False Confession

CU R RE N T D I R E CT I O NS IN P SYC H OL OGI C AL SC I EN C E

False Confessions
Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform
Saul M. Kassin John Jay College of Criminal Justice

ABSTRACT—Despite

the commonsense belief that people do not confess to crimes they did not commit, 20 to 25% of all DNA exonerations involve innocent prisoners who confessed. After distinguishing between voluntary, compliant, and internalized false confessions, this article suggests that a sequence of three processes is responsible for false confessions and their adverse consequences. First, police sometimes target innocent people for interrogation because of erroneous judgments of truth and deception. Second, innocent people sometimes confess as a function of certain interrogation tactics, dispositional suspect vulnerabilities, and the phenomenology of innocence. Third, jurors fail to discount even those confessions they see as coerced. At present, researchers are seeking ways to improve the accuracy of confession evidence and its evaluation in the courtroom. interrogation; confessions; evidence

KEYWORDS—police

In criminal law, confession evidence is highly persuasive—yet fallible. Despite the pervasive myth that people do not confess to crimes they did not commit, the pages of American history, beginning with the Salem witch trials of 1692, bear witness to all the men and women who were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned, often because of false confessions. Although the prevalence rate is unknown, recent analyses reveal that 20 to 25% of prisoners exonerated by DNA had confessed to police, that the percentage is far higher in capital murder cases (White, 2003), and that these discovered instances represent the tip of an iceberg (Drizin & Leo, 2004). After reviewing a number of cases throughout history, and drawing on theories of social influence, Wrightsman and I proposed a taxonomy that distinguished three types of false confessions: voluntary, compliant, and internalized.

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