Excerpts:
psychological research conclusively undermines is the widespread notion that innocent people never plead guilty.
That assumption has informed centuries of law enforcement, and decades of movie plots and murder-mystery novels. The whole point in many investigations is to get the bad guy to confess. Laboratory experiments and dozens of case studies, however, show it is not hard to get innocent people to confess.
"Innocence is a state of mind that puts innocent people at risk," said psychologist Saul Kassin at Williams College, who has studied the phenomenon. Innocent people, Kassin found, are more likely to waive their constitutional rights to remain silent and to have a lawyer present. Innocent people also assume that innocent people do not get convicted, or that objective evidence will exonerate them. Nearly a quarter of all convictions overturned in recent years based on DNA and other evidence have involved false confessions.
While false confessions often involve the mentally disturbed -- John Mark Karr last year confessed to being involved in the murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, despite convincing evidence that showed he was innocent -- Kassin and Gary Wells, a psychologist at Iowa State University, say the problem is not limited to the mentally ill.
In one experiment, Kassin asked volunteers to perform a challenging task on a computer but warned them not to touch the "Alt" key or risk damaging a computer. Volunteers were told that the computer had been damaged and were asked whether they hit the banned key. In reality, the volunteer did nothing wrong. Most volunteers denied it, but as the initial task they were given was made difficult, they became less sure because they were distracted. When researchers had confederates lie about having seen the volunteers hit the Alt key, the number of people who confessed went up to 100 percent. Every stage of increased pressure led ever larger numbers of volunteers to believe they were really guilty.
And:
Interrogation experts such as Joseph Buckley, president of John E. Reid and Associates, a Chicago-based firm that has trained tens of thousands of interrogators, and Pete Blair, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Texas State University, say false confessions are rare. Blair said laboratory experiments don't say much about the real world -- where confessing to crimes can involve serious penalties -- and that Craig's case had all the hallmarks of a guilty politician trying to save his skin.
"Everybody who confesses tries to retract," added Buckley. "When you talk to your lawyer, he says, 'we should challenge that so we will say you were coerced or abused.' That is very, very common."
Comment: A general rule it to regard everything that you are told by another person as "something you are told by another person". Yet too often we regard what we are told as fact. Even if you are being told what the informant believes to be true, people are fallible. Moreover, people don't always tell you what they believe to be true.
I would tend to believe a scientist (such as Kassin quoted above) whose incentives are to fairly state conclusions based on evidence rather than a businessman selling interrogation services (such as Reid quoted above) whose incentives are to make profits for his company. But both reports should be treated as input data rather than statements of truth.
I would note that professional interrogators are in the unfortunate situation that they can not always check the results of their interrogation with other, more reliable evidence. It is pretty natural for them to believe that the confessions that they produce are valuable. Indeed, I think that confessions are a valuable source of evidence, but one easily overvalued by those whose jobs are to obtain confessions when possible. JAD
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