How guilty and innocent suspects perceive the police and themselves: suspect interviews in Germany

Abstract

Purpose. Suspects are central participants of a police interview and can provide crucial information on the interview interactions with the interviewers. This study examined how the way suspects perceive interviews relates to (a) their reported status of being guilty or innocent and (b) their decision to confess or deny. Methods. A total of 250 convicted offenders completed a two-part questionnaire on their perceptions during the most recent suspect interview in which they had confessed to or denied a crime they had committed (Part 1) or not committed (Part 2). Results. Participants reported a total of 334 police interviews-223 for which they reported being guilty and 111 for which they reported being innocent. An exploratory factor analysis showed that three latent factors described how they viewed the interviewers and themselves: Respectful-Open Behaviors (non-accusatorial interviewer behaviour, and no pressure in suspects), Confession-Oriented Tactics by the interviewer (minimization and maximization tactics), and Suspects' Psychological Distress (insecurity, fear, and lack of self-confidence). Suspects perceived less Psychological Distress and less Respectful-Open Behaviors in reported innocent (vs. guilty) interview situations. In reported guilty interview situations, confessions were associated positively with Respectful-Open Behaviors and Suspects' Psychological Distress, whereas denials were associated positively with Confession-Oriented Tactics. Innocent interview situations showed a positive correlation between confessions and Suspects' Psychological Distress. Conclusions. In this study, suspects deliver an important message to the police and the legal system: The findings substantiate the benefits of an open-minded interviewing approach, and fail to support a confession-oriented interrogation approach. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Contextual factors predict self-reported confession decision-making: A field study of suspects’ actual police interrogation experiences.

“…Finally, for privacy purposes given their pending adjudication, we did not ask respondents to report whether they were actually guilty; doing so would have increased the risk profile of the study. Suspects’ actual guilt or innocence almost certainly plays a role in whether or when they confess or provide any incriminating information (May et al, 2020). Studies with convicted persons are able to ask about actual guilt without placing respondents in legal jeopardy, though as noted above, there are trade-offs in terms of memory recall and selection bias in guilt status.…”

“…From a research standpoint, studying suspects' decision making could inform confession diagnosticity. Understanding why suspects decide to confess could help identify differential patterns among true versus false confessions, as innocent and guilty suspects may experience interrogation stressors differently (May et al, 2020;Guyll et al, 2013;Redlich et al, 2011).…”

“…Samples with incarcerated prisoners inherently involve selection bias because those individuals have already been convicted; therefore, presumably most (though certainly not all) are actually guilty. Also, with people who are incarcerated in prisons, the time span between the interrogation and study data collection is often many years, raising concerns about memory degradation (May et al, 2020).…”

“…From a research standpoint, studying suspects’ decision-making could inform confession diagnosticity. Understanding why suspects decide to confess could help identify differential patterns among true versus false confessions, as innocent and guilty suspects may experience interrogation stressors differently (Guyll et al, 2013; May et al, 2020; Redlich et al, 2011). Whereas prior work on confession diagnosticity focused on the role of police interrogation techniques in generating true versus false confessions (e.g., Meissner et al, 2014), it is important to consider suspects as active participants in the interrogation interaction.…”

Swedish police officers' strategies when interviewing suspects who decline to answer questions

“…However, regulations differ across countries regarding decisions to directly terminate the police interview if the suspect chose to exercise their right to silence (e.g. May et al, 2021). In Sweden, police are permitted to continue to ask questions, although the suspect is entitled to respond with silence or state ‘no comment’.…”