Confessions: Evidentiary Reliability of

Abstract

Contradicting the commonsense belief that “I'd never confess to a crime I did not commit”, false confessions are a contributing factor in roughly one quarter of all post‐conviction DNA exonerations. Voluntary, compliant, and internalized false confessions are distinguished and a sequence of three processes is articulated as responsible for these confessions and the adverse legal consequences that follow. First, police often target innocent people for interrogation on the basis of confident but erroneous judgments of truth and deception made in a preinterrogation interview. Second, innocent people sometimes confess during interrogation as a result of certain dispositional vulnerabilities (such as compliant and suggestible personalities, mental illness and retardation, adolescence, and the phenomenology of innocence) and/or the use of certain coercive tactics (prolonged isolation, the false evidence ploy, and minimization). Third, people cannot accurately distinguish between true and false confessions, and jurors fail to discount even those confessions they see as coerced. As a matter of policy, it is suggested that police should videotape entire interrogations using a neutral, “equal focus” camera perspective and that psychological experts can help to educate judges and juries about the various risk factors.