November 6, 2023 • 43 mins
Josh Dubin does a deep dive into the psychology behind Coerced Confession Evidence with David Rudolf, criminal defense and civil rights attorney, and co-host of the podcast Abuse of Power.
It turns out tactics used to extract Coerced Confessions are also rooted in Junk Science. Just like Bite Mark Evidence, Bloodstain Pattern Analysis, and so many others covered in this show, Coerced, or False Confessions are another link in the chain of the Junk Science epidemic.
Kate Judson, Executive Director of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, updates Josh Dubin's Wrongful Conviction: Junk Science.
Learn more and get involved.
http://www.wrongfulconvictionpodcast.com/junk-science
Wrongful Conviction: Junk Science is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co No1.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, folks, Kate Judson here, I'm a lawyer and the
executive director of the Center for Integrity and Forensic Sciences.
We're back with another episode of Junk Science, a series
we first released in twenty twenty. But these stories are
just as relevant as ever. Confessions, as you'll hear in
this episode, are frequently unreliable, especially under circumstances that include,
(00:27):
but aren't limited to, depression, shock, youth, grief, and false
claims by law enforcement. And since many confessions take place
in the high stress environment of an interrogation room, there's
a higher than average likelihood that confessions given to law
enforcement will be false or unreliable. With how unreliable confessions
(00:54):
can be, it might surprise you to know that they
are sometimes used to validate a scientific concept. It works
like this, Analysts or experts use a risky type of
analysis in a case and then say that because an
accused person confessed in the case, the analysis is correct.
(01:16):
This approach isn't two independent pieces of proof. It's one
mistake compounding another on their own. Confessions need to be
treated with skepticism and care, and certainly they should never
be the main basis for a scientific concept.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Hi, everyone in our feed you've probably heard the podcast
Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions hosted by Laura and I Wrider
and Steve Drizzen. Would they dive into the stories of
innocent people who have been subject to tactics that elicit
false confessions. As it turns out, these tactics are actually
rooted in junk science, just like bitemark evidence, bloodstain pattern analysis,
(02:06):
and so many others that we have covered in this show,
we want to make it clear that false confessions are
another link in this chain of the junk science epidemic.
For some of our more avid listeners, this will be
something of a refresher for what you've already heard about
how twenty five percent of wrongful convictions are based on
false confessions. But in today's episode, we're going to unpack
(02:31):
the story not of an individual case, but the story
of how the junk science that's behind false confessions is
employed in the interrogation room. Here's our show. It's a
crisp fall morning, and you're on your way to the
first class of the day, psychology one onh one. Just
(02:54):
a few weeks ago, you started as a freshman at
this small college in Massachusetts and so far, psych is
your favorite class. You walk into your classroom and start
taking off your jacket while your teacher makes some announcements.
He says, the psychology department is conducting an experiment. Participation
is completely optional, but anyone who decides to participate will
(03:18):
receive extra credit. You're already doing really well in this class,
so the extra credit doesn't matter to you that much.
But you're curious to see what a psychological experiment will
be like, so you sign up. The next week, you
show up to the room where the experiment will be conducted.
When you get there, there's already another student waiting outside
(03:41):
who says she's also here for the experiment. It's not
long before a professor comes out into the hall to
greet you, and he's well, very professor looking. He wears
a tweed jacket and his hair is slightly gray. The
professor tells you, in a very authoritative tone, sit in
front of the computer. He then motions for the other
(04:03):
student to sit in the chair next to you. On
the table in front of her, there is a piece
of paper with letters printed on it. Then the professor
takes his seat across from you. Both. He says welcome,
thanks for joining us today. This experiment will test reaction times.
One student will read from a list of letters well,
(04:25):
the other will type out the letters that she calls out.
It's actually a very simple experiment. He pauses for a moment,
then looks you in the eye. Just one thing before
we begin, be very careful not to hit the alt key.
You see, it's right there next to the space bar.
The computer program we are using today is a little
(04:48):
bit finicky, and hitting that alt key will cause the
computer to crash. And if that happens, we'll lose all
of our data, and we wouldn't want that to happen.
It's not quite the experiment you were expecting, but it
sounds like it'll be, I guess, kind of fun. You
sit up straight, fingers hovering over the keyboard. The professor says,
(05:12):
let's get ready and begin. The student next to you
starts reading off letters B, A, J, B, T, S K.
The letters come quickly, but you keep up. You think
of this as a game, and you want to win.
You're laser focused on the task in front of you.
(05:35):
But then the screen suddenly glitches and then it goes black.
You sit there, frozen, staring at the blank screen. The
(05:58):
professor running the experiment sees the confused look on your
face and jumps up from his seat. He looks pissed.
He walks over to your side of the table, looks
at the blank screen and says, did you hit the
alt key? No? I didn't. I don't know why this happened.
I'm gonna ask you one more time. The professor says,
(06:20):
did you hit the alt key? I said no, I
really don't think I did. You're getting flustered, and the
professor is clearly angry. What a strange reaction. He stands
over you and picks up the keyboard and clicks some
keys and nothing happens. You did hit the alt key.
(06:43):
I know you did. He turns to the student who
is reading the letters and asks her if she saw
what happened. She says, hate to say it, but I
did see you hit the alt key. The professor storms
over to seat and starts writing furiously on his pad
of paper. You're confused, and you feel really bad, like
(07:08):
you've messed up the whole experiment. You didn't mean to.
You thought it was going well. But if the other
student said you did it, I mean the computer did crash.
You must have hit it by accident. The professor rips
off the top page of his writing pad and pushes
it toward you. Sign this, he says. You read what
(07:29):
the professor has scribbled down. It says, I hit the
all key and cause the computer program to crash. Data
was lost. Uh. I really don't think I hit it, professor,
you say. The professor is now fuming. He practically slams
the pen down on the table in front of you.
(07:52):
Sign it. The leader of this experiment will call you
later today. You think this guy's pretty pissed. I'll just
talk it through the organizer of the experiment When he calls, you,
pick up the pen and sign the paper. Just then,
another student walks into the room. The professor says to her,
(08:14):
we'll have to reschedule our appointment. As he leaves the
room to get his appointment book, mumbling something angry to himself,
the new student in the room raises her eyebrows at you.
She whispers, Hey, what happened? She must have heard all
of the yelling. I hit a key on the computer
that I wasn't supposed to, and I guess I crashed
(08:36):
the computer. You say, The professor comes back, he books
a new appointment with the girl who walks in. When
she leaves, he sits down and takes a deep breath
and says, it's okay. I didn't mean to get so upset.
Show me exactly what happened when you hit the old key.
(08:56):
You put your hands on the keyboard, and you say, well,
when I was going to hit the A button, I
hit the alt key with the side of my hand
by accident. The professor writes down a note on a
pad of paper, then looks up. Okay, great, His demeanor
totally changed. He suddenly calm and seems to be even cheery.
