Causes Of False Confessions

The Cause and Effect of False Confessions:

The Importance of Retrieving Truthful Confessions in Police Interrogations

Beverly Monroe, Derek Tice, Earl Washington Jr.; these names may not mean anything to you, but to police investigators, these names are evidence of false confessions occurring in our society. False confessions occur more in police interviews and interrogations than the average person would assume. A false confession can be given to law enforcement officers after several different occurrences, all of which a law enforcement officer wants to try to keep from happening. Interviews and interrogations are meant to help police officers gain an understanding of the situation, or crime, that has been committed and the suspect’s direct

According to Richard A. Leo (2009), a false confession is “An admission plus a postadmission narrative of a crime that the confessor did not commit” (pg. 333). There are three different types of false confessions that come in a variety of categories. In a lecture on false confessions in class, Dr. Roth mentioned that “There are many different categories of false confessions, such as: Brain-washing, Desperation, Inquisition, Child Abuse, Mental Fragility, Inference, Fabrication, Opportunism, Pretense, Police Force, and Unrequited Innocence” (2018). There are different cases that fall under all of these categories of false confessions, and the lists grow on and on as the years go by. As of today’s date, there have currently been 2,180 exonerations in cases that primarily focused on false confessions as their main source of guilt. Those 2,180 exonerations equals to 18,750 years lost in the lives of these people. Studies done by Leo, as well as many other criminal justice researchers, find that there are three different types of false confessions. These three types are known as voluntary confessions, coerced-compliant confessions, and coerced-internalized (338). Voluntary confessions occur when a confession is given without police interrogation, while coerced-compliant confessions are given when one feels stressed,

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9f3f/d52ecc20cb9c988818403d66664278e97352.pdf

Innocence Project (2012). Earl Washington Jr. The National Registry of Exonerations. https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3721

Kassin, S. M. (2015). The Social Psychology of False Confessions. Social Issues and Policy

Review, 9(1), 22-51. doi:10.1111/sipr.12009

Larmour, S. R., Bergstrom, H., Gillen, C. T.A., Forth, A. E. (2015) Behind the Confessions:

Relating False Confession, Interrogative Compliance, Personality Traits, and Psychopathy. The Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, 30(2) 994-102. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11896-014-9144-3 Leo, Richard A. (2009). False Confessions: Causes, Consequences, and Implications. The

Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 37(3), 332-343. http://jaapl.org/content/jaapl/37/3/332.full.pdf Possley, Maurice and Shaffer, Michael (2012). Derek Tice. The National Registry of

Exonerations. http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3820

Roth, Kelly. (2018). False Confessions Power Point.