#165 Wrongful Conviction: Junk Science - Coerced Confession Evidence

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.

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.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi everyone. In our feed you've probably heard the podcast
Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions, hosted by Laura and I Writer
and Steve Drizzen, where 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 bite mark evidence, blood

(00:25):
stained pattern analysis, 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 of wrongful convictions are based on

(00:47):
false confessions. But in today's episode, we're going to unpack
the story not of an individual case, but the story
of how the junk science that's behind false confessions employed
in the interrogation room. Here's our show. It's a crisp

(01:08):
fall morning and you're on your way to the first
class of the day, psychology one on one. Just 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,

(01:30):
the psychology department is conducting an experiment. Participation is completely optional,
but anyone who decides to participate will 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,

(01:50):
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 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

(02:13):
jacket and his hair is slightly gray. The professor tells
you in a very authoritative tone, to sit in front
of the computer. He then motions for the other student
to sit in the chair next to you. On the
table in front of her, there's a piece of paper
with letters printed on it. Then the professor takes his

(02:34):
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, the
other will type out the letters that she calls out.
It's actually a very simple experiment. He pauses for a moment,

(02:54):
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
bit finicky, and hitting that alt key will cause the
computerative crash, and if that happens, will lose all of

(03:15):
our data, and we wouldn't want that to happen. It's
not quite the experiment you were expecting, but it sounds
like it will be, I guess kind of fun. You
sit up straight, fingers hovering over the keyboard. The professor says,
let's get ready and begin. The student next to you

(03:38):
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.
Your laser focused on the task in front of you.
But then the screen suddenly glitches and then it goes black.

(04:14):
You sit there, frozen, staring at the blank screen. The
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.

(04:36):
I'm going to ask you one more time. The professor says,
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 click some keys,

(04:59):
and thing happens. You did hit the alt key. I
know you did. He turns to the student who was
reading the letters and asked her if she saw what happened.
She says, I hate to say it, but I did
see you hit the alt key. The professor storms over

(05:20):
to his seat and starts writing furiously on his pad
of paper. You're confused, and you feel really bad, like
you've messed up the whole experiment. You didn't mean to.
You thought it was going well. But if the other
students said you did it, I mean the computer did crash.
You must have hit it by accident. The professor rips

(05:42):
off the top page of his writing pad and pushes
it towards you. Sine this, he says. You read what
the professor has scribbled down. It says, I hit the
alt key and caused the computer program to crash. Data
was lost. Uh. I really don't think I hit it, professor,

(06:03):
you say. The professor is now fuming. He practically slams
the pen down on the table in front of you.
Sign it. The leader of this experiment will call you
later today. You think this guy is pretty piste. I'll
just talk it through the organizer of the experiment. When

(06:24):
he calls, you, pick up the pen and sign the paper.
Just then, another student walks into the room. The professor
says to her, 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?

(06:49):
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 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

(07:10):
didn't mean to get so upset. Show me exactly what
happened when you hit the alt key. You put your
hands on the keyboard, and you say, well, when I
was going to hit the A button, I I hit
the alt key with the side of my hand by accident.
The professor writes down a note on a pad of paper,

(07:32):
then looks up. Okay, great, his demeanor totally changed. He
suddenly common seems to be even cheery. 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 weather.

(07:55):
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 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

(08:19):
you did not in fact hit the old key, but
you certainly aren't the only person to falsely admit that
you did. The story you just heard is based on
an experiment that was conducted by psychology professor Saulcasting at
Williams College. Now. He did the experiment to better understand

(08:41):
why people confess the crimes they did not commit. You
might be thinking, well, admitting to hitting an alt key
sounds like a sort of low stake scenario. It's nothing
like admitting to a rape or a murder, and that's
precisely the point. In the low state scenario of Casson's experiment.

(09:02):
It seems like there would be less of a reason
to lie. So the experiment actually underscores how a combination
of applying pressure and false and culplatory evidence can cause
someone to doubt themselves to the point of admitting to
something they did not do, even in a low stress situation.

(09:23):
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, as does the likelihood that
someone will falsely confess. Often when I tell people about
course confessions, they say, I would never confess to something

(09:44):
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 are susceptible to the
tactics that are often employed by law enforcement to obtain
a confession, regardless of whether you are innocent or guilty.