(09:21):
That's the end of the experiment. Thank you so much
for participating, and let me explain everything. He tells you
that the experiment was really not for testing reaction times,
but to study whether presenting someone with phony evidence and
then accusing them can lead that person to admit to
doing something that they did not do. Turns out, everyone
(09:46):
else that was in that room with you, the student
reading out the letters, the one that later asked you
what happened, they were all in on the experiment. The
professor tells you that you did not, in fact hit
the ald key. But you certainly aren't the only person
to falsely admit that you did. The story you just
(10:09):
heard is based on an experiment that was conducted by
psychology professor Saulcaston at Williams College in nineteen ninety six. Now,
he did the experiment to better understand why people confess
to crimes they did not commit. You might be thinking, well,
admitting to hitting an ald key sounds like a sort
(10:30):
of low stake scenario. It's nothing like admitting to a
rape or a murder, and that's precisely the point. In
the low stake scenario of Casson's experiment, it seems like
there would be less of a reason to lie. So
the experiment actually underscores how a combination of applying pressure
(10:51):
and false inculpatory evidence can cause someone to doubt themselves
to the point of admitting to something they did not
do in a low stress situation. So it logically follows
that when the stakes are as high as being accused
of something like rape or murder, the stress and vulnerability increases,
(11:12):
as does the likelihood that someone will falsely confess. Often
when I tell people about Chorus confessions, they say I
would never confess to something I didn't do. But if
you were able to relate to the student in this experiment,
if you could just imagine yourself second guessing your own
actions in that scenario, then it's likely that you too
(11:37):
are susceptible to the tactics that are often employed by
law enforcement to obtain a confession, regardless of whether you
are innocent or guilty. I'm Josh Dubin's civil rights and
criminal defense attorney, an innocent ambassador to the Innocence Project
in New York. Today, on Wrongful Conviction Junks Science, we
(12:01):
examine the psychology behind coerce confessions. Interrogation techniques that detectives
use when questioning a suspect are in fact, very efficient
and extremely effective. They routinely result in getting people to
confess to committing crimes, and that presents a really unique
dilemma for detectives investigating those crimes. They know that once
(12:25):
they get someone in that windowless room of a police precinct,
they will oftentimes be able to get them to confess,
which means those detectives better have real evidence, not merely
a gut feeling or a hunch, real proof tying a
suspect to a crime before subjecting them to the crucible
(12:47):
of an interrogation, because while this process is great at
getting guilty people to confess to crimes they committed, it
is also great for getting innocent people to confess the
crimes they did not commit.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
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Speaker 2 (14:10):
Coarse confessions have been a part of our criminal justice
system for a long time. Take for example, the case
of Stephen Born in eighteen nineteen, detectives found three big
bones in Stephen's backyard in Vermont. The police alleged that
the bones belonged to his brother in law, who had
gone missing and was presumed to have been murdered. The
(14:31):
police told Stephen, the only way you're going to avoid
the death penalty is to confess and stand trial, and
so Stephen confessed. He put his fate in the hands
of a jury who declared him guilty of murdering his
brother in law. Stephen was convicted and sentenced to death.
Luckily for him, before his execution date, his brother in
(14:54):
law was found alive and well hanging out in New Jersey.
And those bones they found the stea Evan's backyard turns
out they were animal bones all along. He was lucky
to escape the gallows. And still, even after so many
false confessions, just like Stephen Bourne's, the confession of a
(15:15):
suspect continues to be seen as the gold standard and
evidence of a person's guilt. Jurors can never seem to
wrap their heads around the fact that someone might confess
to a crime they didn't commit, and the tactic for
obtaining a confession from a suspect only got better. In
(15:36):
nineteen forty seven, a detective named John Reid began to
distill the methods and principles of interrogations into a scientific
procedure designed to increase the likelihood that a suspect would confess.
John Reid was a polygraph expert for the Chicago Police
(15:57):
when he began to develop his nine step process, is
called the Read technique. He claimed that his technique could
diagnose truth interception. The re technique spread throughout the country
and is still popular today. According to the Red and
Associate's website, over half a million law enforcement and security
(16:18):
officers have attended their training programs. And while John Reid's
technique indeed increased the likelihood of securing a confession from
crime suspects, not much had been done to understand whether
these tactics produced confessions that were actually accurate and truthful.
That is until Saul Cassen began conducting his computer crash
(16:41):
experiments at Williams College. Doctor Casson's experiment tested for some
of the variables that are often used during the red technique.
The first variable is vulnerability. Cassen made his test subjects
feel vulnerable by putting them in the mildly stressful set
situation of having them type letters at a rapid pace.
(17:04):
Another variable was false incriminating evidence. When students in the
experiment were told that someone saw them hit the alt key,
they were much more likely to sign a confession. In fact,
of the students who were asked to type at a
fast pace and then we're told that someone saw them
hit the alt key, one hundred percent of them confessed.
(17:29):
Although none of them actually hit the alt key, they
all admitted to the crime when presented with false incriminating evidence.
On top of that, sixty five percent of students who
were presented with false incriminating evidence actually believed in their
own guilt. This was measured by how many of the
students said, I hit the key when that third student,
(17:51):
remember the one that enters the room for their quote
unquote appointment, A seemingly more neutral party comes into the
room and says, hey, what happened. Finally, thirty five percent
of the students actually internalize their guilt to such a
degree that they made up details about it by saying,
for example, oh, I hit the alt key with the
(18:12):
side of my hand. The fact is that none of
these students had hit the alt key, yet under these
controlled conditions, they confess to something they didn't do. Inducing
vulnerability and presenting false, incriminating evidence are the cornerstones of
the red technique. What doctor Casson's experiment shows is that
(18:34):
interrogation techniques like John Reid's are a recipe for causing
innocent people to admit to things that they did not do.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
You can flip a coin and be as accurate in
determining whether somebody is telling the truth or not as
a trained police officer, and trained police officers are no
more effective at that than your average person. And in fact,
there have been numerous psychological studies and nothing correlates to
(19:07):
being able to do that to any degree of scientific validity.
And that's really where the junk science of this technique
comes in, because the reality is you can't tell whether
or not somebody is lying by verbal and nonverbal behavior.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
So with us today we have the amazing David Rudolph
David is a phenomenal, phenomenal criminal defense attorney, civil rights attorney,
criminal justice reform advocate. The list goes on and on.
He is a friend of mine, a personal hero of mine,
and many of you have probably seen him in the
(19:49):
Netflix series The Staircase, which followed the trials of his client,
Michael Peterson, who was accused of murdering his wife. Now,
David has worked on countless wrongful conviction cases and cases
in which people have found themselves sitting in an interrogation
room getting broken down by detectives. And he is someone
(20:13):
who has studied corese confessions and really dug into how
the psychological techniques used by these interrogators can result in
a wrongful conviction. So, David, I want to dive right
into the red technique. What is it and how is
it different than say, standard police interview.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
When you're trying to elicit information, what you're really doing
is interviewing, not interrogating. You're asking open ended questions, You're
following up on things, not for the purpose of confronting
the person, but rather for the purpose of finding out
what actually happened, and that's not designed to get a confession.
(20:55):
The retechnique is simply a protocol for how to interrogate someone,
and this is important who you already believe is guilty.
You don't use the retechnique in order to elicit information.
You only use the retechnique in order to secure admissions
and then ultimately a confession.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Okay, so let's talk about that for a second, because
you said something interesting, and that is that the interrogator
will actually use this technique on the person they believe
to be the guilty suspect. They might not have any
physical evidence to prove that, but they have a hunch,
or they're zeroing in on someone because of tunnel vision,
(21:39):
whatever the case may be. They think this is their guy,
and they bring that person in for questioning. And they're
not simply trying to find out the truth, right, They're
sole objective when they employ this technique is to get
a confession.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Absolutely. It's intuition plus arrogance. You know that. That's my
recipe for how this all starts. You have a police
officer who's done one hundred five hundred one thousand investigations
and they know who they like for the crime. You know,
if it's a wife who's dead, they like the husband
immediately if the husband has a mistress, well that's the clincher.
