There are many reasons for an innocent to confess to a crime that she or he hasn 't commit. The most frequent ones are fear of abuse, coercion, ignorance of the law or even fatigue after a long interrogation. Apart from the mentally ill, there is another group that unfortunately is very easy to be manipulated into confessing for something they didn 't do, juveniles. Young children or adolescents are very vulnerable population as they cannot yet understand or analyze efficiently the situation they are in. That is why there are cases where the police officer would take advantage of this fact and through the power of intimidation, violence, and fear have manage to obtain false confessions from underage suspects.
One of these instances was the case of Florida vs Brenton Leonard Buttler. The were many aspects that lead to the wrongful persecution of the fifteen-year-old Brenton for the murder of Mrs. Mary Ann Stephens during an armed robbery on May 2000 (citation needed). The most severe of all was the tremendous lack of professional and diligent investigation work by the police detectives. Which in turn led to the extortion of a false confession that made it even harder for justice to be served.
When young Brenton was brought in for an interview, he was put in a sound resistant lock room
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Indeed, for people who are not familiar with modern psychological techniques of interrogation might be absurd that someone would confess to an offense he or she didn 't commit. In a study conducted by Leo and Liu, 264 students were selected as potential jurors and were first asked to rate 18 different interrogation techniques. The participants had to rate according to their own perception how coercive each technique was, how likely it was to elicit a false confession and how likely to elicit a true confession. Later on, they were also asked to evaluate confessions in association with other types of evidence like eyewitness testimony, DNA evidence, and a suspect 's bad character