(10:10):
I'm Josh Duben's civil rights and criminal defense attorney and
innocence ambassador to the Innocence Project in New York. Today,
on Wrongful Conviction Junk Science, we examine the psychology behind
commerce confessions. Interrogation techniques that detectives use when questioning a
suspect are in fact very efficient and extremely effective. They

(10:35):
routinely result in getting people to confess the committing crimes,
and that presents a really unique dilemma for detectives investigating
those crimes. They know that once they get someone in
that windowless room of a police precinct, they will oftentimes
be able to get them to confess, which means those

(10:55):
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 of an interrogation
because while this process is great at getting guilty people
to confess to crimes they committed, it is also great

(11:17):
for getting innocent people to confess the crimes they did
not commit. 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 putting everything on the

(11:39):
line to successfully represent them. Since then, they have championed
the rights of over fifty thousand regular Americans injured through
the negligence and 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

(12:02):
water of Flint, Michigan undrinkable. Whites and Luxembourg ticket personally
when there's a miscarriage of justice anywhere, and therefore they
feel a sense of responsibility to support Bronto conviction podcasts.
You can learn more about them by visiting Whites lux
dot com. That's w e I t Z l u
X dot Com. Course, confessions have been a part of

(12:31):
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 Steven's backyard and 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 police told Stephen, the only way you're going to

(12:53):
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
law was found alive and well hanging out in New Jersey,

(13:17):
and those bones they found in Stephen's backyard turns out
there were animal bones all along. He was lucky to
escape the gallows. And still, even after so many false confessions,
just like Stephen Bournes, the confession of a suspect continues
to be seen as the gold standard and evidence of

(13:39):
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 seven a
detective named John Reid began to de still the methods

(14:01):
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 when he
began to develop his nine step process, called the Read technique.

(14:22):
He claimed that his technique could diagnose truth and deception.
The Red technique spread throughout the country and is still
popular today. According to the Reading Associate's website, over half
a million law enforcement and security officers have attended their
training programs. And while John Reid's technique indeed increase the

(14:44):
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
Casson began conducting his computer crash experiments at Williams College.
Dr Casson's experiment tested for some of the variables that

(15:07):
are often used during the Red technique. The first variable
is vulnerability. Casson made his test subjects feel vulnerable by
putting them in the mildly stressful situation of having them
type letters at a rapid pace. Another variable was false
incriminating evidence. When students in the experiment were told that

(15:31):
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, a hundred percent of them confess. Although none
of them actually hit the alt key, they all admitted

(15:52):
to the crime when presented with false incriminating evidence. On
top of that, six 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, remember the one
that enters the room for their quote unquote appointment, seemingly

(16:15):
more neutral party comes into the room and says, hey,
what happened. Finally, thirty five percent of the students actually
internalized 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 side of my hand.
The fact is that none of these students had hit

(16:36):
the alt key, yet under these controlled conditions, they confessed
to something they didn't do. Inducing vulnerability and presenting false,
incriminating evidence are the cornerstones of the read technique. What
Dr Casson's experiment shows is that interrogation techniques like John
Reid's are a recipe for causing innocent people to admit

(17:00):
to things that they did not do. You can flip
a coin and be as accurate 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

(17:22):
numerous psychological studies and nothing correlates to 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. So with

(17:47):
us today we have the amazing David Rudolph. David is
a phenomenal, phenomenal criminal defense attorneys, civil rights attorney, criminal
justice reform avage, and 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

(18:09):
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

(18:32):
who has studied course 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 read technique. What is it and how is
it different than say, uh, standard police interview When you're

(18:53):
trying to elicit information, what you're really doing is interviewing,
not interrogating. You're asking open ended questions, You're 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. The re

(19:15):
technique is simply a protocol for how to interrogate someone.
And this is important who you already believe is guilty. Uh,
you don't use the re technique in order to elicit information.
You only use the re technique in order to secure
admissions and then ultimately a confession. Okay, so let's talk

(19:38):
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 there's zeroing in on
someone because of tunnel vision, whatever the case, maybe they