(22:20):
So there's all these sort of preconceptions, and then the
arrogance is that they know because they've done it so
many times. And you know, part of what we ought
to recognize here is that when you're doing that, you're
obviously already thinking the person's guilty, and so confirmation bias
is going to start leaking in. And this is especially
true and it's ironic where there's not much other evidence.
(22:44):
Picture this situation. So there's a vicious crime, just an
awful uproar in the community, and this police officer believes,
legitimately believes that this other person is the purp, but
there's no evidence. The pressure to get that person to
confess becomes enormous because if you don't, then there's no case.
(23:09):
And so ironically enough, there's much more pressure to get
a false confession when there's no evidence. So that means
there's much more pressure to get a false confession when
the person is innocent.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
So David walk us through this technique. Let's say you
have a husband suspected of killing his wife. Police ask
them to come down to the station. What's the first
thing that happens.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
What you do in the retechnique is first you isolate
the person. You put the person in an uncomfortable position,
You shut them off from any support system, and you
make them anxious so that they're more susceptible to the
other techniques that are going to follow, and so the
(23:57):
person is feeling vulnerable. When you feel vulnerable, you're much
more likely to give in to pressure, particularly if you're
all alone in a strange place, surrounded by imposing authority
figures who have guns. I don't think there's very many
people who wouldn't feel a bit of panic at that situation,
(24:22):
just psychological panic. So it's a whole notion of creating
a situation where you are uncomfortable that you want to
get out of, and then creating a situation where the
only way out is to say what those bullies want
you to say.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
You know, I'm imagining the guy in our hypothetical who
is probably just overcome with grief from having just lost
his wife, and then the last place he wants to
be is where he ends up, you know, in some
dank room at a police station, and it's you know,
(25:09):
got no windows, it's always got those uncomfortable chairs and
they leave them to cool as heels right, and he
sits there by himself for a while, and then the
detectives come in and the questions start, and tell our
listeners what techniques the interrogators use to sort of capitalize
(25:32):
on his vulnerability.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
What you do during the interview phase is you ask
a series of questions, some of which are called behavior
provoking questions, and there are questions that are designed, at
least in the officer's mind, to provoke responses that they
can then use to determine whether the person is telling
the truth or not. So, you know, it might be
(25:55):
questions like why would somebody be saying that you were
at the crime scene if you really weren't, Or what
do you think should happen to the person who did this?
You know, when you ask a husband, why would your
own friends be saying that they think that you might
have done this? And you're thinking to yourself, well, you know,
(26:19):
maybe some of my friends saw that time when you know,
my wife and I got into an argument over the
car or whatever it is. And so you're just trying
to come up with some explanation because the officer is
asking you for one, and you minimize it because it
wasn't a big deal, and so you talk about it,
and then all of a sudden, that then becomes the
(26:42):
takeoff point. Well, that wasn't the only time that you
had an argument, wasn't. No, it wasn't the only time
we had an argument. Well, let's talk about some of
the other times you had arguments. And the idea is
that if you ask enough of these behavior inducing questions, you,
as a trained police officer, sir, looking at verbal and
nonverbal cues, you know, hesitation, how their eyes are looking,
(27:07):
that you can tell if they're lying or not.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
A lot of us have this notion that investigators have
this heightened ability to tell if someone is lying or not,
and that's just not the case. We know that there's
no science to back up that an officer can tell
if you are or are not telling the truth. But
that doesn't help the person sitting in that interrogation chair.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
Any answer you give is subject to confirmation, bias, and interpretation.
And that's why this whole thing is junk science. There's
no logic to it, there's no basis for it. It's simply,
let me ask a couple of hard questions and see
if the person is getting nervous or more nervous.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Okay, So now the cop is certain, at least in
his or her mind, that the person in front of
them committed the crime, even though there's no proof to
back that job. So what's the next step.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
Now? The goal is to get the confession, especially as
I said earlier, when there's no other evidence. So the
tone of the whole conversation changes. It now turns sharp,
and all of a sudden, the officer says, listen, you know,
we've been talking for a while and I just have
to tell you. We know you're guilty. The person says, well, no,
(28:25):
I'm not, and the officer says, well, don't bother lying to.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Me about it.
Speaker 4 (28:31):
So the person says, no, I didn't do it. Well,
then can you explain why your DNA is on the knife?
The officer says, you know, maybe it was so horrible
that you've blotted it out of your memory. You know,
maybe that's why you don't remember it. But but how
do you explain that that DNA.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Is on that knife?
Speaker 4 (28:52):
And there is no DNA on the knife? But the
officer is now alying to the person in order to
end use the person to be sort of incredulous about
his own guilt or innocence. And so there are cases
where people actually become convinced people are innocent, become convinced that, yeah,
(29:17):
maybe I actually did this, or yeah I did this,
and the person knows they didn't. But yet if they're
told that they did, at some point they become convinced
that they must have done it. Why else would this
person be saying that?
Speaker 2 (29:34):
And I think the most important point here is that
a lot of people think that the police can't lie
to them.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
And in fact, in most countries they can't. In the
Great Britain, the cops cannot lie to you about the evidence.
But our Supreme Court has said, oh no, it's fine
for you to lie to a suspect about the evidence,
because after all, he or she knows if he's innocent,
that it can't be true. That ignores the psychology of it.
(30:02):
The truth of the matter is that cops are allowed
to lie during interrogations everywhere in the United States, because
the United States Supreme Court has said that's not a
violation of due process, and it's outrageous. Why should they
be able to lie to you about something as serious
as a crime. And the evidence of a crime. I'm
(30:24):
not aware of any other English speaking country where that's okay.
It's not okay in Canada, it's not okay in Great Britain,
it's not okay in Australia or New Zealand. We are
the only country I'm aware of where that's permissible. And
that's a big, big problem that needs to be corrected.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
I mean, look, I try to put myself in these
people's shoes all the time, and I think about what
it would be like if an officer said to me
that my friend claimed that I murdered someone when I didn't,
and that there's DNA evidence against me. I mean, I
would feel just totally screwed, you know, scared alone. And
(31:11):
you know, after these interrogators confront the suspect, they say
we have this evidence. They might even tell them that
they have witnesses that have identified them at the scene.
They give all of this false, incriminating evidence. This is
constant psychological pressure being applied to a suspect, and it
(31:31):
is increasing their vulnerability. Okay, the suspect gets more and
more scared, more upset, and the detective starts talking about
the serious consequences and the suspect is starting to get
convinced that, you know, they're going to go to prison
for something they didn't do, so tell us what typically
(31:55):
happens next.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
What happens is the police go into minimization, moral justifications
excuses for the potential behavior. So they say things like, well,
you know, we can understand how this might have happened.
I mean, you know, you may have been provoked, maybe
this was in self defense. From the minimization, they go
(32:18):
to two other techniques, and I'll call them active encouragement
and alternative theories. So active encouragement is they're trying to
sort of say, you know, we're just trying to help
you here. It's going to look a lot better for
you if you explain that this was just because your
uncle made you do it than if the DA and
(32:42):
the jury thinks you did this because you're a monster.
