Behavioral Sciences & the Law

ACCESS

False Confessions: An Integrative Review of the

Phenomenon

Michael Welner1,2 | Matt DeLisi3

ABSTRACT

Confessions are an important evidentiary part of the legal process, and false confessions have been notable contributors to wrongful convictions. However, academic research in the psychology and law field primarily relies on student or volunteer samples in staged exercises, methodological features that lack ecological validity for replicating police interrogation or thepressures distinctive to high stakes crime investigations. Here, we provide an integrative review of research and data on false confessions during police interrogations with distinctions of key concepts, relevant case law pertaining to confessions including several U.S. Supreme Court decisions, updating the typology of false confessions, the quantification of false confessions, risk factors for false confessions, interrogation risk factors for false confessions, validity threats to false confessions research, and recommended directions for informing courts and the law.

This article is a very detailed, very academic review of all of the literature and “studies” as to the causes of false confessions.

Here is the conclusion:

Conclusion

No one disputes that false confessions of the innocent, unless identified soon afterward, lead to miscarriages of justice. A recurrent problem in research that examines the interface between psychology and law, is that the participants, procedures, and methodologies of a classroom or laboratory setting bear no resemblance to actual criminal suspects, real police interrogators, and the interactional exchanges between those actors.

In this regard, the scientific basis of false confessions research is handicapped by a lack of ecological validity and at times, a lack of content and construct validity.

Brown and Ashcraft show how far police interrogations have professionalized in recent decades. It is intellectually dishonest to compare the abuses and indignities of police practices from a century ago to professional interrogations of today where suspects are interviewed in controlled settings that minimize the abuses of suspects, even if the setting is spartan and altogether uncomfortable. Advocacy scholarship uses facsimile studies and the outlier tragedy of wrongful convictions to promote false equivalence of police interrogations to coercion implicates some of the most highly‐cited and influential studies in the field.

This examination of false confessions and its research base yields the following conclusions:

� Confessions to crimes arise more predictably from one's perception of proof of guilt, and to a lesser degree, external and internal pressures on the suspect.

� False confessions are established by undisputed case evidence rather than academic theory. To date, presumptions about suspects and interrogation are not scientific or reflective of forensic science assessment.

� False confessions are an endpoint of the convergence of suspect vulnerabilities, features of the interrogation, and/or the context in which the interrogation takes place. Assessment requires an accounting of each of these features within the boundaries of litigation.

� Causal factors demonstrated from undisputed false confessions contribute to reliable and valid forensic assessment. Research of interrogation in non‐empirical, staged contexts does not replicate the conditions of interrogation. Assessment that is based on non‐empirical research relies on theoretical presumption and may mislead the trier of fact.

� Assessment of disputed confessions requires an evaluation of contemporaneous sources of objective data informing the suspect moving from denial to acceptance of responsibility.

Given the pressures of criminal litigation, this includes consideration of how a confession came to be retracted and how a motivated suspect's account of the interrogation remains consistent or, morphs to conform to a more legally advantageous narrative.

� The validity of confessions and related claims benefit from transparent data that accounts for the suspect's experience in custody as clearly as possible. This includes videotaping of the interrogation and custodial experience. It may additionally be aided by records of the earliest accounts of one's interrogation experience, either through notes of one's defense attorney or recordings of jail phone calls. Fidelity of the data contributes to the contemporaneous reconstruction of interrogation and the movement of the suspect from denial to confession. Moreover, the clarity of such data informs potential contamination and its sources, for either the suspect's statement or the suspect's account of the interrogation.