Forensic Victimology
2nd Edition
Chapter Ten: False Confessions
False Confessions
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A false confession is an involuntary statement of
guilt made under duress, or as the result of
coercion.
False confessions are far from rare.
Those most at risk for a false confession share one
characteristic: they are naive to police procedure.
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This can be due to chronological age, mental age or life
experience.
False Confessions
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Anyone can be induced to give a false confession
under the right circumstances.
One of the most obvious ways to document, if not
prevent, a false confession is to videotape all
suspect interrogations in their entirety.
Confession Law
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Confessions are expected to be free of “compulsion
or inducement”.
The use in a state criminal trial of a defendant’s
confession obtained by coercion is forbidden by the
Fourteenth Amendment. Brown v. Mississippi (1936)
held that convicted resulting solely from confessions
obtained through “brutality and violence” violated
due process.
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However, psychological coercion was not deemed
unconstitutional.
The legal onus was on the defendant to be able to
provide the confession was extracted through
violence.
Confession Law
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In 1966 the Miranda Warning was introduced.
This required police to advise a subject in police
custody that they had a right to an attorney and that
they did not have to answer questions and, further,
that they had the right not to incriminate
themselves.
Types of False Confessions
1. Voluntary false confession
• A confession to a crime given by an individual
who either knows they did not commit the crime,
but nonetheless has made a decision to confess,
or through no pressure from police has come to
believe they committed the crime they are
confessing to.
2. Coerced-Compliant confession:
• A confession to a crime given by an individual
who knows he or she is innocent, but due to
conditions of the interrogation, says what they
believe is necessary to placate the interrogator
and end the situation.
Types of False Confessions
3. Coerced-Internalized confession:
• A confession to a crime given by an individual
who comes to actually believe they may have
committed the crime.
Interviewing and
Interrogation
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Many styles of questioning are either directly from,
or based to a significant degree, on the Reid
technique, a nine-step technique of interviewing and
interrogation that is outlined in the fifth edition of
Criminal Interrogations and Confessions (Inbau,
etal, 2013).
The authors of the Reid Technique purport to
present a system of interrogations that would
minimize false confessions, when it is designed only
to get confessions.
This chapter identifies several issues with this
technique.