You're telling them that he's going to you're going to
be charged based on this evidence, and now you're providing
this lifeline if you will. I've had situations where people
have been told if you don't confess, you're going to
get life. If you do confess, we'll treat you as
(33:02):
a juvenile offender.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
So what's happening here is that the person is told
you don't really have any good or attractive options.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
They're often told, as you said, you're going to get
life in prison or even the death sentence if you
don't confess, and the interrogators tell them that confessing will
at least get them the better of two horrible options. Right,
You'll get life instead of the death penalty. It doesn't
really leave the innocent person with much of a choice,
does it.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
To top it all off, Josh, if you're innocent and
all you want to do is get out of that room,
you know, you've now been in there for two hours,
three hours, four hours, they haven't accepted any of your denials,
and now you just wanted to stop. And what you
think to yourself, if you're innocent, is if I just
(33:56):
agree with what they're saying. If I just agree with
what they're saying, this is going to stop. And when
I get out of here, you know, I can explain
why this happened, and I and everyone's going to understand
that I'm innocent because that's what the evidence is going
to show.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
And you know, it just becomes the path of least resistance.
The other piece you need to understand is it's not
just a person saying I'm guilty, because that's just the
first step.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Right, because a jury's got to be able to believe it.
The confession has to sound convincing.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
You know.
Speaker 4 (34:30):
If all it was was the person said, yeah, I
did it, I don't think a jury's going to give
that a whole lot of weight. But when the person's
confession includes details that only the perpetrator could know, well,
the perpetrator and the police. Once it has those details,
it becomes persuasive evidence. It's not just why would an
(34:53):
innocent person confess? It's how would an innocent person know
these things? And that's where the power comes in, you know.
It's the details about where the attack occurred, how it occurred,
what weapon was used, how long it took, what time
it occurred. All of these are fed into the person,
(35:13):
you know, with leading questions. So do you remember it
was about nine pm when you finally entered the house,
you know? And when you went into the house, do
you remember that the first place you went was into
the kitchen and that's where you found the knife. Right,
So there's all these leading questions that if you're innocent,
(35:35):
and you're trying to get out of there. You're accepting
you don't even have to say it, you just say
yeah or mm hm, and those then get incorporated into
a written statement. And you've already gone so far as
to say all this, so you figure, what the hell,
I'll sign it, and then your life is over.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
So, David, what can we do here? The system keeps
on on churning out false confessions? How do we get
this to stop?
Speaker 4 (36:05):
Stop using this particular technique. It's an enormously effective technique
to get guilty people to confess. We can all agree
on that. The problem is it's also an enormously effective
technique to get innocent people to confess.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
I think certain law enforcement officials in this country might
resist that because they'll think, well, if we don't use this,
then we are losing this critical tool for getting suspects
to confess. And if we don't have this, then we're
not going to be able to convict someone who committed
a crime. But that's not really the case, right because
(36:45):
there are other more reliable techniques out there. So tell
us about some other ways that detectives can obtain a
confession that doesn't employ or doesn't include employing the re technique.
Speaker 4 (37:01):
In Great Britain, they use a completely different method, and
it's called the piece method Peacee And you don't try
to force the conversation in any particular way. You're simply
conducting a really thorough interrogation or interview that has been
planned out in advance. You know exactly what you're going
(37:22):
to ask, you know what you want to talk about,
you know what you want to ask questions about, you
know what evidence there is, and so you can judge
the validity of what the person's saying by the actual evidence,
not by false evidence. And it's a completely different technique
and it is not something that results in the kinds
(37:43):
of false confessions that you see in the United States.
If there's other evidence, then you don't necessarily need the confession.
All you may need are some inconsistencies in the person's
statement to sort of nail the case down. And if
there is no other evidence, why would you try to
(38:06):
get a confession where the confession may very well not
be accurate.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Now, another part of the problem here that we touched
on a bit is not just the false confession, but
also how convincing it ends up being. When it is
presented to a jury. Is there any insight into what
other countries do in that regard?
Speaker 4 (38:29):
You know, in the United States, a jury has to
come back with either guilty or not guilty, and not
guilty sort of implies innocence. In Scotland, there's a verdict
called not proven, and I think the verdicts in every
country should be either proven or not proven, because if
(38:51):
that was the verdict, the presumption of innocence becomes less
important in a sense, because the focus is on did
the state prove its case right?
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Because a journam might be thinking shit, if I say
not guilty, What I'm really saying is that the person
absolutely didn't do it. And what I really want to
say is that who knows. The person may have done it,
but the prosecution just did improve their case. So if
you include this other sort of line item or this
(39:24):
notion that they have in Scotland not proven on the
verdict form, it would actually be a way to protect
the presumption of innocence exactly.
Speaker 4 (39:35):
I think that that would go a long way towards
focusing juror's attention on the actual question.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
These seem to be really big changes that are going
to take a lot of time and effort to accomplish.
We like to be able to provide our listeners with
some insight into what they can be doing to help
change the system. So what would you tell our listeners
they can be doing to help effectuate change, especially when
it comes to wrongful confessions or coerce confessions.
Speaker 4 (40:09):
Please go sit on juris to talk to your fellow
jurors and talk to your friends and neighbors and co
workers about these issues. When you hear somebody's confess to
a crime, go and talk with other people and explain
that it may not be what it seems, because that's
(40:29):
how this changes. It changes from the bottom up, not
from the top down.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
What I want for all of you to take away
from today's episode is some practical advice. Now you might
be thinking I'll never be in this situation. This would
never happen to me. I'm sure that most people that
have ended up being interrogated by the police thought the
exact same thing. It's not going to happen to me
(40:57):
until it does. Unfortunately, your innocence is not a safeguard
against being incarcerated. As we discussed in this episode, innocent
people are often more likely to falsely confess than the
actual perpetrator of a crime for a few reasons. First,
(41:17):
they think that because they're innocent, they don't need a lawyer.
They'll just go in there, speak to the cops, tell
them the truth, and that'll be that. The problem is
that interrogators who are following the read technique don't take
the words you say at face value. Instead, they look
behind the words and look for reasons why those words
(41:41):
support your guilt. Remember, most of the time, they have
decided that you were probably involved before you even get
in that room. That is why you are being interrogated
in the first place. Another reason why many innocent people
confess is because none of us are immune from the
effects of the psychological warfare administered under conditions that are
(42:03):
simply the perfect storm for vulnerability. And believe me, it
happens to the toughest among us I have seen it.
It is simply too difficult to withstand that type of
pressure until the day comes when we are able to
enact the type of reform that David talked about, things
like preventing law enforcement from lying to suspects about the
(42:26):
existence of evidence tying them to the crime. The reality
is that we all need to protect ourselves. Preventing false
confessions starts with an understanding of the tactics investigators use.
You are now armed with that knowledge, and it should
always end with if God forbid you ever find yourself
(42:47):
being interrogated. Is my name is Christopher Ochoa, John Restivo,
Sante Trible, Clementia Geary, and I want to lawyer and
you don't answer a single question after that. Next week
(43:11):
we'll explore the junk signs of roadside drug testing with
Greg Glaud. Wrongful Conviction Junk Science is a production of
Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One.
Thanks to our executive producer Jason Flamm and the team
at Signal Company Number one executive producer Kevin Wardis and
(43:31):
senior producers Kara Kornhaber and Britz Spangler. Our music was
composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram
at dubin Josh. Follow the Wrongful Conviction podcast on Facebook
and on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Twitter at
wrong Conviction
Hey, folks, Kate Judson here, I'm a lawyer and the
executive director of the Center for Integrity and Forensic Sciences.