(20:00):
think this is their guy, um, 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
employed this technique is to get a confession. Absolutely, it's
it's it's intuition plus arrogance. You know that. That's my
recipe for how this all starts. You have a police

(20:23):
officer who's done a hundred five hundred 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 that's the clincher.
So there's all these sort of preconceptions and then the
arrogance is that they know because they've done it so

(20:46):
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 is guilty, and so confirmation
bias is going to start leaking in. And this is
especially true where and it's ironic, where there's not much
other evidence. Picture this situation. So there's a vicious crime,

(21:08):
just an awful uproar in the community, and this police
officer believes, legitimately believes that this other person is the purpose,
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. And so ironically enough, there's much more pressure

(21:32):
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. So David walk us
through this technique. Let's say you have a husband suspected
of killing his wife. Police ask him to come down

(21:53):
to the station. What's the first thing that happens. What
you do in the re technique 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

(22:13):
other techniques that are going to follow. And so the
person is feeling vulnerable. And when you feel vulnerable, you're
much more likely to give in too 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

(22:35):
many people who wouldn't feel a bit of panic at
that situation, 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

(22:56):
bullies want you to say. 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

(23:19):
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, 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

(23:44):
tell our our listeners what techniques the interrogators used to
sort of capitalize on his vulnerability. 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,

(24:06):
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 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

(24:31):
that they think that you might have done this? And
you're thinking to yourself, well, you know, 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 officers asking you for one,

(24:53):
and you 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 to take off 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

(25:14):
these behavior inducing questions, you as a trained police officer
looking at verbal and nonverbal cues, you know, hesitation, how
their eyes are looking, that you can tell if they're
lying or not. 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.

(25:36):
We know that there's no science to back up that
an officer can tell if you are or not telling
the truth. But that doesn't help the person sitting in
that interrogation chair. Any answer you give is subject to confirmation, bias,
and interpretation. And that's why this whole thing is junk science.

(25:57):
There's no there's no logic to it, there's no 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. Okay, so now the cop
is certain, at least in in his or her mind,
that the person in front of them committed the crime,
even though there's no proof to back that hunch up.

(26:19):
So what's the next step 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,

(26:41):
and I just have to tell you. We know you're guilty.
The person says, well, no, I'm not, and and the
officer says, well, don't don't bother lyne to me about it.
So the person says, no, I didn't do it. Well,
then can you explain why your d n A is
on the knife? The officer says, you know, maybe it
was so horrible that you've blotted out of your memory.

(27:04):
You know, maybe that's why you don't remember it. But
but how do you explain that that DNA is on
that knife? And there is no DNA on the knife?
But the officer is now a lying to the person
in order to induce the person to be sort of
incredulous about his own guilt or innocence. Uh, And and

(27:27):
so there are cases where people actually become convinced people
are innocent, become convinced that, yeah, 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.

(27:50):
Why else would this person be saying that? And I
think the most important point here is that a lot
of people think that the police can't lie to them,
and 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,

(28:10):
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. Well, that ignores
the psychology of it. 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.

(28:35):
Why should they be able to lie to you about
something as serious as a crime and the evidence of
a crime. I'm 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

(28:56):
of where that's permissible. And that's a big, big problem
that needs to be corrected. 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

(29:17):
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 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

(29:38):
identified them at the scene. They give all of this false,
incriminating evidence. This is um constant psychological pressure being applied
to a suspect, and it is increasing their vulnerability. Okay,
the suspect gets more and more scared, more upset, and
the detective starts talking about the series consequences, and the

(30:04):
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 what typically happens next. What happens
is the police go into minimization, moral justifications excuses for
the potential behavior. So they say things like, well, you know,

(30:26):
we can understand how this might have happened. I mean, uh,
you know, you may have been provoked, maybe this was
in self defense. From from the minimization, they go to
two other techniques, and I'll call them active encouragement and
alternative theories. So active encouragement is they're trying to sort

(30:47):
of say, you know, we're just trying to help you here.
It's gonna look a lot better for you if you
explain that this was just because your uncle made you
do it. Then if the d A and the jury
thinks you did discuss, you're a monster. You're telling them
that he's gonna do. You're gonna be charged based on
this evidence, and now you're providing this lifeline if you will.

