False Confession
An admission of guilt can trump even the proverbial smoking gun. A confession is the ideal civic solution. The perpetrator takes responsibility, and the public sleeps soundly.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the number of false confessions nationwide. A review of murder cases in a single Illinois county found 247 instances in which the defendants' self-incriminating statements were thrown out by the court or found by a jury to be insufficiently convincing for conviction.
Suspects with low IQs are particularly vulnerable to the pressures of police interrogation. They are less likely to understand the charges against them and the consequences of admitting guilt.
Intelligence is by no means the only decisive factor. Suspects with compliant or suggestible personalities and anxiety disorders may be hard-pressed to withstand an interrogation.
Self-incriminating statements are often the result of a kind of cost-benefit analysis. A false confession is an escape hatch. Under the circumstances, it becomes rational. The most common explanation given after the fact is that suspects just wanted to go home.
This often indicates an inability to appreciate the consequences of a confession, a situation that police cultivate by communicating that a confession will be rewarded with lenient sentencing. Police may also offer mitigating factors, the crime was unintentional, or, the suspect was provoked.
The circumstances of interrogation are crucial. Everybody has a breaking point. Nobody confesses falsely in an hour.
False confessions are generated in cell blocks as well as interrogation rooms.
A particularly vulnerable defendant may begin to doubt their own memory when presented with false evidence. Children and the mentally handicapped, or people whose recollections are clouded by drugs or alcohol, are particularly susceptible. Interrogators may suggest that a suspect has repressed the memory. They then offer false evidence to fill in the gaps. After intense interrogation, these suspects become sufficiently convinced of their own guilt and accept an internalized false confession.
Psychology Today
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