Melissa Calusinski was a normal girl living in a town outside Chicago with her parents, Paul and Cheryl. Melissa had no criminal background, she was known as a kind and caring girl who always put everyone above herself. When she was offered to work with her sister Crystal at a nearby childcare center, she instantly knew that working with children was her passion and that this is what she was meant to do (Moriarty, 2016). Ever since the age of 22, she has worked as a teacher’s assistant at that facility. While working her shift on the 14th of January, Melissa noticed that one of the children, Benjamin Kingan (known as Ben), was ill after laying him down on the floor to crawl around. Ben stopped breathing while under Melissa’s care and CPR was performed to try and save him. He ended up …show more content…
This is considered a maximization technique, it is used by officers and interrogators as a scare tactic to scare suspects into confessing or to just make them uncomfortable. In Melissa's case, it worked like a charm. The more she would deny having anything to do with the death of Ben, the more they would jump down her throat, ultimately leading to what I believe was a false confession. There is a high possibility that the inappropriateness of the police interrogation was what led to a false confession from Melissa. After being interrogated for 14 hours straight, there had to be a breaking point. In the video, it shows a portion of the interrogation where they essentially put words into Melissa’s mouth. Not once did she say this is what I’ve done and here is how I’ve done it. Instead, it was the officers constructing a story that fit the situation, saying that she had thrown him onto the floor, which ultimately led to his death (Moriarty, 2016). After countless attempts at denial, Melissa gave the interrogators what they wanted to hear, a