1) If you didn’t do it, why confess?
There are a few reasons. Sometimes, according to experts’ reported opinions, people confess to protect someone. Sometimes, they’re trying to punish themselves for past wrongdoing. Sometimes they crave fame. But sometimes, police questioning tactics are to blame.
Reports show that the average time of police questioning is one to two hours. The average time of questioning that yields a false conviction? Sixteen and a half.
http://www.totalcriminaldefense.com/news/articles/criminal-evidence/false-confession/
2)
False confessions taint many cases, Temple law forum told
Joseph A. Slobodzian, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Posted: Friday, November 9, 2012, 9:12 PM
"It's incredibly counterintuitive how common false confessions are. It boggles my mind," said Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.
Of 300 people freed through DNA evidence uncovered by the Innocence Project, Neufeld said, 25 percent had been convicted in part by their own false confessions.
"Twenty-five percent false confessions is a much higher number than I or anyone who is in the criminal justice system would ever imagine," Neufeld added.
Neufeld was one of several criminologists, psychologists, and lawyers who spoke Friday about the phenomenon of false confessions at a symposium for lawyers and legal professionals at Temple University's law school, sponsored by the Temple Law Review and the Temple-based Pennsylvania Innocence Project.
The experts said defense lawyers should be aware that even detailed confessions can be false.
Many people, especially those with cognitive or emotional-development problems, are especially vulnerable to being convinced that it is in their best interest to confess to a crime they did not commit.
The experts urged the legal community to push for videotaping police questioning of suspects - from start to finish - as a way of safeguarding criminal suspects who are vulnerable to confessing.
…
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/b..._taint_many_cases__Temple_law_forum_told.html
3)
Confessing to Crime, but Innocent
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: September 13, 2010
Eddie Lowery lost 10 years of his life for a crime he did not commit. …
But more than 40 others have given confessions since 1976 that DNA evidence later showed were false, according to records compiled by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Experts have long known that some kinds of people — including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led — are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There are also people like Mr. Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance by persistent interrogators.
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.
An article by Professor Garrett draws on trial transcripts, recorded confessions and other background materials to show how incriminating facts got into those confessions — by police introducing important facts about the case, whether intentionally or unintentionally, during the interrogation.
…
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.”
Of the exonerated defendants in the Garrett study, 26 — more than half — were “mentally disabled,” under 18 at the time or both. Most were subjected to lengthy, high-pressure interrogations, and none had a lawyer present. Thirteen of them were taken to the crime scene.
Jim Trainum, a former policeman who now advises police departments on training officers to avoid false confessions, explained that few of them intend to contaminate an interrogation or convict the innocent.
“You become so fixated on ‘This is the right person, this is the guilty person’ that you tend to ignore everything else,” he said. The problem with false confessions, he said, is “the wrong person is still out there, and he’s able to reoffend.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/us/14confess.html?pagewanted=2&hp
