New York – In a recent issue of Behavioral Sciences and the Law, one of the leading peer-reviewed journals in forensic mental health, a groundbreaking cross-disciplinary article scrutinized the existing body of research on police interrogations and false confessions and the foundation of long-advanced assertions about what causes false confessions. False Confessions: An Integrative Review of the Phenomenon examines the fascinating matter from within the unique, urgent experience of an interrogation for a major crime and the forces driving suspect decision-making, police approaches, and the tipping point of a suspect’s move from denial to confessing to the crime.
“Disputing confession evidence is an important stage of pre-trial proceedings,” observes Michael Welner, M.D., a forensic psychiatrist who has consulted on scores of disputed and undisputed confessions over three decades. Adds Dr. Welner, a Professor of Psychiatry at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and Chairman of The Forensic Panel, “Our study found that in spite of advances in forensic science, and aspirations for relevant, reliable, and valid expert testimony, courts are routinely misled by advocacy portraying itself as researched science. As a result, the justice system maintains important misunderstandings about police interrogation, suspect vulnerability, what causes false confessions, and when and why the justice system should be concerned with the validity of confession evidence.”
The article coalesced data and study spanning the behavioral and social sciences, police science, and criminal justice, respecting the interdisciplinary expertise converging into interrogation study. Highlighting the various outcomes of interrogation, the article distinguishes confessions from admissions and statements based on the substance and intent reflected in the statements. In addition, the article explains important distinctions between false confessions and false guilty pleas that render these to be unrelated constructs within the justice system.
In addition to the long-identified compliant, internalized, and voluntary types, the article expands the typology of false confessions to now account for leverage false confessions, when the statements of suspects and witnesses interviewed in sequence are then leveraged against one another. Such cases are distinctive for interrogation pressures that can be generated by the evidence alone rather than police coercion or suspect vulnerability.
The article highlights numerous core flaws native to academic social science literature on interrogation. “The existing literature consistently presents a presumption of law enforcement as intimidating, confrontational, and inherently coercive,” noted Dr. DeLisi, a Distinguished Professor of Criminal Justice at Iowa State University, adding, “In actuality, a significant proportion of murderers and sex offenders perceive police to be calm, allowing time to respond, empathic, and at times ingratiating, and show them positive attitudes. The inherent biases against law-enforcement handicap some researchers from interpreting data beyond affirming interrogation itself as invariably coercive and then positing speculations to fit each case for how coercion must have occurred.”
The consistent tone of such bias also includes the broad dismissal of deception detection techniques among law enforcement interviewers. False Confessions: An Integrative Review of the Phenomenon includes a review of linguistic and behavioral deception detection research of actual suspects in major crimes. This better informs the assessment of police decision-making and whether it is rooted in professional practices.
The article further points out how the body of current research also fails to account for suspect neutralization, a well-researched construct that includes a suspect’s denials of responsibility and rationalizations for doing so, even if lying and misleading is necessary. Suspects’ communication styles, such as deception, obfuscation, and rationalization are expressions of neutralization. It is for this reason that communications between suspects and law enforcement include a mixture of true and false statements. Interrogation techniques are implemented to directly engage neutralization by suspects.
However, neutralization is not accounted for in social science research on interrogation and false confessions. The notion that a suspect denies responsibility, among that branch of academia, is treated as evidence for innocence rather than the expected communication of either the innocent or the guilty. This, too, illustrates an inherent bias that affects the interpretation of research and case data.
Turning to suspect vulnerability, False Confessions: An Integrative Review of the Phenomenon revisits the validation of compliance and susceptibility as risk factors for false confession. On the other hand, the authors’ caution about whether younger age – rather than naivete among youth – is a vulnerability to false confession. Research among adolescents does not provide evidence that those above age sixteen lack the competencies for the criminal justice system that adults have. Mental illness, similarly, has not been established as a risk factor for false confessions, in part because it has not been studied in such a way as to rule out the influence of comorbid substance use or intoxication.
Other environmental and interactional features long touted to be risk factors for false confessions, on closer examination, do not show a causal relationship or have never been studied. For example, isolation, “minimization,” and implied promises have not been demonstrated to cause false confessions in interrogation to major crimes. Long custodial time, a common quality of modern interrogation, is not so much a risk factor as whether physical abuse happens to someone in prolonged custody. Lack of sleep impacts decision-making, but the urgencies of interrogation for major crimes bring hyperarousal to the setting so that a suspect remains vigilant if fatigued.
Self-reports of false confessions are derived from inmates who have incentive to maintain their innocence. Even so, self-reports of false confessions are conspicuously more frequent among youth misdemeanor offenders. The authors pointed out that self-report research also notes that the most common reason for such false confessions is to protect someone else, rather than police abuse. This is consistent with the protective false confession type often capitalized on by gangs, knowing that younger teenage conscripts and aspiring members will not be punished as would their older peers. The teenagers who confess in this context do not anticipate consequences based on their experiences in the juvenile justice system, in which custodial sentencing to major crimes is a fraction of that reserved for adults.
The authors highlight existing and heavily relied upon research methodologies that fail to demonstrate the findings attributed to them. In some instances, samples are padded with cases that are not false confessions. Researchers mingle the above categories, or in other instances include cases of claimed false confessions that remain very much in dispute.
False Confessions: An Integrative Review of the Phenomenon demonstrates that the phenomenon of false confessions suffers from an inadequate research base that derives from studies that lack ecological validity, content validity, and construct validity. Ecological validity problems reflect in studies of college students and volunteer subjects; these protocols neither recreate interrogation nor the unique adversarial and high stakes dynamics between suspect and law enforcement. Content validity problems arise in survey research of curated groups of academics, social science researchers, and mock jurors about what they “feel” or “think” are “risk factors” or “settled science.” These are opinion surveys that do not inform what is occurring, but rather what other like-minded cohorts ought to think. Construct validity problems arise in research that comingles false confessions with false statements and false guilty pleas, incrimination by third parties, and other unrelated constructs.
Authors Welner, DeLisi, and Theresa Janusewski propose that cases included for closer study of causes should draw from the pool of confessions undisputed by either side to be false (rather than relying on the account of one vested party). The article details benchmarks that researchers and courts can use to establish undisputed false confessions. Other prescriptions include research that mines data from now-mandated videotaped interrogations to inform factors driving the transition from denial to confession.
As for a disputed confession case itself, the authors underscore the importance of transparent data, particularly that data which is contemporaneous with the confession. These sources range from videotapes of interrogations to police body cams to notes that defense attorneys make from their earliest encounters with clients detailing defendants’ claims, to recordings of phone calls to the jail or medical facility or other unguarded communications. As the authors recommend, “Fidelity of the data contributes to the contemporaneous reconstruction of the interrogation and the movement of the suspect from denial to confession.”
The authors are all part of The Forensic Panel, a multidisciplinary forensic practice that consults on complex litigation around the United States, including frontier issues for which the science is emerging, such as disputed confessions. Apart from its efforts in litigation itself, which inform The Forensic Panel’s empirical reference point, the practice continues to conduct and publish original research on areas in the law and science interface that promote ethical upgrades of forensic practice and the judicious application of expertise in forensic casework.
To access the article, False Confessions: An Integrative Review of the Phenomenon, click here.
