False Confessions Case Study

One such case is, that of Engin Raghip of the so-called ‘Tottenham three’ will be discussed in the context of admissibility of psychological evidence in order to demonstrate how the judiciary has increasingly come to accept the psychological notion that most people, under certain circumstances, are susceptible to making false confessions. In order to better understand why people confess to crimes they have not committed, Kassin and Wrightman (1985) proposed a conceptual framework that divides false confessions in two main categories, voluntary or coerced. Voluntary false confessions are offered without any external pressure and coerced false confessions are elicited by the police.

According to the framework, voluntary false confessions result from one of the following: a morbid desire for notoriety, which is probably due to a personality disorder; inability to distinguish facts from fantasy, which is probably due to distorted thinking such as in schizophrenia; need for punishment, which is probably associated with depressive illness; hope

for leniency; or a desire to protect the real perpetrator (Kassin and Wrightsman, 1985; Gudjonsson, 1993).
Coerced false confessions are divided in two groups, compliant and internalized. Both are elicited by the police. As a result of coercive police interviewing or custodial setting, a coerced-compliant false confession occurs when a suspect gives up and falsely confesses in order to escape from a psychologically intimidating situation for some instrumental gain. The suspects might think they will be allowed to go home by confessing and the truth might come out eventually; they might be claustrophobic; they might have a drug addiction that needs feeding, or just want the interview to end (Gudjonsson, 1994).
A coerced-internalized false confession occurs when suspects start to believe (internalize) their guilt whilst being interviewed by the police, despite having no recollection of committing the crime. For example, the suspect might have been heavily intoxicated at the time of the offence and come to distrust his or her memory and start to believe the police accusation (Gudjonsson, 1993).
It has been pointed out (Gudjonsson, 2006) that there is some overlap between categories within the framework.

For example, a desire to protect the real perpetrator is not necessarily always voluntary – the false confessor might be pressured by other people to ‘take the blame’. Kassin (1998) suggested a modification of the model by adding the source of coercion. Whether internal, custodial or non-custodial. This typology categorizes different types of false confessions (voluntary, coerced-compliant and coerced-internalized) and distinguishes between the source of coercion (internal, custodial and non-custodial). Gudjonsson (2006) suggested replacing the word coerced with the word pressure and not to use it when there is no sign of pressure. For example, the confession of a man who walks into a police station and confesses to a high profile murder which he did not commit would be classified as voluntary and internally

motivated.
Although we can describe different psychologically distinct false confessions, it is difficult to evaluate the frequency with which they occur. Methodological issues make it difficult to establish how often they do happen because it is impossible to establish what proportions of confessions are false. The studies that have been conducted give us some idea of how common they are. In a study of more than 250 cases of wrongful conviction for murder and rape in America, where post-conviction DNA had established the innocence of the person, pointed out that 40 (16%) of them had confessed. In a comprehensive study using a different methodology, Sigurdsson and Gudjonsson (1996) demonstrated that the rate of false confessions appears to