We're back with another episode of Junk Science, a series
we first released in twenty twenty. But these stories are
just as relevant as ever. Confessions, as you'll hear in
this episode, are frequently unreliable, especially under circumstances that include,
(00:27):
but aren't limited to, depression, shock, youth, grief, and false
claims by law enforcement. And since many confessions take place
in the high stress environment of an interrogation room, there's
a higher than average likelihood that confessions given to law
enforcement will be false or unreliable. With how unreliable confessions
(00:54):
can be, it might surprise you to know that they
are sometimes used to validate a scientific concept. It works
like this, Analysts or experts use a risky type of
analysis in a case and then say that because an
accused person confessed in the case, the analysis is correct.
(01:16):
This approach isn't two independent pieces of proof. It's one
mistake compounding another on their own. Confessions need to be
treated with skepticism and care, and certainly they should never
be the main basis for a scientific concept.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Hi, everyone in our feed you've probably heard the podcast
Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions hosted by Laura and I Wrider
and Steve Drizzen. Would they dive into the stories of
innocent people who have been subject to tactics that elicit
false confessions. As it turns out, these tactics are actually
rooted in junk science, just like bitemark evidence, bloodstain pattern analysis,
(02:06):
and so many others that we have covered in this show,
we want to make it clear that false confessions are
another link in this chain of the junk science epidemic.
For some of our more avid listeners, this will be
something of a refresher for what you've already heard about
how twenty five percent of wrongful convictions are based on
false confessions. But in today's episode, we're going to unpack
(02:31):
the story not of an individual case, but the story
of how the junk science that's behind false confessions is
employed in the interrogation room. Here's our show. It's a
crisp fall morning, and you're on your way to the
first class of the day, psychology one onh one. Just
(02:54):
a few weeks ago, you started as a freshman at
this small college in Massachusetts and so far, psych is
your favorite class. You walk into your classroom and start
taking off your jacket while your teacher makes some announcements.
He says, the psychology department is conducting an experiment. Participation
is completely optional, but anyone who decides to participate will
(03:18):
receive extra credit. You're already doing really well in this class,
so the extra credit doesn't matter to you that much.
But you're curious to see what a psychological experiment will
be like, so you sign up. The next week, you
show up to the room where the experiment will be conducted.
When you get there, there's already another student waiting outside
(03:41):
who says she's also here for the experiment. It's not
long before a professor comes out into the hall to
greet you, and he's well, very professor looking. He wears
a tweed jacket and his hair is slightly gray. The
professor tells you, in a very authoritative tone, sit in
front of the computer. He then motions for the other
(04:03):
student to sit in the chair next to you. On
the table in front of her, there is a piece
of paper with letters printed on it. Then the professor
takes his seat across from you. Both. He says welcome,
thanks for joining us today. This experiment will test reaction times.
One student will read from a list of letters well,
(04:25):
the other will type out the letters that she calls out.
It's actually a very simple experiment. He pauses for a moment,
then looks you in the eye. Just one thing before
we begin, be very careful not to hit the alt key.
You see, it's right there next to the space bar.
The computer program we are using today is a little
(04:48):
bit finicky, and hitting that alt key will cause the
computer to crash. And if that happens, we'll lose all
of our data, and we wouldn't want that to happen.
It's not quite the experiment you were expecting, but it
sounds like it'll be, I guess, kind of fun. You
sit up straight, fingers hovering over the keyboard. The professor says,
(05:12):
let's get ready and begin. The student next to you
starts reading off letters B, A, J, B, T, S K.
The letters come quickly, but you keep up. You think
of this as a game, and you want to win.
You're laser focused on the task in front of you.
(05:35):
But then the screen suddenly glitches and then it goes black.
You sit there, frozen, staring at the blank screen. The
(05:58):
professor running the experiment sees the confused look on your
face and jumps up from his seat. He looks pissed.
He walks over to your side of the table, looks
at the blank screen and says, did you hit the
alt key? No? I didn't. I don't know why this happened.
I'm gonna ask you one more time. The professor says,
(06:20):
did you hit the alt key? I said no, I
really don't think I did. You're getting flustered, and the
professor is clearly angry. What a strange reaction. He stands
over you and picks up the keyboard and clicks some
keys and nothing happens. You did hit the alt key.
(06:43):
I know you did. He turns to the student who
is reading the letters and asks her if she saw
what happened. She says, hate to say it, but I
did see you hit the alt key. The professor storms
over to seat and starts writing furiously on his pad
of paper. You're confused, and you feel really bad, like
(07:08):
you've messed up the whole experiment. You didn't mean to.
You thought it was going well. But if the other
student said you did it, I mean the computer did crash.
You must have hit it by accident. The professor rips
off the top page of his writing pad and pushes
it toward you. Sign this, he says. You read what
(07:29):
the professor has scribbled down. It says, I hit the
all key and cause the computer program to crash. Data
was lost. Uh. I really don't think I hit it, professor,
you say. The professor is now fuming. He practically slams
the pen down on the table in front of you.
(07:52):
Sign it. The leader of this experiment will call you
later today. You think this guy's pretty pissed. I'll just
talk it through the organizer of the experiment When he calls, you,
pick up the pen and sign the paper. Just then,
another student walks into the room. The professor says to her,
(08:14):
we'll have to reschedule our appointment. As he leaves the
room to get his appointment book, mumbling something angry to himself,
the new student in the room raises her eyebrows at you.
She whispers, Hey, what happened? She must have heard all
of the yelling. I hit a key on the computer
that I wasn't supposed to, and I guess I crashed
(08:36):
the computer. You say, The professor comes back, he books
a new appointment with the girl who walks in. When
she leaves, he sits down and takes a deep breath
and says, it's okay. I didn't mean to get so upset.
Show me exactly what happened when you hit the old key.
(08:56):
You put your hands on the keyboard, and you say, well,
when I was going to hit the A button, I
hit the alt key with the side of my hand
by accident. The professor writes down a note on a
pad of paper, then looks up. Okay, great, His demeanor
totally changed. He suddenly calm and seems to be even cheery.
