Posted
Nov. 12, 2002
Police Presumption of Guilt Key
in False Confessions
A police investigator's presumption of a suspect's
guilt puts those innocent of crime at greater risk of making false
confessions, according to a series of experimental studies by
Saul Kassin, professor of psychology and chairman of the legal
studies program at Williams College. Kassin presented his findings
at the Law and Cognitive Psychology Lecture Series Nov. 8 in a
speech titled "Police Interrogations and Confession: Does
Innocence Put Innocents at Risk?"
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| Prof. Saul Kassin said
innocent witnesses should invoke their Miranda rights when
they feel the police are starting to treat them like a suspect. |
Once police secure a signed confession prosecutors
are prone to trust in them even when exonerating evidence comes
to light. "Once in evidence, a confession is for all practical
purposes a conviction," Kassin said.
The Innocence Project at the Cardozo School
of Law in New York City, which seeks to obtain the release of
those wrongly convicted, has so far won reversals in 114 cases
on the basis of new DNA evidence, Kassin said, and in about 25
percent of those cases suspects had made false confessions.
Kassin cited the case of Bruce Godschalk, who
falsely confessed to committing two rapes on the same day in King
of Prussia, a suburb of Philadelphia, in May 1987. He recanted
the confession and later DNA analysis by two separate labs confirmed
that Godschalk had not committed the crimes. But the local prosecutor
refused to release him, claiming instead that the lab tests were
flawed and that he instead believed the detective and the tape-recorded
confession.
"The power of confession is such that even
prosecutors believe it rather than DNA evidence from two different
labs," Kassin said.
Similarly, in the notorious Central Park jogger
rape case five black juveniles were each convicted on the basis
of graphically detailed confessions given on camera after nearly
40 hours of interrogation that Kassin believes were nonetheless
false. The five also retracted their confessions promptly. A convicted
serial rapist and murderer, Matias Reyes, later admitted to the
crimes, saying he acted alone, and DNA evidence confirmed his
guilt. No DNA evidence linked the juveniles to the crime scene.
The basic text on interrogation techniques for
police detectives is Criminal Interrogation and Confession, now
in its fourth edition. It is "the Bible of interrogation,"
Kassin said, noting that the U.S. Supreme Court cited the book
in its Miranda rights decision. To elicit confessions, it instructs
detectives to isolate suspects, confront them with their guilt
with dogged persistence, present false evidence (such as faked
hair, blood, or fingerprint specimens, phony witnesses or supposedly
failed lie detector tests), put the suspect in a state of helplessness
where his denials do not achieve escape for him, and present a
palatable alternative that minimizes the crime and makes it seem
in the suspect's best interest to make a confession.
Typically a detective might suggest that the
crime "was probably an accident" or that the suspect
was drunk and did not realize what he was doing, Kassin said.
Though courts forbid police from making explicit promises of reduced
punishment in exchange for cooperation, once a suspect is convinced
that police have somehow gathered evidence that points to him,
police might strongly imply that a confession will result in a
lighter sentence.
False confessions have three types that Kassin
called the voluntary, coerced-compliant and coerced-internalized.
In voluntary confessions there is no external pressure and they
occur typically in high-profile cases. Two hundred people confessed
to kidnapping Lindbergh's baby, for example. In coerced-compliant
confessions, the confessor knows he is innocent but confesses
to get out of the interrogation situation, to get a promised reward
or to avoid a threat. Usually they will immediately recant the
confession. In coerced-internalized confessions, innocent suspects
come to believe they actually committed the crime and that they
have repressed all memory of the act.
The key to a false confession is the detective's
presumption of the suspect's guilt, Kassin said. Police investigators
who have participated in Kassin's studies have defended their
practices with comments such as "I've never taken a false
confession and I know because everyone who confessed was later
convicted," or "I don't get false confessions because
I don't interrogate innocent people." Kassin shrugged at
the premises of those statements and declined to comment on them.
Nonetheless, his series of experimental studies
of false confessions produced the following conclusions: with
high levels of confidence, investigators commit false positive
errors and presume innocent suspects to be guilty; naively believing
in the power of their innocence, suspects waive their Miranda
rights; despite plausible and vigorous denials, innocent suspects
are subjected to suggestive and highly aggressive interrogations;
the introduction of false evidence increases chances of false
confessions; and police "overbelieve" false confessions.
In one study one group of college students were
told to fake crimes such as shoplifting, chalking obscenities
on walls or breaking into college buildings and setting off alarms.
A control group was told to simply appear at the scenes of the
phony crimes. All students were then interrogated on videotape
and the tapes shown to untrained college students and experienced
police investigators from Florida and Toronto. The police professionals
identified guilty students correctly 50 percent of the time, no
better than chance, but had 80 percent confidence in their judgment.
College students who judged the tapes scored lower on accuracy
but were also less confident of their judgments. "Where the
police made errors, the errors were false positives," Kassin
said, who also noted a police bias toward a guilty response. "Some
individual investigators, however, do do well and are more highly
accurate. We don't know what it is these people are doing."
In another study, Kassin found that about 80
percent of innocent people will waive their Miranda rights, especially
people who have never been in trouble before, but only 36 percent
of guilty suspects will be persuaded to give up their protection.
Police have developed techniques for eliciting waivers that try
to make suspects see the police as their ally who cannot help
until the formality of Miranda rights is removed. What was shocking,
Kassin said, was that in the experiment 67 percent of innocent
suspects surrendered their rights in the face of clearly hostile
interrogations. "They believed in the power of their innocence
to set then free. They believed they could make others see their
inner states if they were given long enough."
In an experiment where two-thirds of suspects
were expected to be guilty, Kassin found that investigators showed
more aggressive presumption of guilt. All participants in the
experiment, the interrogators, the suspects and third-party observers
agreed that in cases where the suspect was indeed innocent, interrogators
exhibited the highest expectation of guilt and exerted the most
extreme pressure to get a confession. "Innocence is a risk
factor," Kassin said.
In still another experiment Kassin tested police
confidence in the confessions they elicited. College students
and police detectives were shown real and false confessions and
asked to discriminate. College students had a higher degree of
accuracy but less confidence in their judgment. "Police investigators
are prone to see deception," Kassin said. "But their
bias is not to deception, but guilt." Interrogation training
increased the level of the response bias, he added.
Asked if his studies suggest that one should
invoke one's Miranda rights anytime one is interviewed by police,
Kassin said, "I would invoke my rights right from the start.
When you think you've shifted from being a witness to being a
suspect, you should invoke immediately. Police aren't trusting
either the 20 percent who don't waive their rights or the 80 percent
who do."
In many cases of bad confessions, he said, there
is no other evidence for police to proceed on. They therefore
apply very great pressure on suspects for confessions.
The Law and Cognitive Psychology Lecture
Series will next present Shari Seidman Diamond, Howard J. Trienens
Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University
Law School. Professor Diamond will speak at the Law School on
Feb. 27, 2003, on jury room conversation. The series is co-chaired
by professor John Monahan of the Law School and U.Va. associate
professor of psychology Bobbie Spellman. Professor Kassin's visit
was made possible by the Law School's Intellectual Enrichment
Fund.
• Reported by M. Marshall
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