(31:12):
I've had situations where people have been told, if you
don't confess, you're going to get life. If you do confess,
will treat you as a juvenile offender. So what's happening
here is that the person is told you don't really
have any any good or attractive options. Right. They're often told,

(31:32):
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.
To top it all off, Josh, if you're innocent, and

(31:56):
all you wanna 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
agree with what they're saying, If I just agree with

(32:17):
what they're saying, this is gonna stop. And when I
get out of here, you know, I can explain why
this happened, and I and everyone's gonna understand that I'm
innocent because that's what the evidence is going to show. Uh.
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

(32:41):
first step, right, because a jury has got to be
able to believe it. The confession has to sound convincing.
You know. If all it was was the person said, yeah,
I did it, I don't think a jury is going
to give that a whole lot of weight. But when
the person's confession includes details that only the perpetrator could know, well,

(33:02):
the perpetrator and the police. Once it has those details,
it becomes persuasive evidence. It's not just why would an
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,

(33:25):
what weapon was used, how long it took, what time
it occurred. All of these are fed into the person,
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, Uh,
do you remember that the first place you went was
into the kitchen and and that's where you found the knife. Right,

(33:48):
So there's all these leading questions that if you're innocent
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 m hmm, and those then get incorporated into
a written statement. Uh. And you've already gone so far

(34:09):
as to say all this, so you figure what the
hell out sign it, and then your life is over.
So David, what can we do here? Um, the system
keeps on churning out false confessions? How do we get
this to stop? Stop using this particular technique. It's an
enormously effective technique to get guilty people to confess. We

(34:32):
can all agree on that. The problem is, it's also
an enormously effective technique to get innocent people to confess.
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

(34:53):
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
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 read technique.

(35:20):
In Great Britain, they use a completely different method and
it's called the peace method p E A c E.
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

(35:40):
exactly what you're gonna 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 is
saying by the actual evidence, not by false evidence. Uh.
And it's a completely different technique, and it is not

(36:00):
something that results in the kinds of false confessions that
you see in the United States. If there's other evidence, uh,
then you don't necessarily need the confession. You All you
may need are some inconsistencies in the person's statement to
sort of nail the case down. And if there is

(36:21):
no other evidence, why would you try to get a
confession where the confession may very well not be accurate. 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

(36:42):
to a jury. Is there any insight into what other
countries do in that regard? 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. Uh.
In Scotland, UH, there's a verdict called not proven uh.

(37:03):
And I think the verdicts in in every country should
be either proven or not proven, because if that was
the verdict, the presumption of innocence becomes less um less
important in a sense, because the focuses on did the
state prove its case? Right, Because a journey might be thinking, shit,

(37:25):
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 didn't prove
their case. So if you include this other sort of
line item or this notion that they have in Scotland

(37:45):
not proven on the verdict form, it would actually be
a way to protect the presumption of innocence exactly. I
think that that that would go a long way towards
focusing juror's attention on the actual question. These seem to
be really big changes that are going to take a
lot of time and effort to accomplish. We like to

(38:09):
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 um confessions or coerce confessions. Please go sit on juries,

(38:30):
talk to talk to your fellow jurors, and and talk
to your friends and neighbors and co workers about these issues.
When you hear somebody's confess uh to a crime, go
and talk with other people and explain that it may
not be what it seems, because that's how this changes.
It changes from the bottom up, not from the top down.

(38:54):
What I want for all of you to take away
from today's episode is some practical advice out 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 gonna happen to me until

(39:16):
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, they

(39:36):
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 will be that. The problem
is that interrogators who are following the red technique don't
take the words you say at face value. Instead, they
look behind the words and look for reasons why those

(39:59):
words 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 were 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

(40:22):
are 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

(40:45):
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

(41:06):
being interrogated, is my name is Christopher Ochoa, John Restivo,
Sante Triple Clementia Geary, and I want a lawyer, and
you don't answer a single question after that. Next week

(41:30):
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 Flom and the team,
it's Signal Company number One executive producer Kevin Wardis and

(41:50):
senior producers Kara Cornhaber and Brit Spangler. Our music was
composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram
at dubin Dot. Josh followed the Wrongful Conviction podcast on
Facebook and on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Twitter
at wrong Conviction