(09:21):
That's the end of the experiment. Thank you so much
for participating, and let me explain everything. He tells you
that the experiment was really not for testing reaction times,
but to study whether presenting someone with phony evidence and
then accusing them can lead that person to admit to
doing something that they did not do. Turns out, everyone
(09:46):
else that was in that room with you, the student
reading out the letters, the one that later asked you
what happened, they were all in on the experiment. The
professor tells you that you did not, in fact hit
the ald key. But you certainly aren't the only person
to falsely admit that you did. The story you just
(10:09):
heard is based on an experiment that was conducted by
psychology professor Saulcaston at Williams College in nineteen ninety six. Now,
he did the experiment to better understand why people confess
to crimes they did not commit. You might be thinking, well,
admitting to hitting an ald key sounds like a sort
(10:30):
of low stake scenario. It's nothing like admitting to a
rape or a murder, and that's precisely the point. In
the low stake scenario of Casson's experiment, it seems like
there would be less of a reason to lie. So
the experiment actually underscores how a combination of applying pressure
(10:51):
and false inculpatory evidence can cause someone to doubt themselves
to the point of admitting to something they did not
do in a low stress situation. So it logically follows
that when the stakes are as high as being accused
of something like rape or murder, the stress and vulnerability increases,
(11:12):
as does the likelihood that someone will falsely confess. Often
when I tell people about Chorus confessions, they say I
would never confess to something I didn't do. But if
you were able to relate to the student in this experiment,
if you could just imagine yourself second guessing your own
actions in that scenario, then it's likely that you too
(11:37):
are susceptible to the tactics that are often employed by
law enforcement to obtain a confession, regardless of whether you
are innocent or guilty. I'm Josh Dubin's civil rights and
criminal defense attorney, an innocent ambassador to the Innocence Project
in New York. Today, on Wrongful Conviction Junks Science, we
(12:01):
examine the psychology behind coerce confessions. Interrogation techniques that detectives
use when questioning a suspect are in fact, very efficient
and extremely effective. They routinely result in getting people to
confess to committing crimes, and that presents a really unique
dilemma for detectives investigating those crimes. They know that once
(12:25):
they get someone in that windowless room of a police precinct,
they will oftentimes be able to get them to confess,
which means those detectives better have real evidence, not merely
a gut feeling or a hunch, real proof tying a
suspect to a crime before subjecting them to the crucible
(12:47):
of an interrogation, because while this process is great at
getting guilty people to confess to crimes they committed, it
is also great for getting innocent people to confess the
crimes they did not commit.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
When three dozen former Brooklyn Navy yard workers found themselves
irreparably poisoned by the asbestos they used in the construction
of the battleships that won World War Two, Perry Whites
and Arthur Luxembourg literally put everything on the line to
successfully represent them. Since then, they've championed the rights of
over fifty thousand regular Americans injured through the negligence and
(13:27):
malfeasance of mainly large corporations. Their ability to level the
playing field against seemingly insurmountable odds has led them to
litigate against opponents as diverse as Big Pharma all the
way to those responsible for rendering the water of Flint,
Michigan undrinkable. Whites and Luxembourg take it personally when there's
a miscarriage of justice anywhere, and therefore they feel a
(13:50):
sense of responsibility to support Bramfel Conviction podcasts. You can
learn more about them by visiting whiteeslux dot com. That's
weitz lx dot com.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Coarse confessions have been a part of our criminal justice
system for a long time. Take for example, the case
of Stephen Born in eighteen nineteen, detectives found three big
bones in Stephen's backyard in Vermont. The police alleged that
the bones belonged to his brother in law, who had
gone missing and was presumed to have been murdered. The
(14:31):
police told Stephen, the only way you're going to avoid
the death penalty is to confess and stand trial, and
so Stephen confessed. He put his fate in the hands
of a jury who declared him guilty of murdering his
brother in law. Stephen was convicted and sentenced to death.
Luckily for him, before his execution date, his brother in
(14:54):
law was found alive and well hanging out in New Jersey.
And those bones they found the stea Evan's backyard turns
out they were animal bones all along. He was lucky
to escape the gallows. And still, even after so many
false confessions, just like Stephen Bourne's, the confession of a
(15:15):
suspect continues to be seen as the gold standard and
evidence of a person's guilt. Jurors can never seem to
wrap their heads around the fact that someone might confess
to a crime they didn't commit, and the tactic for
obtaining a confession from a suspect only got better. In
(15:36):
nineteen forty seven, a detective named John Reid began to
distill the methods and principles of interrogations into a scientific
procedure designed to increase the likelihood that a suspect would confess.
John Reid was a polygraph expert for the Chicago Police
(15:57):
when he began to develop his nine step process, is
called the Read technique. He claimed that his technique could
diagnose truth interception. The re technique spread throughout the country
and is still popular today. According to the Red and
Associate's website, over half a million law enforcement and security
(16:18):
officers have attended their training programs. And while John Reid's
technique indeed increased the likelihood of securing a confession from
crime suspects, not much had been done to understand whether
these tactics produced confessions that were actually accurate and truthful.
That is until Saul Cassen began conducting his computer crash
(16:41):
experiments at Williams College. Doctor Casson's experiment tested for some
of the variables that are often used during the red technique.
The first variable is vulnerability. Cassen made his test subjects
feel vulnerable by putting them in the mildly stressful set
situation of having them type letters at a rapid pace.
(17:04):
Another variable was false incriminating evidence. When students in the
experiment were told that someone saw them hit the alt key,
they were much more likely to sign a confession. In fact,
of the students who were asked to type at a
fast pace and then we're told that someone saw them
hit the alt key, one hundred percent of them confessed.
(17:29):
Although none of them actually hit the alt key, they
all admitted to the crime when presented with false incriminating evidence.
On top of that, sixty five percent of students who
were presented with false incriminating evidence actually believed in their
own guilt. This was measured by how many of the
students said, I hit the key when that third student,
(17:51):
remember the one that enters the room for their quote
unquote appointment, A seemingly more neutral party comes into the
room and says, hey, what happened. Finally, thirty five percent
of the students actually internalize their guilt to such a
degree that they made up details about it by saying,
for example, oh, I hit the alt key with the
(18:12):
side of my hand. The fact is that none of
these students had hit the alt key, yet under these
controlled conditions, they confess to something they didn't do. Inducing
vulnerability and presenting false, incriminating evidence are the cornerstones of
the red technique. What doctor Casson's experiment shows is that
(18:34):
interrogation techniques like John Reid's are a recipe for causing
innocent people to admit to things that they did not do.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
You can flip a coin and be as accurate in
determining whether somebody is telling the truth or not as
a trained police officer, and trained police officers are no
more effective at that than your average person. And in fact,
there have been numerous psychological studies and nothing correlates to
(19:07):
being able to do that to any degree of scientific validity.
And that's really where the junk science of this technique
comes in, because the reality is you can't tell whether
or not somebody is lying by verbal and nonverbal behavior.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
So with us today we have the amazing David Rudolph
David is a phenomenal, phenomenal criminal defense attorney, civil rights attorney,
criminal justice reform advocate. The list goes on and on.
He is a friend of mine, a personal hero of mine,
and many of you have probably seen him in the
(19:49):
Netflix series The Staircase, which followed the trials of his client,
Michael Peterson, who was accused of murdering his wife. Now,
David has worked on countless wrongful conviction cases and cases
in which people have found themselves sitting in an interrogation
room getting broken down by detectives. And he is someone
(20:13):
who has studied corese confessions and really dug into how
the psychological techniques used by these interrogators can result in
a wrongful conviction. So, David, I want to dive right
into the red technique. What is it and how is
it different than say, standard police interview.
Speaker 4 (20:33):
When you're trying to elicit information, what you're really doing
is interviewing, not interrogating. You're asking open ended questions, You're
following up on things, not for the purpose of confronting
the person, but rather for the purpose of finding out
what actually happened, and that's not designed to get a confession.
(20:55):
The retechnique is simply a protocol for how to interrogate someone,
and this is important who you already believe is guilty.
You don't use the retechnique in order to elicit information.
You only use the retechnique in order to secure admissions
and then ultimately a confession.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Okay, so let's talk about that for a second, because
you said something interesting, and that is that the interrogator
will actually use this technique on the person they believe
to be the guilty suspect. They might not have any
physical evidence to prove that, but they have a hunch,
or they're zeroing in on someone because of tunnel vision,
(21:39):
whatever the case may be. They think this is their guy,
and they bring that person in for questioning. And they're
not simply trying to find out the truth, right, They're
sole objective when they employ this technique is to get
a confession.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Absolutely. It's intuition plus arrogance. You know that. That's my
recipe for how this all starts. You have a police
officer who's done one hundred five hundred one thousand investigations
and they know who they like for the crime. You know,
if it's a wife who's dead, they like the husband
immediately if the husband has a mistress, well that's the clincher.
