Nobody believes they would ever confess to a crime they didn't commit. And that's an important starting point because to confess to a crime you didn't commit is to put yourself in jeopardy of incarceration. It's not something people do.
And so when somebody confesses to a crime, everybody, cops, prosecutors, judges, juries, Everybody believes that confession. The psychology underlying the study of false confessions is really two psychologies. Why does it happen? And when it happens, why does everybody believe it?
Everybody, I think, fundamentally understands that they have a breaking point. Whatever the story is, is if stress levels have built, if the suspect starts to think, and this again tends to happen over a period of time, that it's in my better interest to confess than to continue deny involvement. In that case what happens is an innocent person succumbs to the pressure and agrees to confess. Now that's an interesting phenomenon because it is a transient confession. It happens momentarily and as soon as the pressure of the moment is lifted, as soon as As soon as a lawyer comes into the situation, immediately there is a recantation.
The suspect recants the confession, I was under pressure, I felt coerced, I didn't do this. That's the hallmark of a compliant false confession. As an act of compliance, they agree to confess, but privately they knew they never did this and that was the end of that.
That I think people fundamentally understand. Things like sleep deprivation, threats made or implied, promises made or implied. can alter the mental calculation of a suspect under stress to make them think that it's their best interest to confess at this point. And the interrogation tactic in particular that puts them at risk for that to happen is lying about evidence.
In the United States, police are allowed to outright lie. They're allowed to say to a suspect, we had DNA found on the victim and we tested it and it's yours. Or we found hair within the victim's grasp.
We tested it. That was your hair. Or we found the victim's blood on your pillow.
Or that polygraph that you agreed to take, you failed it. Now, if you take somebody who's vulnerable to manipulation and their grasp on reality is starting to weaken and you outright lie about the evidence, you can shake in their view of reality. So when you look at confession evidence, you have to ask yourself what risk factors were present in the person that made him vulnerable, what interrogation tactics... were used that would make anybody vulnerable. And there's a good 100 plus years of psychology research showing that when you lie to people about reality, when you misrepresent reality, you can produce profound changes in people's visual perceptions, beliefs, autobiographical memories.
The problem is 95% of false confessions contain accurate details about the crime that were not in the public domain. When you have a conversation with somebody, when you interrogate somebody, as part of that process of exchange, you're not just eliciting information, you're communicating information. So if a suspect is broken down to the point where the suspect believes it's in his best interest to confess, he probably has received through the process of interrogation enough facts to make that confession credible.
I defy any prosecutor or judge or jury or appeals court to get past that statement. It's almost not possible. I've looked at confessions that have proved to be false before I knew they were false and I believed them and I'm a critic of confession evidence but I believe them and so that is essentially the problem of how you get people to recognize it. That begs now the question how do you solve this problem? How do you solve a problem both that the false confession happens and that people can't tell a false confession if they see one?
An interrogation needs to be recorded from start to finish. Whether you call it an interview or an interrogation, the entire process from start to finish. It will make police better at what they do. It will make suspects more likely to... It may not make guilty suspects more likely to confess, but I think it might make innocent suspects less likely to confess.
And then it will make better fact finders of prosecutors, judges, juries, and appeals courts.