About the Author.Series Preface.Preface.Acknowledgments.Introduction. PART I: INTERROGATIONS AND CONFESSIONS. Interrogation Tactics and Techniques. Interrogation in Britain. Persons at Risk During Interviews in Police Custody: the Royal Commission Studies. The Identification and Measurement of 'Oppressive' Police Interviewing Tactics in Britain. Why do Suspects Confess? Theories. Why do Suspects Confess? Empirical Findings. Miscarriages of Justice and False Confessions. The Psychology of False Confession: Research and Theoretical Issues. The Psychology of False Confession: Case Examples. PART II: LEGAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS. The English Law on Confessions. The American Law on Confessions. The Psychological Assessment. Suggestibility: Historical and Theoretical Aspects. Interrogative Suggestibility: Empirical Findings. PART III: BRITISH COURT OF APPEAL CASES. The Effects of Drugs and Alcohol Upon the Reliability of Testimony. The Court of Appeal. The 'Guildford Four' and the 'Birmingham Six'. Psychological Vulnerability. Police Impropriety. Misleading Special Knowledge. PART IV: FOREIGN CASES OF DISPUTED CONFESSIONS. Four High Profile American Cases. Canadian and Israeli Cases. Murder in Norway: a False Belief Leading to a False Confession. References. Appendix. Index.

The Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions: A Handbook

Recently, in a number of high-profile cases, defendants who were prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced on the basis of false confessions have been exonerated through DNA evidence. As a historical matter, confession has played a prominent role in religion, in psychotherapy, and in criminal law-where it is a prosecutor's most potent weapon. In recent years, psychologists from the clinical, personality, developmental, cognitive, and social areas have brought their theories and research methods to bear on an analysis of confession evidence, how it is obtained, and what impact it has on judges, juries, and other people. Drawing on individual case studies, archival reports, correlational studies, and laboratory and field experiments, this monograph scrutinizes a sequence of events during which confessions may be obtained from criminal suspects and used as evidence. First, we examine the preinterrogation interview, a process by which police target potential suspects for interrogation by making demeanor-based judgments of whether they are being truthful. Consistent with the literature showing that people are poor lie detectors, research suggests that trained and experienced police investigators are prone to see deception at this stage and to make false-positive errors, disbelieving people who are innocent, with a great deal of confidence. Second, we examine the Miranda warning and waiver, a process by which police apprise suspects of their constitutional rights to silence and to counsel. This important procedural safeguard is in place to protect the accused, but researchers have identified reasons why it may have little impact. One reason is that some suspects do not have the capacity to understand and apply these rights. Another is that police have developed methods of obtaining waivers. Indeed, innocent people in particular tend to waive their rights, naively believing that they have nothing to fear or hide and that their innocence will set them free. Third, we examine the modern police interrogation, a guilt-presumptive process of social influence during which trained police use strong, psychologically oriented techniques involving isolation, confrontation, and minimization of blame to elicit confessions. Fourth, we examine the confession itself, discussing theoretical perspectives and research on why people confess during interrogation. In particular, we focus on the problem of false confessions and their corrupting influence in cases of wrongful convictions. We distinguish among voluntary, compliant, and internalized false confessions. We describe personal risk factors for susceptibility to false confessions, such as dispositional tendencies toward compliance and suggestibility, youth, mental retardation, and psychopathology. We then examine situational factors related to the processes of interrogation and show that three common interrogation tactics-isolation; the presentation of false incriminating evidence; and minimization, which implies leniency will follow-can substantially increase the risk that ordinary people will confess to crimes they did not commit, sometimes internalizing the belief in their own culpability. Fifth, we examine the consequences of confession evidence as evaluated by police and prosecutors, followed by judges and juries in court. Research shows that confession evidence is inherently prejudicial, that juries are influenced by confessions despite evidence of coercion and despite a lack of corroboration, and that the assumption that "I'd know a false confession if I saw one" is an unsubstantiated myth. Finally, we address the role of psychologists as expert witnesses and suggest a number of possible safeguards. In particular, we argue that there is a need to reform interrogation practices that increase the risk of false confessions and recommend a policy of mandatory videotaping of all interviews and interrogations.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2004.00016.x

The Psychology of Confessions A Review of the Literature and Issues

Recent DNA exonerations have shed light on the problem that people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit. Drawing on police practices, laws concerning the admissibility of confession evidence, core principles of psychology, and forensic studies involving multiple methodologies, this White Paper summarizes what is known about police-induced confessions. In this review, we identify suspect characteristics (e.g., adolescence; intellectual disability; mental illness; and certain personality traits), interrogation tactics (e.g., excessive interrogation time; presentations of false evidence; and minimization), and the phenomenology of innocence (e.g., the tendency to waive Miranda rights) that influence confessions as well as their effects on judges and juries. This article concludes with a strong recommendation for the mandatory electronic recording of interrogations and considers other possibilities for the reform of interrogation practices and the protection of vulnerable suspect populations.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1596284_code797450.pdf?abstractid=1483878&type=2

Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendations

The detection of deception is a promising but challenging task. A systematic discussion of automated Linguistics Based Cues (LBC) to deception has rarely been touched before. The experiment studied the effectiveness of automated LBC in the context of text-based asynchronous computer mediated communication (TA-CMC). Twentyseven cues either extracted from the prior research or created for this study were clustered into nine linguistics constructs: quantity, diversity, complexity, specificity, expressivity, informality, affect, uncertainty, and nonimmediacy. A test of the selected LBC in a simulated TA-CMC experiment showed that: (1) a systematic analysis of linguistic information could be useful in the detection of deception; (2) some existing LBC were effective as expected, while some others turned out in the opposite direction to the prediction of the prior research; and (3) some newly discovered linguistic constructs and their component LBC were helpful in differentiating deception from truth.

http://www.iula.upf.edu/materials/050603vazquez.pdf

Automating Linguistics-Based Cues for detecting deception in text-based asynchronous computer-mediated communication

/pdf/police-induced-confessions-risk-factors-and-recommendations-316jdprxc5.pdf

Police-induced confessions: risk factors and recommendations.

Protecting the Innocent: A Response to the Bedau-Radelet Study

Miranda v. Arizona is the Supreme Court’s most famous criminal law decision, spelling out the requirements for police interrogation of criminal suspects. Despite its fame, we have little empirical knowledge about how the decision has affected police interrogation in the years that followed. What percentage of suspects waives Miranda rights? How many confess? How important are confessions to the outcome of prosecutions? No one knows the answer. This Article provides answers to those questions. After a review of existing literature in Part I, Part II sets forth the methodology of the empirical study. Part III reports the specific findings, including assessments of custodial interrogations, noncustodial interrogations, police compliance with Miranda rules, and ultimate outcomes of criminal cases. Part IV assesses the importance of these findings with respect to the wisdom of Miranda. The Article concludes that the Miranda decision, despite the promises of the Court and its defenders, has yet to be empirically justified as the proper balance between the competing interests of criminal suspects and society at large.

Police Interrogation in the 1990s: An Empirical Study of the Effects of Miranda

Critics charged that the Supreme Court’s 1966 decision in Miranda v. Arizona would “handcuff the cops.” Were critics’ concerns justified? This Article, using FBI data, finds that national crime clearance rates fell precipitously in the two years immediately after Miranda and have remained at lower levels in the decades since. Multiple regression analysis further reveals that rising crime rates and the aging baby-boom generation do not account for much of this decline in clearance rates. Rather, as this Article concludes, Miranda has in fact “handcuffed” the police, and society should begin to explore ways of loosening these shackles.

Handcuffing the Cops? A Thirty Year Perspective on Miranda’s Effects on Law Enforcement

Criminal procedure scholarship has spent little time discussing the guiltless and much discussing the guilty. Recent attempts to correct this problem have led to discussions of the plight of an innocent person who confessed to a crime he did not commit. These discussions call for still more regulation of police interrogations without attempting to quantify the problem. Such a focus is incomplete because the innocent are at risk not only when police extract untruthful confessions but also when police fail to obtain truthful confessions from criminals. It is possible that more regulation aimed at reducing false confessions may produce such a substantial drop in truthful confessions as to pose a greater risk to the innocent. The aim of this empirical essay is to think more carefully about “the numbers” – that is, to try and place the risk to the innocent from false confessions, lost confessions, and lost convictions into some perspective. Part I attempts to quantify the dimensions of the false confession problem. Part II then turns to an assessment of the relative risk to the innocent from false confessions versus lost confessions. False confessions are a relatively infrequent cause of wrongful convictions while truthful confessions are perhaps the most frequent way in which miscarriages of justice are uncovered. Finally, Part III provides an escape from these tradeoffs by suggesting videotaping of police interrogation as a substitute for the restrictive Miranda rules.

Paul G. Cassell

Papers

Protecting the Innocent: A Response to the Bedau-Radelet Study

Police Interrogation in the 1990s: An Empirical Study of the Effects of Miranda

Handcuffing the Cops? A Thirty Year Perspective on Miranda’s Effects on Law Enforcement

Police Interrogation in the 1990s: An Empirical Study of the Effects of Miranda

Protecting the Innocent from False Confessions and Lost Confessions – And from Miranda