(22:20):
So there's all these sort of preconceptions, and then the
arrogance is that they know because they've done it so
many times. And you know, part of what we ought
to recognize here is that when you're doing that, you're
obviously already thinking the person's guilty, and so confirmation bias
is going to start leaking in. And this is especially
true and it's ironic where there's not much other evidence.
(22:44):
Picture this situation. So there's a vicious crime, just an
awful uproar in the community, and this police officer believes,
legitimately believes that this other person is the purp, but
there's no evidence. The pressure to get that person to
confess becomes enormous because if you don't, then there's no case.
(23:09):
And so ironically enough, there's much more pressure to get
a false confession when there's no evidence. So that means
there's much more pressure to get a false confession when
the person is innocent.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
So David walk us through this technique. Let's say you
have a husband suspected of killing his wife. Police ask
them to come down to the station. What's the first
thing that happens.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
What you do in the retechnique is first you isolate
the person. You put the person in an uncomfortable position,
You shut them off from any support system, and you
make them anxious so that they're more susceptible to the
other techniques that are going to follow, and so the
(23:57):
person is feeling vulnerable. When you feel vulnerable, you're much
more likely to give in to pressure, particularly if you're
all alone in a strange place, surrounded by imposing authority
figures who have guns. I don't think there's very many
people who wouldn't feel a bit of panic at that situation,
(24:22):
just psychological panic. So it's a whole notion of creating
a situation where you are uncomfortable that you want to
get out of, and then creating a situation where the
only way out is to say what those bullies want
you to say.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
You know, I'm imagining the guy in our hypothetical who
is probably just overcome with grief from having just lost
his wife, and then the last place he wants to
be is where he ends up, you know, in some
dank room at a police station, and it's you know,
(25:09):
got no windows, it's always got those uncomfortable chairs and
they leave them to cool as heels right, and he
sits there by himself for a while, and then the
detectives come in and the questions start, and tell our
listeners what techniques the interrogators use to sort of capitalize
(25:32):
on his vulnerability.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
What you do during the interview phase is you ask
a series of questions, some of which are called behavior
provoking questions, and there are questions that are designed, at
least in the officer's mind, to provoke responses that they
can then use to determine whether the person is telling
the truth or not. So, you know, it might be
(25:55):
questions like why would somebody be saying that you were
at the crime scene if you really weren't, Or what
do you think should happen to the person who did this?
You know, when you ask a husband, why would your
own friends be saying that they think that you might
have done this? And you're thinking to yourself, well, you know,
(26:19):
maybe some of my friends saw that time when you know,
my wife and I got into an argument over the
car or whatever it is. And so you're just trying
to come up with some explanation because the officer is
asking you for one, and you minimize it because it
wasn't a big deal, and so you talk about it,
and then all of a sudden, that then becomes the
(26:42):
takeoff point. Well, that wasn't the only time that you
had an argument, wasn't. No, it wasn't the only time
we had an argument. Well, let's talk about some of
the other times you had arguments. And the idea is
that if you ask enough of these behavior inducing questions, you,
as a trained police officer, sir, looking at verbal and
nonverbal cues, you know, hesitation, how their eyes are looking,
(27:07):
that you can tell if they're lying or not.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
A lot of us have this notion that investigators have
this heightened ability to tell if someone is lying or not,
and that's just not the case. We know that there's
no science to back up that an officer can tell
if you are or are not telling the truth. But
that doesn't help the person sitting in that interrogation chair.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
Any answer you give is subject to confirmation, bias, and interpretation.
And that's why this whole thing is junk science. There's
no logic to it, there's no basis for it. It's simply,
let me ask a couple of hard questions and see
if the person is getting nervous or more nervous.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
Okay, So now the cop is certain, at least in
his or her mind, that the person in front of
them committed the crime, even though there's no proof to
back that job. So what's the next step.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
Now? The goal is to get the confession, especially as
I said earlier, when there's no other evidence. So the
tone of the whole conversation changes. It now turns sharp,
and all of a sudden, the officer says, listen, you know,
we've been talking for a while and I just have
to tell you. We know you're guilty. The person says, well, no,
(28:25):
I'm not, and the officer says, well, don't bother lying to.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Me about it.
Speaker 4 (28:31):
So the person says, no, I didn't do it. Well,
then can you explain why your DNA is on the knife?
The officer says, you know, maybe it was so horrible
that you've blotted it out of your memory. You know,
maybe that's why you don't remember it. But but how
do you explain that that DNA.
Speaker 2 (28:50):
Is on that knife?
Speaker 4 (28:52):
And there is no DNA on the knife? But the
officer is now alying to the person in order to
end use the person to be sort of incredulous about
his own guilt or innocence. And so there are cases
where people actually become convinced people are innocent, become convinced that, yeah,
(29:17):
maybe I actually did this, or yeah I did this,
and the person knows they didn't. But yet if they're
told that they did, at some point they become convinced
that they must have done it. Why else would this
person be saying that?
Speaker 2 (29:34):
And I think the most important point here is that
a lot of people think that the police can't lie
to them.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
And in fact, in most countries they can't. In the
Great Britain, the cops cannot lie to you about the evidence.
But our Supreme Court has said, oh no, it's fine
for you to lie to a suspect about the evidence,
because after all, he or she knows if he's innocent,
that it can't be true. That ignores the psychology of it.
(30:02):
The truth of the matter is that cops are allowed
to lie during interrogations everywhere in the United States, because
the United States Supreme Court has said that's not a
violation of due process, and it's outrageous. Why should they
be able to lie to you about something as serious
as a crime. And the evidence of a crime. I'm
(30:24):
not aware of any other English speaking country where that's okay.
It's not okay in Canada, it's not okay in Great Britain,
it's not okay in Australia or New Zealand. We are
the only country I'm aware of where that's permissible. And
that's a big, big problem that needs to be corrected.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
I mean, look, I try to put myself in these
people's shoes all the time, and I think about what
it would be like if an officer said to me
that my friend claimed that I murdered someone when I didn't,
and that there's DNA evidence against me. I mean, I
would feel just totally screwed, you know, scared alone. And
(31:11):
you know, after these interrogators confront the suspect, they say
we have this evidence. They might even tell them that
they have witnesses that have identified them at the scene.
They give all of this false, incriminating evidence. This is
constant psychological pressure being applied to a suspect, and it
(31:31):
is increasing their vulnerability. Okay, the suspect gets more and
more scared, more upset, and the detective starts talking about
the serious consequences and the suspect is starting to get
convinced that, you know, they're going to go to prison
for something they didn't do, so tell us what typically
(31:55):
happens next.
Speaker 4 (31:56):
What happens is the police go into minimization, moral justifications
excuses for the potential behavior. So they say things like, well,
you know, we can understand how this might have happened.
I mean, you know, you may have been provoked, maybe
this was in self defense. From the minimization, they go
(32:18):
to two other techniques, and I'll call them active encouragement
and alternative theories. So active encouragement is they're trying to
sort of say, you know, we're just trying to help
you here. It's going to look a lot better for
you if you explain that this was just because your
uncle made you do it than if the DA and
(32:42):
the jury thinks you did this because you're a monster.
