False Witness Confessions Research Paper

“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 this article, Richard Leo examines false confession cases, investigating the wonder of false confessions, the effect of confessional proof, and the reasons for false confessions. Police interrogations can be intimidating to people who are in desperate situations. Some people are bullied into making false confessions and end up getting convicted, even though they are innocent. If the Court convicts someone using testimonies and confessions, the defendant didn’t get the right to a fair trial.

While people find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to a crime he or she did not commit, there are people who end up making a false confession. In the Central Park Five case, the police managed to get the young boys to admit to the crime with the false promise that they would be allowed to go home if they confessed (Kassin, 2002). For Martin Tankleff, while in an

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

Many people admitted things they have not even done or accused their neighbors and friends in order to exonerate themselves and to save their lives.

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.

Before the experiment was conducted previous research was studied to ensure consecutive results throughout their own trials. This research revealed that most of the sociological world has ignored the issue of exoneration and when the criminology section was reviewed, little interest was shown on the topic. The few studies found in the criminology section shared some of the same findings as later expressed in the article. Mainly that wrongful convictions are due mostly to faulty eyewitness’s testimony, perjury and if the person was convicted of a prior crime. However, no literature that focused on sociological variables including race,

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.

Studying collage students, or any other narrowed group, does not represent the majority of individuals that could be in the situation of a false confession. The consequences of a confession of a crime can lead to an investigation to close, leaving the "perpetrator" with higher charges. These real life consequences can also discredit any real evidence on a case, letting the real perpetrator off. With this, if an individual decides to retract their false confession, a jury is more likely to convict them because they are seen as untrustworthy (Kassin et al., 2010). These consequences are unlikely to be taken into consideration with experimental research on false

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.

Would you ever admit to committing a crime that you didn’t actually commit? Of course not, says common sense. Naturally, it is difficult to understand why anyone would confess to a crime they didn’t commit. However, false confessions are one the leading causes of wrongful convictions.1 As the Supreme Court of Canada noted in R v. Oickle, innocent people are induced to make false confessions more frequently than those unacquainted with the phenomenon might expect.2

Interrogators convince the suspect that they committed the crime, even though they didn’t. Interrogators accomplish this by first making the suspect question their innocence. Then, the interrogator explains why the suspect would’ve committed the crime, and how they could’ve forgotten they ever committed it. Often times, the suspect recants his confession once they leave the interrogation and have time to themselves to think it over (Leo, 2009). In these cases, interrogators are able to successfully convince the suspect that they committed a crime that they didn’t actually commit, but this belief usually only lasts for a short amount of time before the suspect takes back

Well, in nearly 25 years since post-conviction DNA evidence has been used to demonstrate criminal innocence, even in cases that landed defendants on death row or in prison for life. Eyewitness misidentification, forensic science errors, false confessions, government misconduct and bad lawyering are many of the reasons wrongful convictions occur. Eyewitness being the most common. Sometimes it can be done by error and other times it is actually done intentionally. In seventy-seven percent of the DNA exonerations, eyewitness misidentification led to wrongful convictions (The Innocence Project- How wrongful conviction happen).

False confessions have been a leading factor in destroying the lives of many innocent people. Since the advances of technology, victims of false confessions have been exonerated from the charges previously placed on them while others are still fighting for innocence or died a criminal. One technological advance that has exonerated many individuals is DNA testing. According to Randy James, DNA testing was discovered in 1985 and was first used in court to convict Tommie Lee Andrews (Time, 2009). Today many Americans are convicted because of false confessions that have not yet been overturned with new evidence (Kassin, 2014). Although DNA testing has led to freedom for many innocent Americans, there are still many innocent people who are locked

Have you heard the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” or “the truth will set you free”? After extensive research I have found that these statements play a big part in the effects of making a false confession. However, once you make a false confession, it is extremely difficult to win a case against you or to appeal a conviction without concrete evidence, such as DNA. According to The Innocence Project, which helps overturn guilty convictions through the use of DNA there has been 349 cases overturned since 1992. There are many reasons why people confess to crimes they did not commit, but there are three main types of confessions to give. Cornell University identifies the three types of false confessions as voluntary, compliant,