Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendations
Abstract
Recent DNA exonerations have helped shed light on the problem of false confessions and the empirical fact that innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit. Drawing on past and current police practices, laws concerning the admissibility of confession evidence in court, relevant core principles of psychology, and forensic studies involving an array of empirical methodologies, this White Paper summarizes much of what we know about police-induced confessions. AS part of this review, we identify dispositional suspect characteristics (e.g., adolescence; intellectual disability; mental illness, and certain personality traits), interrogation tactics (e.g., excessive interrogation time; presentations of false evidence; minimization), and the phenomenology of innocence (e.g., the tendency to waive Miranda rights) that can influence the reliability of confessions, as well as their effects on judges, juries, and other decision makers. This article concludes with a strong recommendation for the mandatory videotaping of interrogations and considers other possibilities...