Confessions: Voluntary, Reliable and False

To defense lawyers, the new research is eye opening. “In the past, if somebody confessed, that was the end,” said Peter J. Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project, an organization based in Manhattan. “You couldn’t imagine going forward.”

Not really an eye opener to defense lawyers, nor even an answer to the problem.  The reality of false confessions has long been recognized.  The problem isn’t knowing that it happens, but persuading a jury that any particular confession is false.  The New York Times does an admirable job explaining the phenomenon by reference to a study by Brandon Garrett.  The problem, unfortunately, will persist.

New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim that only the defendant could have committed the crime.

Professor Garrett said he was surprised by the complexity of the confessions he studied. “I expected, and think people intuitively think, that a false confession would look flimsy,” like someone saying simply, “I did it,” he said.

Instead, he said, “almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable,” rich in telling detail that almost inevitably had to come from the police. “I had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred,” he said, using a term in police circles for introducing facts into the interrogation process. “I didn’t expect to see that almost all of them had been contaminated.”

As Jeff Gamso says, it looks like Garrett hasn’t spent much time in the trenches.  Nothing to see here.  Nothing new.  Police may not be very good at many things, but manipulating people into confessing is something they’ve gotten down to an art form.  Garrett is shocked, SHOCKED!, that this happens.  He’s particularly shocked by the fact that cops feed their subject the background facts needed to flesh out a crime they never committed.  It’s not brain surgery

Garrett’s purpose is to reform the “insidious” practice of contaminated confessions.  In the abstract of his article, he states:

 This Article outlines a series of reforms that focus on the insidious problem of contamination, particularly videotaping interrogations in their entirety, but also reframing police procedures, trial practice, and judicial review. Unless criminal procedure is reoriented towards the reliability of the substance of confessions, contamination of facts may continue to go undetected, resulting in miscarriages of justice.

But the confessions come off as very reliable.  And they’re confessions.  So what if a detail is wrong.  People get confused.  People make mistakes.  But nobody confesses to a crime they didn’t commit.  Ask any juror and they’ll tell you, they would never confess to a crime they didn’t commit.  Never.

Yet, as the Times article makes clear, as DNA exonerations make clear, it happens.  It happens with surprising frequency. 

Videotaping interrogations may help.  But it most assuredly won’t be an ironclad guarantee that false confessions won’t happen.  The art form of interrogation will adjust to a camera, and cops will refine their technique to make sure that it plays well to a jury.  Short of the video capturing a suspect being beaten, the interrogation will have some of the  trappings of coercion, as most do, but also fall into that problematic area that people don’t confess to crimes they didn’t commit. 

In time, I suspect some brilliant law enforcement minds will come up with some new interrogation techniques that will take great advantage of the video, the medium of conclusive proof of guilt, even when the confession requires a bit of prodding.  And the fact that cops need to push people to confess, to manipulate them to “tell the truth,” to subtly coerce them to open up, is no surprise.  After all, no one expects criminals to just spill their guts for the asking.  What jury would be surprised to learn that the police yanked the perp’s chain a bit to get him to admit to his crime?  Isn’t that what cops need to do to get a confession?

The reason for cops doing this is twofold, that it’s their job to nail down the evidence to convict a perp, and there’s no better way to do so than to get the perp to confess.  And if the perp confesses, by the way, there’s no better evidence than a video of it.  The second influence is that cops don’t usually coerce confessions from people for no reason, but from the suspect they believe committed the crime. 

Once they decide who the criminal is, they set about the hard work of proving it, and they are comfortable with their efforts because they believe in what they are doing.  They don’t see it as a problem, but as getting the goods on the bad guy.  Of course, they aren’t always right about the bad guy, but that doesn’t alter their certainty.  They sleep well that night.

False confessions might appear to be a good thing for the cops up front, as they’ve not only “solved” another crime but nailed down the evidence on the perp, but they have their downside.   First, they result in the conviction of an innocent person.  Second, they leave a criminal on the street.  It’s really not in the interest of the cops, or the public, to convict the innocent, though it does solve the problems of pacifying the public when a heinous crime occurs and they need immediate resolution, as well as proving the competency of the police and reinforcing the image as brilliant crime-fighters and protectors of the public.

None of this, however, is news.  None of this does much to help a jury to distinguish between an honest confession and a false confession.  And none of this helps the defense when confronted with a defendant’s confession in convincing a jury that false confessions happen.  Trying a false confession case is akin to being a kamikaze.  The defendant confessed.  That’s a chasm few can leap. 

Still, anything that helps to bring people to the realization that false confessions happen is better than nothing. 

8 thoughts on “Confessions: Voluntary, Reliable and False

  1. Paul

    Those who obstruct justice by faciliting false confessions need to face criminal penalties. Police who do this (and DAs who go along) free the real felons to commit new crimes while potentially murdering the false defendant. The failure to prosecute misenforcement of law is the ultimate in “softness on crime” and undermines our justice system.

  2. Lee

    “The problem isn’t knowing that it happens, but persuading a jury that any particular confession is false.”

    This problem doesn’t stop with confessions. Junk science, police brutality, mistaken ID. I think more and more members of the public are coming around to accepting that these happen and with real frequency, but not in THIS case.

  3. Rob Mckinney

    It was an interesting piece, but the Stanford Law Review article was more in depth. I would suggest reading more on the Reid Method of interrogation to discover how the cops get the confessions.

  4. Ben

    Is pleading guilty to a crime that was not committed with no evidence to prove any crime was committed. Just a simple she said/he said case, be considered the same as a false confession case? The fear of being found guilty and facing 10-15 years is State Prison was in itself enough to plead quilty to a lesser charge. It’s been over ten years now but I cannot continue to live my life past that day. Is there help for someone in this posission? What can be done for these types of casses?

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