False Confessions Case Study

“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).

In order to comprehend the contribution of psychology to areas of criminal investigation it is important to evaluate research into two of the following areas of criminal investigation: eye witness testimony and offender profiling as well as assess the implications of the findings in the area of criminal investigation. In addition, this essay, with reference to relevant psychological research, discuss how the characteristics of the defendant may influence jury behaviour as well as analyse two psychological influences on the decision making process of juries. In order to improve the efficiency of detection and successful prosecution of crime it is important to underline that in a previous administration, detection of serious crime was poor and eyewitness testimony appeared very unreliable, partly due to standard interview techniques yielding confusing results. It is therefore this essays primary focus is to provide the chief constable with a report explaining how psychologists might be able to improve this situation with a full evaluation of process and evidence.

During interrogation, police are allowed to make accusations, lie about or make up evidence, yell at the suspects or get in their faces. According to the law, police are allowed to use the tactic trickery or lying to receive a confession from the suspect. The assumption the police officers make is that no matter how many lies told, a person will not state they are guilty if they truly did not commit the crime. In the case shown in the video, Confession, the police told one of the men that he had failed a polygraph (lie detector) test, even though he had passed it. I believe this tactic is unjust. I admit, I tend to do this to people because I want to know if they are telling me the truth. However, when it comes to a person potentially being convicted and receiving the death penalty or time in jail, I believe the tactic that was used was not right. Joe Dick was interrogated for eight hours. He claimed that he was told every thirty seconds that he was lying and he was going to be sentenced to the death penalty. In Confession, Richard Leo made a valid point stating that people who are tortured will say anything to make the pain stop. Also, people who have the torture mechanism waved in their face will state that they are guilty to avoid being tortured. Joe had the death penalty waved in his face. He was given an ultimatum of the death penalty or tell the truth? In addition, the police officers repeated told Joe that he was lying and the lie detector proved this. What other

Determining a false confession proves difficult due to the multitude of dimensions involved. According to Kassin and Wrightsman’s (1985) survey of the literature, there are three main types of false confessions—voluntary, coerced-compliant, and coerced-internalized. Unlike coerced false confessions, voluntary false confessions arise as a result of someone willingly turning themselves into the police with an account of their crime (McCann, 1998). Voluntary false confessions can result from multiple motives, including an internalized need for punishment or to save someone else’s face. In contrast, coerced false confessions directly result from police interrogations. While coerced-compliant confessions are made to avoid interrogation, escape the stressful situation, or achieve some other reward, coerced-internalized confessions emerge when a suspects begins to

Is a man guilty until proven innocent or innocent until proven guilty? Many times during court procedures the idea of a man being innocent until proven guilty is thrown out the window. Most commonly, eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, and government misconduct have led to an unjust trial, automatically assuming the accused guilty. However the continued use of informants, and its inability to be curtailed, has led to a growing number of wrongful convictions. Even though judges attempt to keep trials fair and just to guarantee the accused’s rights, incentives continue to be given by prosecutors and police officers to elicit false testimonies from informants and put an innocent man behind bars.

In recent years, there have been multiple high-profile cases of people being exonerated, often by DNA testing, after giving a false confession to a crime they did not commit. People who often fall into this trap are juveniles or those with a diminished mental capacity (Redlich, 2009). DNA testing has helped many innocent people that gave false confessions be free again. This trend brings up the question of how were they able to give a false confession.

Of the 121 participants, three primary areas were measured, whether or not the participant found the defendant guilty or not, to what degree the participant found the defendant guilty on a 1 to 7 scale, and the severity of punishment the participant thought the defendant should receive with 5 choices. This was done by the use of four different surveys, a black discredited witness, a white discredited witness, a black witness, and a white witness. Descriptives were done on guilt rating (M = 4.55, SD = 1.539) and punishment rating (M = 2.43, SD = 1.255). Then the descriptives were broken down even more into four categories for each dependent variable in regards to the independent variables, credible witness guilt rating (M = 4.88) and

There is certainly constant controversy about the numerous amounts of conviction cases which involves false allegations and how black men play a significant role. “A Crime by Any Other Name” briefly mentions the concept of how bias and discriminatory our Justice System truly is. Something in particular that we see constantly especially in urban areas is the mistreatment of black men. Black men are blamed and punished for a crime they ultimately did not do for reasons which racist people think that a black man who is suspicious should be arrested or charged. As we all know, police enforcement typically focuses on street crime and low-income neighborhoods. Specifically today, Chicago is still facing numerous amounts of false conviction cases

The second stage of research consisted of three studies with different time length confessions. There were two purposes for this stage (1) explore the possibilities to prevent camera influence and (2) outline the issues of external validity such as the end judgment. Given several pieces of evidence, the participants focused on the video taken to determine if the offender is guilty or not guilty. Researchers revealed that the camera point of view will be the focus point regardless of the other evidence provided. Also highlighted in the second stage is the probability of a guilty verdict increasing based on the camera’s focus point; the likelihood of a guilty verdict will double when the camera focuses on the subject (Lassiter, 2001).

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.

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.

In 1989, five African and Hispanic-American boys, between the ages of 14 and 16, were “wilding” in New York City’s Central Park, unaware that the events of that evening would change their lives forever. That same evening a female jogger was found beaten, raped and left for dead. She had multiple fractures as well has her eye socket being crushed and having lost over three quarters of her blood. She survived the attack but was unable to recall any of the events of that evening. Within 48 hours of the attack the five African and Hispanic-American boys were arrested and charged with the crime based solely on the confessions obtained by the police. There was no physical evidence tying any of the boys to the crime. Four of the confessions were videotaped and were later used in court to incriminate the boys. The boys described the crime in gruesome detail and the role that each of them played in the crime. After the arrests, the boys all recanted their confessions, and said that the reason that they felt compelled to confess was because they were lead to believe that if they would confess they would be allowed to return home. Despite the lack of evidence and the fact that the boys recanted the confessions persuaded the police officers, the prosecutors of the case, the jurors, and the nation that the boys were guilty and led to their convictions and the boys were sentenced to prison. Thirteen years later a man named Matias Reyes came forward on his own volition and confessed to the

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)

Like the police investigation, there was a lack of forensic involvement in this case as well. Brenton Butler was solely charged based on the fact that, an eye witness, Mr. Stephens identified Brenton as the murderer. Many will declare this case to be racial discrimination and racial profiling, due to the fact that Brenton was a black male like the murderer. Brenton just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the forensic investigation, after finding Mrs. Stephens' stolen purse in a garbage container a mile away from the murder, they should have tested the purse for DNA and finger prints. If they had done this, they would have seen that Brenton Butler's finger prints were in fact not to be found on the purse, instead they would have those of another man and Butler would have been instantly proven innocent.

Over the years, history has shown that innocent people have provided false confessions and been convicted of crimes after being subjected to the use of the aforementioned interrogation techniques. As a result, interrogation methods are being questioned (Kassin et al., 2010). In the extraordinary 1932 case of Brown v. Mississippi, “three Black tenant farmers confessed to murder after they were brutally whipped with a steel-studded leather belt--beatings that would continue, the men were told, unless they confessed,” (Kassin, 1997, p. 225). The well-publicized case of the Central Park Five, a group of young men who were convicted and sentenced to extensive prison terms for the beating and rape of a woman New York City’s Central Park, is another example. Controversy arose when, years after the crime was committed and the men were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms, another man came forward and confessed to the crime, forcing the court to re-examine the original convictions. This investigation determined that the suspects were coerced into providing false confessions and they were subsequently released, as a result of People v. Wise (2002).