Forensic Victimology 2nd Edition

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Forensic Victimology 2nd Edition

• Chapter Ten False Confessions

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False Confessions

• A false confession is an involuntary statement of
  guilt made under duress, or as the result of
  coercion.
• False confessions are far from rare.
• Those most at risk for a false confession share
  one characteristic they are naive to police
  procedure.
• This can be due to chronological age, mental age
  or life experience.

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False Confessions

• Anyone can be induced to give a false confession
  under the right circumstances.
• One of the most obvious ways to document, if not
  prevent, a false confession is to videotape all
  suspect interrogations in their entirety.

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Confession Law

• Confessions are expected to be free of
  compulsion or inducement.
• The use in a state criminal trial of a
  defendants confession obtained by coercion is
  forbidden by the Fourteenth Amendment. Brown v.
  Mississippi (1936) held that convicted resulting
  solely from confessions obtained through
  brutality and violence violated due process.
• However, psychological coercion was not deemed
  unconstitutional.
• The legal onus was on the defendant to be able to
  provide the confession was extracted through
  violence.

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Confession Law

• In 1966 the Miranda Warning was introduced.
• This required police to advise a subject in
  police custody that they had a right to an
  attorney and that they did not have to answer
  questions and, further, that they had the right
  not to incriminate themselves.

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Types of False Confessions

• Voluntary false confession
• A confession to a crime given by an individual
  who either knows they did not commit the crime,
  but nonetheless has made a decision to confess,
  or through no pressure from police has come to
  believe they committed the crime they are
  confessing to.
• Coerced-Compliant confession
• A confession to a crime given by an individual
  who knows he or she is innocent, but due to
  conditions of the interrogation, says what they
  believe is necessary to placate the interrogator
  and end the situation.

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Types of False Confessions

• Coerced-Internalized confession
• A confession to a crime given by an individual
  who comes to actually believe they may have
  committed the crime.

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Interviewing and Interrogation

• Many styles of questioning are either directly
  from, or based to a significant degree, on the
  Reid technique, a nine-step technique of
  interviewing and interrogation that is outlined
  in the fifth edition of Criminal Interrogations
  and Confessions (Inbau, etal, 2013).
• The authors of the Reid Technique purport to
  present a system of interrogations that would
  minimize false confessions, when it is designed
  only to get confessions.
• This chapter identifies several issues with this
  technique.