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Cathy Woods Case

Decent Essays

1976 Michelle Mitchell was found murdered around the vicinity of the University of Nevada, Reno. Cathy Woods a schizophrenic had told a counselor at the psychiatric facility she was staying at that she remembered information about the stabbing of a woman in Reno. After telling the counselor this Cathy Woods was taken in for interrogation. During the interrogation Cathy Woods gave investigators details about the case that was public knowledge. Investigators were able to get a confession from her and she was sentenced to life in prison without parole. However, this was a false confession because Cathy Woods was mentally and intellectually impaired and to end the lengthy interrogation she confessed to the murder. Cathy Woods would spend the next …show more content…

The officers that interrogated Cathy Woods used the Reid Model which is a nine step model of interrogation that is used to extract false confessions from suspects (Bennel,Forth,Pozzulo). The Reid model is the most used form of interrogation in the United States but has problems because the way it’s used puts a lot of stress on the suspects to confess to a crime they may not even have committed. For example, having interrogations that are hours even days long and denying suspects food, water and even being able to use the bathroom will make people confess just to end the interrogation, which is what happened to Cathy Woods. Cathy Woods’s false confession falls into the Coerced-compliant category because she confessed to a crime she knew she didn’t commit, but did it anyway to end the interrogation. Cathy Woods also vulnerable to false confessions because of her mental illness. To avoid false confessions such as Cathy Woods there must be safety nets in place that would be able to capture these inadequate interrogations. For instance, Saul Kassin a distinguished Professor of Psychology suggests we record all interrogations and have it reviewed by a judge before a trial starts. This way our chances of catching a false confession goes up and we can avoid people who are innocent from serving harsh

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