False Confessions In The Criminal Justice System

False confessions have been a problem in the criminal justice system since the early years. When false confessions first started being discussed people found it hard to believe that someone would own up to a crime that they had nothing to do with. Since false confessions were considered new territory then nothing was really done to help those who did falsely confess. Many times, people did not believe that the confession was false, and even today that is a serious problem that many people face. People back in the day were not interested in helping those who falsely confessed, but over the years this has changed and “the issue of people spending time in prison after being wrongfully accused and convicted of crimes has become a strongly debated

34). The only problem with the Reid technique is that is does provoke false confessions and there are quiet a few issues that arise from a person falsely confessing. False confessions typically lead to false convictions which also causes problems in the United States’ criminal justice system. One of the issues of a false confession is that it is hard for the person to retract it and have people, like officers or jurors, believe them, especially if the confession had details of the crime in it. When officers are interrogating a suspect who continuously denies the crime, but the officers strongly believe they are guilty, then the interrogators start giving out details of the crime and asking the suspect why they did this, why they took them here, or used this weapon, and so on. Once the suspect is so distressed and cannot handle the interrogation anymore then the suspect confesses to the crime and uses the information that the officers fed to them in their confession, which makes the confession believable to other officers and even jurors. Research has shown that “confessions are powerful regardless of the pressure that was used to elicit them and regardless of whether they are consistent over time, accurate as descriptions of the crime, and retracted shortly after they are taken” (Kassin et al., 2010, p.

One of the most basic solutions would be to make sure “that custodial interviews and interrogations be videotaped in their entirety” (Kassin et al., 2010, p. 49). When the police know that they are being videotaped then they will be less inclined to use tactics that will force a confession out of someone; and the videotape will be able to be used in trial and show the jury how the confession came about if the suspect does confess and then retract their statement. Scholars also suggest that “the Reid technique should be replaced by a noncoercive technique such as the PEACE model used in the United Kingdom” (Gudjonsson & Pearse, 2011, p. 34). The United Kingdom started using the PEACE model in 1993 (Gudjonsson & Pearse, 2011, p.34) and it “was developed out of sound psychological principles- following valuable collaborative work between academics, psychologists, police practitioners, and lawyers- and was intended to take into account vulnerabilities of some interviewees, with the aim to minimize the risk of false confession” (Gudjonsson & Pearse, 2011, p. 34). The PEACE method would be a better tactic than the Reid technique because it discourages the use of manipulating the suspect and pressuring them into confessing and it focuses on figuring out what the truth is and if the suspect was involved in the crime