You're telling them that he's going to you're going to
be charged based on this evidence, and now you're providing
this lifeline if you will. I've had situations where people
have been told if you don't confess, you're going to
get life. If you do confess, we'll treat you as
(33:02):
a juvenile offender.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
So what's happening here is that the person is told
you don't really have any good or attractive options.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:12):
They're often told, as you said, you're going to get
life in prison or even the death sentence if you
don't confess, and the interrogators tell them that confessing will
at least get them the better of two horrible options. Right,
You'll get life instead of the death penalty. It doesn't
really leave the innocent person with much of a choice,
does it.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
To top it all off, Josh, if you're innocent and
all you want to do is get out of that room,
you know, you've now been in there for two hours,
three hours, four hours, they haven't accepted any of your denials,
and now you just wanted to stop. And what you
think to yourself, if you're innocent, is if I just
(33:56):
agree with what they're saying. If I just agree with
what they're saying, this is going to stop. And when
I get out of here, you know, I can explain
why this happened, and I and everyone's going to understand
that I'm innocent because that's what the evidence is going
to show.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (34:12):
And you know, it just becomes the path of least resistance.
The other piece you need to understand is it's not
just a person saying I'm guilty, because that's just the
first step.
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Right, because a jury's got to be able to believe it.
The confession has to sound convincing.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
You know.
Speaker 4 (34:30):
If all it was was the person said, yeah, I
did it, I don't think a jury's going to give
that a whole lot of weight. But when the person's
confession includes details that only the perpetrator could know, well,
the perpetrator and the police. Once it has those details,
it becomes persuasive evidence. It's not just why would an
(34:53):
innocent person confess? It's how would an innocent person know
these things? And that's where the power comes in, you know.
It's the details about where the attack occurred, how it occurred,
what weapon was used, how long it took, what time
it occurred. All of these are fed into the person,
(35:13):
you know, with leading questions. So do you remember it
was about nine pm when you finally entered the house,
you know? And when you went into the house, do
you remember that the first place you went was into
the kitchen and that's where you found the knife. Right,
So there's all these leading questions that if you're innocent,
(35:35):
and you're trying to get out of there. You're accepting
you don't even have to say it, you just say
yeah or mm hm, and those then get incorporated into
a written statement. And you've already gone so far as
to say all this, so you figure, what the hell,
I'll sign it, and then your life is over.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
So, David, what can we do here? The system keeps
on on churning out false confessions? How do we get
this to stop?
Speaker 4 (36:05):
Stop using this particular technique. It's an enormously effective technique
to get guilty people to confess. We can all agree
on that. The problem is it's also an enormously effective
technique to get innocent people to confess.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
I think certain law enforcement officials in this country might
resist that because they'll think, well, if we don't use this,
then we are losing this critical tool for getting suspects
to confess. And if we don't have this, then we're
not going to be able to convict someone who committed
a crime. But that's not really the case, right because
(36:45):
there are other more reliable techniques out there. So tell
us about some other ways that detectives can obtain a
confession that doesn't employ or doesn't include employing the re technique.
Speaker 4 (37:01):
In Great Britain, they use a completely different method, and
it's called the piece method Peacee And you don't try
to force the conversation in any particular way. You're simply
conducting a really thorough interrogation or interview that has been
planned out in advance. You know exactly what you're going
(37:22):
to ask, you know what you want to talk about,
you know what you want to ask questions about, you
know what evidence there is, and so you can judge
the validity of what the person's saying by the actual evidence,
not by false evidence. And it's a completely different technique
and it is not something that results in the kinds
(37:43):
of false confessions that you see in the United States.
If there's other evidence, then you don't necessarily need the confession.
All you may need are some inconsistencies in the person's
statement to sort of nail the case down. And if
there is no other evidence, why would you try to
(38:06):
get a confession where the confession may very well not
be accurate.
Speaker 2 (38:12):
Now, another part of the problem here that we touched
on a bit is not just the false confession, but
also how convincing it ends up being. When it is
presented to a jury. Is there any insight into what
other countries do in that regard?
Speaker 4 (38:29):
You know, in the United States, a jury has to
come back with either guilty or not guilty, and not
guilty sort of implies innocence. In Scotland, there's a verdict
called not proven, and I think the verdicts in every
country should be either proven or not proven, because if
(38:51):
that was the verdict, the presumption of innocence becomes less
important in a sense, because the focus is on did
the state prove its case right?
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Because a journam might be thinking shit, if I say
not guilty, What I'm really saying is that the person
absolutely didn't do it. And what I really want to
say is that who knows. The person may have done it,
but the prosecution just did improve their case. So if
you include this other sort of line item or this
(39:24):
notion that they have in Scotland not proven on the
verdict form, it would actually be a way to protect
the presumption of innocence exactly.
Speaker 4 (39:35):
I think that that would go a long way towards
focusing juror's attention on the actual question.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
These seem to be really big changes that are going
to take a lot of time and effort to accomplish.
We like to be able to provide our listeners with
some insight into what they can be doing to help
change the system. So what would you tell our listeners
they can be doing to help effectuate change, especially when
it comes to wrongful confessions or coerce confessions.
Speaker 4 (40:09):
Please go sit on juris to talk to your fellow
jurors and talk to your friends and neighbors and co
workers about these issues. When you hear somebody's confess to
a crime, go and talk with other people and explain
that it may not be what it seems, because that's
(40:29):
how this changes. It changes from the bottom up, not
from the top down.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
What I want for all of you to take away
from today's episode is some practical advice. Now you might
be thinking I'll never be in this situation. This would
never happen to me. I'm sure that most people that
have ended up being interrogated by the police thought the
exact same thing. It's not going to happen to me
(40:57):
until it does. Unfortunately, your innocence is not a safeguard
against being incarcerated. As we discussed in this episode, innocent
people are often more likely to falsely confess than the
actual perpetrator of a crime for a few reasons. First,
(41:17):
they think that because they're innocent, they don't need a lawyer.
They'll just go in there, speak to the cops, tell
them the truth, and that'll be that. The problem is
that interrogators who are following the read technique don't take
the words you say at face value. Instead, they look
behind the words and look for reasons why those words
(41:41):
support your guilt. Remember, most of the time, they have
decided that you were probably involved before you even get
in that room. That is why you are being interrogated
in the first place. Another reason why many innocent people
confess is because none of us are immune from the
effects of the psychological warfare administered under conditions that are
(42:03):
simply the perfect storm for vulnerability. And believe me, it
happens to the toughest among us I have seen it.
It is simply too difficult to withstand that type of
pressure until the day comes when we are able to
enact the type of reform that David talked about, things
like preventing law enforcement from lying to suspects about the
(42:26):
existence of evidence tying them to the crime. The reality
is that we all need to protect ourselves. Preventing false
confessions starts with an understanding of the tactics investigators use.
You are now armed with that knowledge, and it should
always end with if God forbid you ever find yourself
(42:47):
being interrogated. Is my name is Christopher Ochoa, John Restivo,
Sante Trible, Clementia Geary, and I want to lawyer and
you don't answer a single question after that. Next week
(43:11):
we'll explore the junk signs of roadside drug testing with
Greg Glaud. Wrongful Conviction Junk Science is a production of
Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number One.
Thanks to our executive producer Jason Flamm and the team
at Signal Company Number one executive producer Kevin Wardis and
(43:31):
senior producers Kara Kornhaber and Britz Spangler. Our music was
composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram
at dubin Josh. Follow the Wrongful Conviction podcast on Facebook
and on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Twitter at
wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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