``In criminal law, confession evidence is a prosecutor’s most potent weapon’’ (Kassin, 1997)—“the ‘queen of proofs’ in the law” (Brooks, 2000). Regardless of when in the legal process they occur, statements of confession often provide the most incriminating form of evidence and have been shown to significantly increase the rate of conviction. Legal scholars even argue that a defendant’s confession may be the sole piece of evidence considered during a trial and often guides jurors’ perception of the case (McCormick, 1972). The admission of a false confession can be the deciding point between a suspect’s freedom and their death sentence. To this end, research and analysis of the false confessions-filled Norfolk Four case reveals the drastic and controversial measures that the prosecuting team will take to provoke a confession, be it true or false. In order to incriminate Danial Williams, Joseph Dick, Eric Wilson, and Derek Tice with the rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko, Detectives Maureen Evans and Robert Ford conducted long, grueling interrogation sessions using many provocative and manipulative tactics. Throughout this process, Ford and Evans coerced the suspects into renegotiating their perception of the crime until an entirely new reality was created. This new reality evolved as the police elicited additional confessionary evidence to account for each new piece of physical evidence from the crime scene. Eventually, in an iterative process that had police editing their theories of the crime and then forcing the suspects to claim this new reality as their own, the reconciled reality of the crime became one that was consistent with both the criminal evidence and the suspects’ new perception. An analysis of empirical m... ... middle of paper ... ...ng Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Print. Elsen, Sheldon, and Arthur Rosett. “Protections for the Suspect under Miranda v. Arizona.” Columbia Law Review 67.4 (1967): 645-670. Web. 10 January 2014. Frontline: The Confessions. Dir. Ofra Bikel. PBS Video, 2010. Film. Kassin, Saul M. (1997). “The psychology of confession evidence.” American Psychologist 52 (1997): 221-233. Web. 8 January 2014. Kassin, Saul, and Lawrence Wrightsman (Eds.). The Psychology of Evidence and Trial Procedure. Chapter 3. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1985. Print. McCann, Joseph. “A Conceptual Framework for Identifying Various Types of Confessions.” Behavioral Sciences and the Law 16 (1998): 441-453. Web. 8 January 2014. McCormick, Charles T. Handbook of the law of evidence. 2nd ed. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1972. Print.
Ewing, C., & McCann, J. (2006). Minds on trial: Great cases in law and psychology. NY: Oxford University. pp. 129-139. Retrieved from http://undergrad.floridatechonline.com/Courses/PSY3100/Critical_Reading_Ewing_McCann.pdf
...igations today has a huge impact on false confessions. The Reid Technique is being criticized in the media because of its guilt-presumptive, aggressive, and psychologically manipulative nature. It is based on a series of assumptions that lack scientific support, and by using it they are creating hostile and coercive environment for the interrogation. The fact that they try to pass these confessions off as voluntary should also be an issue against using them since we know they are usually coerced. There are two alternatives to the Reid technique being used to interview suspects. These do not use coercion and manipulation to get confessions. The first is the PEACE Model, which is an interview technique that is more ethical, and the other technique is Cognitive interviewing which is used by police as a memory technique used to enhance the retrieval of their memory.
Depending on what study is read, the incidence of false confession is less than 35 per year, up to 600 per year. That is a significant variance in range, but no matter how it is evaluated or what numbers are calculated, the fact remains that false confessions are a reality. Why would an innocent person confess to a crime that she did not commit? Are personal factors, such as age, education, and mental state, the primary reason for a suspect to confess? Are law enforcement officers and their interrogation techniques to blame for eliciting false confessions? Regardless of the stimuli that lead to false confessions, society and the justice system need to find a solution to prevent the subsequent aftermath.
Law And Human Behavior, 35(6), 452-465. doi:10.1007/s10979-010-9257-x. Persistent link to this record : http://search.ebscohost.com.unh-proxy01.newhaven.edu:2048/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pdh&AN=2011-19356-003&site=ehost-live&scope=site Newring, K. B., & O'Donohue, W. (2008). False confessions and influenced witnesses. Applied Psychology in Criminal Justice, 4(1), 81-107. Persistent link to this record.
