Michael Crowe Confessions: A Case Study

Forensic psychology focuses on legal matters such as mental state examinations of criminal defendants, child custody/family law, violence risk assessment, civil law, social science research, mediation/dispute resolution, etc…But in this case, we will be focusing on the matter of “false confessions”. This is seen mainly in interrogations between the interrogator and a suspect. It is when a suspect confesses to a crime and maybe even believes they committed the crime, even though they have not. A confession would be defined as an admission of guilt, whereas a false confession is the admission of guilt by an innocent. It is a serious matter since it can incarcerate completely innocent people and ruin their lives, while leaving the real criminal,

D. in psych, made books on psych, and is professor in psych). He did a lot of research on the Michael Crowe case to prove the theory of false confessions and even created a taxonomy of false confessions along with Lawrence Wrightsman. This consists of three types of false confessions; voluntary, compliant and internalized. The voluntary is mostly seen in cases where people are either looking for fame, a pathological need for attention or self-punishment, feelings of guilt or delusions, the perception of tangible gain, or the desire to protect someone else. For example, if someone very famous gets murdered, there may be many false confessions from people who would like the attention/are in need of it. As for compliant, a false confession is more likely to occur because the suspect would like to escape from a stressful situation, avoid punishment, or gain a promised or implied reward. For example, if the moral seriousness of the crime is minimized and the suspect is promised freedom after a confession, then someone may confess just to get out of the situation. The confession is then usually not questioned at all in the court, leaving the innocent incarcerated. Finally with an internalized false confession, interrogators use tactics to cause the vulnerable to falsely confess by putting much pressure and stress on them. This is the type of false confession seen with Michael Crowe. Now that these false confessions have been brought to light, there is an innocence project organization which helps prevent wrongful convictions by informing people and starting actions against harsh interrogation tactics. So far, there are a little over 20 states in America that record interrogations and hopefully, many more are to come. In Canada, the Supreme Court makes it clear that, “…it may seem counterintuitive that people would confess to a crime that they did not