A Comparison Of The Norfolk Four And Guilford Four Cases

Wakefield, H. & Underwager, R. (2014). Coerced or Non-voluntary Confessions: IPT Library Resources. Retrieved October 19, 2017, from

In the video “The Confessions” presented by Frontline, a murder of a women that was committed by one man, quickly resulted into a false gang murder-rape scene committed by eight men. The victim, Michelle Bosko, was seen to be raped and killed in her apartment in Norfolk, Virginia. From the video, it has been proven that seven out of the eight men that confessed were innocent, but somehow they all received an unequal punishment. Because the innocent men admitted to a murder that they didn’t commit out of fear, they were all sentenced to some time in prison. The head detective, Glenn Ford, intimidated the men so much that they either were convinced that they were at the crime scene or they told him every detail that he wanted to hear.

“It is difficult to prove a causal relationship between permissible investigative and interrogatory deception and testimonial deception.  Police freely admit to deceiving suspects and defendants.  They do not admit to perjury, much less to the rationalization of perjury.  There is evidence, however of the acceptability of perjury as a means to the end of conviction.  The evidence is limited and fragmentary and is certainly not dispositive” (Skolnick, 1982).

Many of today’s interrogation models being utilized in police investigations have an impact on false confessions. The model that has been in the public eye recently is the social psychological process model of interrogation known as the “The Reid Technique.” There are two alternatives used by the police today to replace the Reid Technique, one is the PEACE Model and the other is Cognitive Interviewing. These methods are not interrogation techniques like Reid but interview processes.

Wrongful convictions are common in the court-system. In fact, wrongful convictions are not the rare events that you see or hear on televisions shows, but are very common. They stem from some sort of systematic defect that lead to wrongful convictions such as, eyewitness misidentification testimony, unvalidated or improper forensic science, false confessions and incriminating statements, DNA lab errors, false confessions, and informants (2014). Bringing awareness to all these systematic defects, which result in wrongful, is important because it will better adjust the system to avoid making the same mistakes with future cases. However, false confession is not a systematic defect. It does not occur because files were misplaced or a lab technician put one too many drops. False confessions occur because of some of psychological attempt to protect oneself and their family. Thus, the courts responsibility should be to reduce these false confessions.

At Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a group of expert defense attorneys who represented an accused terrorist facing the death penalty quit the case due to the intrusive monitoring of their client. Their defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is allegedly responsible for the bombing of the US destroyer Cole back in 2000. The man who is now defending him is 35 year old Navy Lieutenant Alaric Piette, who quit his job as a SEAL to become a lawyer. However, the problem arises due to the fact that he graduated from Georgetown University in 2012, leaving him with only six years of experience, along with never having participated in a capital case such as this one. Because of this, many people, including himself, believe that Lieutenant Piette is not qualified to take on a case of this magnitude (Philipps,

Confessions have become one of the most valued pieces of evidence in the criminal justice system. What many people, including jurors, may not know is that the process to obtain a confession can vary greatly. Many confessions can be coerced by very abnormal and dangerous situations. A prime example of a suggestive interrogation with a false confession comes from the documentary titled Murder on a Sunday Morning. Alongside, the analysis of the confession given in this documentary will be the critical analysis of three separate academic articles with findings that could have better served the defendant of this case.

``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

To develop an experimental paradigm to study the influence of psychologically based interrogation techniques on true and false confessions.

Our criminal justice system has over time implemented and changed the means of sentencing and punishment for crimes. In the United States plea deals are accountable for 90% of criminal cases. A plea deal is an agreement between prosecutor and defendant in whom the defendant accepts a guilty plea to a charge and in return receives some type of concession from the prosecution. As we have moved forward in the judicial system and now have the ability to look back on previous cases, plea deals have become more controversial. The majority of awareness in this area has been used to look deeper into false confessions, grazing right over the fact that false confessions are a large part plea deals. A controversy arose when many refused to believe that situational factors during interrogations and dispositional factors inherent to the suspects could result in false confessions. (Redlich, 2010)

When questioning witnesses of a crime, detectives may choose a specific technique; one technique is the Reid Technique. The Reid Technique is a multi-step questioning method that pressures the witnesses or the accused to admit to the crime. It is used in North America. According to Professor Brent Snook, a psychologist at the Memorial University in Newfoundland, the Reid Technique is “Starsky and Hutch”, where two hot head detectives “beat up” their suspects to encourage them confess (http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/25/youre-guilty-now-confess-false-admissions-put-polices-favourite-interrogation-tactic-under-scrutiny/). This paper will examine the steps of the Reid Technique, as well as reveal substantial evidence that this technique should be banned. This technique has led to false confessions. Not only does this mean that someone has been punished that isn’t guilty, but it also means the real criminal has not been found and punished. The arguments against the use of this technique are the following:

Police interrogate suspects on a daily basis, but how can they tell if the confession is real? We have all heard, at one time or another of someone confessing to a crime they didn’t commit. Then your next thought is “I would never confess to something I didn’t do”. The only way you can be a 100% sure of that is if you have been through an interrogation before. This paper is going to define “confession” and tell how an innocent person will confesses to a crime they didn’t commit. This paper will also show the history of interrogations.

     There has been many inmates sentenced to death row that innocent. Since 1973, more than 99 people have been released from prison after being sentenced to death despite their innocence, The Social Psychology of Police Interrogation: The

What does it take to close a case? Investigators -- engulfed in a slew of incriminating evidence and having secured some extremely reliable witnesses is a substantial amount to put away a prime suspect. What can insure that a case is closed even more quickly is a confession from the suspect. This confession usually takes a certain amount of coercion, on the part of the interrogators, to achieve. Coercion is an interrogation technique that uses intimidation to get suspects to confess to crimes whether or not they are truly guilty of any crime. Some will argue that coercion is a brilliant method with which to incarcerate criminals with. Others will say that it is much more beneficial to conduct a full investigation instead of relying on a

Almost everyone who has seen a cop television show or movie has heard the saying “You have the right to remain silent”. In America, people are raised to believe that the justice system never fails, and that no matter what happens justice will always prevail, though for some people this safety net has failed them. Since the late 1980s six studies have documented 250 interrogation-induced false confessions. Police-induced false confessions are the result of multistep process and sequence of influence, persuasion, and compliance. Imagine that a solider of the U.S. military is brought in for questioning, kept locked up for sixteen hours in an interrogation room, constantly threatened with the death penalty if they did not confess to the crime, and the whole time left without representation. In 1997 this was the case for four individuals from Norfolk, Virginia held without representation and forced to give false confessions.