defendant. Mock jury studies show that confessions almost invariably produce convictions at trial even when jurors determine that the confession was coerced, even when there is no other substantial evidence, even when the confession was reported by a secondhand informant who was motivated to lie, and even, at times, when the confession is contradicted by exculpatory DNA tests.
The power of confessions is rooted in the commonsense notion that people would not admit to crimes they did not commit. This belief leads judges, juries, the media, and the public to inherently trust confession evidence. Often, this commonsense belief is well placed. It does not, however, provide an antidote in court to the problem of false confessions. Analyses of actual cases provide further explanation for why people uncritically accept false confessions. Specifically, research shows that a vast majority of proven false confessions contain not only an admission of guilt but accurate nonpublic details about the crime (e.g., the position of the victim’s body, what he or she was wearing, what the crime scene looked like). In cases in which the confessor was later proved innocent, these details— which helped to prove that the confessor had guilty knowledge—reveal a process of contamination by which police had wittingly or unwittingly introduced these details to the suspect through the processes of interviewing and interrogation.
It is important to note that confessions can not only influence judges and juries at trial, but they can also alter the course of an ongoing investigation before it ever reaches the courtroom. Drawing on basic psychological research on confirmation biases, studies have shown that once detectives, forensic or medical examiners, polygraph examiners, eyewitnesses, alibis, and others involved in an investigation form a strong hypothesis about the identity of the perpetrator, that hypothesis corrupts their perception of the evidence. In several studies, information that a suspect had confessed led witnesses to misidentify that confessor in a lineup or perceive his handwriting as a match to a note found at the crime scene. In one study, professional polygraph examiners who were told that the suspect had confessed were more likely as a result to report that the suspect’s polygraph chart indicated deception. Even latent fingerprint experts are influenced by strong contextual cues such as confession.
Matters of Policy and Practice
It is safe to assume that most confessions taken by police and those subsequently form the basis of guilty pleas and convictions at trial involve the actual perpetrators of crime. It is also clear, however, that some innocent people are misidentified for interrogation and also induced to confess. In these cases, society stands to lose twice: first, when innocents are wrongfully convicted for crimes that they did not commit; second, when the real perpetrators of those crimes remain free to victimize others.
The U.S criminal justice system provides a singular mechanism by which individuals accused of a crime can protect themselves from self-incrimination. In the landmark case of Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that statements made by a defendant during an interrogation are admissible in court only if the defendant had been apprised of his or her constitutional rights to silence and to counsel—and then voluntarily, knowingly, and intelligently waived those rights. Although Miranda was aimed at changing the dynamic of police interrogations, which the Court described as inherently coercive, its effectiveness is a matter of dispute. As previously noted, empirical studies have shown that certain segments of the population—most notably, young adolescents and adults who are intellectually impaired—do not fully comprehend their rights and how to implement them. Moreover, statistics show that most people tend to waive their rights—in part because police have become highly skilled at convincing suspects to do so and in part because people believe that invoking their rights will lead authorities to infer their guilt. To further complicate matters, research shows that innocence itself is a state of mind that leads innocent people to waive their rights because they have nothing to fear or hide. In short, there is reason to believe that Miranda warnings do not adequately protect the citizens who need it most— those accused of crimes they did not commit. Other safeguards, therefore, are needed.
Over the years, some researchers have advocated for measures to protect vulnerable suspect populations and limit the use of psychologically coercive interrogation practices. The most important proposal for reform, however, is to require the video recording of all suspect interviews and interrogations—the entire process, not just the final confession. This was the primary recommendation in a White Paper of the American Psychology-Law Society. Video recording both serves as a deterrent to excessive police tactics and preserves an objective and accurate record of what transpired during interrogation sessions that are often later in dispute. Aided by these video recordings, judges and experts can better determine the voluntariness and reliability of the resulting confession. Many states and jurisdictions have adopted this practice—with positive results.
References:
- Gudjonsson, G. H. (2003). The psychology of interrogations and confessions: A handbook. Chichester, UK: Wiley.
- Inbau, F. E., Reid, J. E., Buckley, J. P., & Jayne, B. C. (2013). Criminal interrogation and confessions (5th ed.). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
- Innocent Project. (2017). False confessions or admissions. Retrieved from https://www.innocenceproject.org/ causes/false-confessions-admissions/
- Kassin, S. M. (2005). On the psychology of confessions: Does innocence put innocents at risk? American Psychologist, 60, 215–228.
- Kassin, S. M. (2012). Why confessions trump innocence. American Psychologist, 67, 431–445. doi:10.1037/ a0028212
- Kassin, S. M., Drizin, S. A., Grisso, T., Gudjonsson, G. H., Leo, R. A., & Redlich, A. D. (2010). Police-induced confessions: Risk factors and recommendations. Law and Human Behavior, 34, 3–38. [Official White Paper of the American Psychology-Law Society]