Law & Psychiatry: Mental Illness, Police Interrogations, and the Potential for False Confession
Recently, an alarmingly high incidence of wrongful convictions has been documented in the United States, in large part because of "Innocence Projects" that use DNA analyses from crime scenes to exonerate innocent persons. The best-known Innocence Project, administered through the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, has helped to free 138 people who had been wrongfully incarcerated. Approximately 25 percent of these cases involved false confessions arising from inappropriate police interrogations. Among these false confession cases, persons with mental impairment appear to be disproportionately represented. The Innocence Project's Web site notes, "Truly startling is the number of false confession cases involving the mentally impaired and the mentally ill. Police interrogation in the [false confession] cases reveals a lack of training and a disregard for mental disabilities" (1).
An example of where this situation can lead is the case of Eddie Joe Lloyd, who spent 17 years