Why Do Innocent People Confess?
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Once the police had badgered a rough murder confession from Felix, they taped it. Yet the confession lacked a critical detail — one that officers neglected to feed to him. Felix learned it three days later in court when he was handed the charge sheet and saw the date of the crime. He stared at the document and realized that he had the perfect alibi: On the day that Antonio Ramirez was gunned down, Felix had been locked up in a juvenile detention facility for violating probation in a case of theft.
The murder charge was dropped, of course, and Mr. Foxall was greatly relieved. “I would have hated to have had to try the case,” he said. “It would have been very scary. Juries don’t want to believe that somebody will confess to a crime he didn’t commit.” Judges don’t want to believe this either. In fact, according to Mr. Foxall, the juvenile commissioner in Felix’s case said, “Well, I don’t understand — why would he confess?”
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Officers are taught to use all the tricks and lies that courts permit within the scope of the Fifth Amendment’s shield against self-incrimination. John E. Reid & Associates, which has trained thousands of interrogators, suggests that a suspect be induced to waive his constitutional rights to silence and counsel by giving him the famous Miranda warning “casually” and not immediately after arrest, when he is “defensive and guarded” and “more likely to invoke his rights.” When a skilled questioner splices it nonchalantly into conversation, the warning’s empowering message of choice can be lost on a suspect. Many false confessors have been routinely Mirandized in this perfunctory manner.
To get people talking, the Reid training also recommends questions that imply leniency without making explicit promises, and that reduce moral responsibility by blaming peer pressure: “Was this your idea or did your buddies talk you into it?” Interrogators are advised to pretend to have evidence but not to fabricate it. A suspect can be shown a card bearing a latent fingerprint and be told: “This is your fingerprint. We found it inside that stolen car.” That’s been allowed by courts if the police officer puts his or her own print on the card but not if the officer fakes it with the suspect’s print. Admissions produced by these tactics may be true or untrue.
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In experiments and in interrogation rooms, adults who are told convincing fictions have become susceptible to memories of things that never happened. Rejecting their own recollections through what psychologists call “memory distrust syndrome,” they are tricked by phony evidence into accepting their own fabrications of guilt — an “internalized false confession.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/why-do-innocent-people-confess.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
This is a long and scary article. This is one reason you NEVER talk to the police without a lawyer.
The information in this article and the findings about eyewitness testimony and its accuracy needs to
be more widely known. Too many things are written in stone.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Frontline: The Confessions
2010NR83 minutes
In this edition of the investigative PBS series, show producer Ofra Bikel looks into the case of four U.S. Navy seamen living in the hellish aftermath of falsely confessing to the 1997 rape and murder of a Virginia woman. Through interviews with the convicted men, Bikel exposes the high-pressure interrogation methods used by police to extract confessions despite the absence of evidence connecting the sailors to the crime.
Cast:
Will Lyman
Director:
Ofra Bikel
Genres:
Documentaries, Military Documentaries
This movie is:
Violent
Availability:
Streaming