The Effects Of Minimization On Confessions

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

There comes a time when a doctor, minister or politicians and an individual will tell a lie. It could be a white lie or big lie; most people almost generally resort to lying in certain situation. Often times a lawyer will lie in order to protect his client, or vice versa, a client will tell a lie in order to avoid being incarnated. There are many situations an individual will be placed in, and at some point in a person’s life they will need to tell a lie. Is it appropriate to lie? This is what Sissela Bok writes about in Lying: Moral choice in Public and Private Life. Bok acknowledges that despite numerous religious and moral statements against lying, people will still lie in certain situations. She will discuss and

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

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

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.

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.

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

Outcome – Guilty persons were more likely to confess than innocent persons and that the use of minimization and the offer of a deal increased the rate of both 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)

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.

Once introduced as evidence, a confession causes a negative chain reaction in the justice system and law enforcers and justice officials often include their biases in their judgment, which leads to justice miscarriage. The process of false confession starts with the law enforcement officials (Leo & Davis, 2011). According to Kassin, Meissner, and ReNorwick (2005), investigators have a high confidence in knowing a true confession but their accuracy is the same as that of the public. The investigators do not see deception but rather they infer

The Antic Egyptian civilization believed in the afterlife and they needed to prove innocence to the Gods. The ‘’The Negative Confessions’’ were created in order to gain a position in the afterlife. Consequently, the common theme of the confessions in the Book of Dead is that all confessions are a representation of the everyday morality.

Many protestants, not brought up in liturgical church settings, find themselves taken aback and confused when first reading the Nicene Creed. This is true especially pertaining to what the creed says about the church. Unfortunately, in many Baptist, Pentecostal, and non-denominational Churches, the Nicene Creed is unfamiliar or unknown to the majority of Church members. A common argument against the use of creeds is “why use a creed when we’ve got the bible?” While this may seem to be rooted in a very high view of scripture, Carl R. Trueman suggests that it is possibly “an unwitting capitulation to the spirit of the age.” In short, Trueman argues that the three assumptions of confessionalism, the past being important and of positive relevance today, language as being a stable transmission of truth throughout time, and the need for a body or institution capable of composing and enforcing creeds, are all countercultural in today’s world.

There is a direct correlation between false confessions and age, where juveniles were would be more keen to taking responsibility for an act he or she did not commit (Farmer, 2011). To prove this hypothesis, a laboratory experiment was conducted to show that suggestibility was an important factor in regards to false confession (Farmer, 2011). This experiment was created to convince participants in three different age groups, 12 and 13 year olds, 15 and 16 year olds, and young adults that they

In the court of law, a confession is both a white knight for the prosecution and a nail in the coffin for the defense. These confessions’ validity often go unquestioned, and, once their statement has been penned, the accused’s fate is usually sealed before they enter the courtroom. Confessions are often generated through the interrogation process, and recent research has shown that law enforcement officials have the ability to alter and even plant a memory in a subject’s mind through interrogative suggestibility, which is defined as ‘the extent to which, within a closed social interaction, people come to accept messages communicated during formal