Walsh, James, and Dan Browning. "Presumed Guilty Until Proved Innocent." Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN). 23 Jul 2000: A1+. SIRS Issues Researcher.
Dwyer, Jim, Peter Neufeld, and Barry Scheck. "False Confessions, Race." Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make It Right. New York: New American Library, 2003. Print.
The evidence offered during the trials should fully reflect the circumstances in which they were confessed. The aim of any interrogation is to ensure that a fair environment for the acquisition of the evidence is provided so that the defendants are aware of the possible consequences of the confessions they make before the investigating personnel. The case has offered insights into the legal practices and the criminal justice system with the stakeholders agreeing that there should be no deliberate creation of the environments that allow blatant errors which lead convictions (Kamisar, 2012). A system that withholds information on warnings to the defendants is defective and hence should be entertained in the modern legal
As already mentioned, this paper’s goal is to provide a guideline for investigators to reduce false confessions. Although different approaches as to why people decide to give false confessions have been considered, they are just a few out of a range of reasons that could influence a person’s decision on pleading guilty. I only discussed those related to methods of interrogation and biases. However, there are others that are also important because they deal with corruption, economic compensation, and social pressure. Indisputably, there is a lot of literature that can provide more information about this conflictive issue. Additionally, an interesting topic for further research would be to investigate if besides social factors there are some biological elements that could lead people to give false confessions.
Roesch, R., & Rogers, B. (2011). The cambridge handbook of forensic psychology. Canadian Psychology, 52(3), 242-242-243.
The idea of multiple truths can be seen often throughout society. The concept can also be broken down into four subcategories - factual or forensic truths, personal and narrative truths, social or dialogic truths, and healing and restorative truths - as discussed in Dr. Robert Kraft’s Violent Accounts: Understanding the Psychology of Perpetrators through South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These different types of multiple truths can be seen often between perpetrators and victims, especially throughout court trials. Although these subdivisions of multiple truths aid in the retrieval of information, it is also common if they contradict one another, as seen in parallax truth. These contradictions rely heavily on the relation of
The phrase “innocent until proven guilty” is popular among law enforcement and government employees but is not always upheld, as various errors, such as misclassification, are a major cause of false confessions. Misclassified
The intent of this paper is to highlight some of the forensic psychology topics learned in psychology 255 and consider the role these topics played in this trial. There seems to be another red flag in regards to Jay’s police interview: why didn’t Jay have a lawyer present during questioning? The answer is that Jay waived his rights (Koenig, 2014).
False confessions are a widespread and troubling issue occurring in the United States today. DNA testing has exonerated about 300 people in the United States and yet not a lot has changed (Innocence Project, n.d). Police often use interrogation procedures that include the usage of suggestibility, maximization, minimization and fabricated evidence with intentions to implicate guilty suspects. However, frequently innocent people along with people who are more susceptible to those procedures such as adolescents, the mentally ill, and people with specific personality traits often waive their Miranda rights and comply by providing a confession even if the confession is not true. In order to decrease the rate of false confessions, police
When an investigator is conducted an interrogation, they will use every tactic necessary to get the suspect to tell the truth. Also, when there is an interrogation the investigator is not confident that there are insufficient evidence and the suspect’s guilt is not one hundred percent certain, so the interrogator may fabricate the truth or even lie to the suspect to get them to confess (Hall, 2015). The investigators have to use tactics that will deceive the suspect although it is not right to do so because if deception is not used the suspect will not voluntarily say that, they committed the crime. if a suspect commits a crime and writes a statement that was not true we as law enforcement officers we would charge the suspect with falsifying
There are two types of false confessions, voluntary false confessions and involuntary false confessions. In a voluntary false confession, a person claims to be responsible for a crime they know they did not commit without any coercion or interference. With this type of false confession, mental health comes into play. These people feel a need for attention or punishment that can only be explained psychologically. In some cases of voluntary false confessions, those who wish to protect the true guilty party confess in the hopes of saving that person at the risk of themselves. Voluntary false confessions are arguably not as prominent as coerced false confessions, but both need to be minimized in order to better our justice system.