that our system has eliminated the cruel tactics that once led people to admit to crimes they didn’tcommit. There is a long history of harsh coercion directed at suspects.As Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote in 1940, “The rack, the thumbscrew, the wheel, solitary confinement, protracted questioning and cross questioning…left their wake of mutilated bodies and shattered minds along the way to the cross, the guillotine, the stake and the hangman’s noose.”Indeed, before the 1930s, it was common to get suspects to confess by subjecting them to what was known as the “third degree”—including significant physical pain.But that has been abandoned in the back room of history.
Juan Rivera, though, did falsely confess—and he is not alone.False confessions and incriminating statements are the leading contributors to wrongful homicide convictions, present in over 60 percent of the known DNA murder-exoneration cases in the United States.More broadly, they appear to have been a factor in about 25 percent of all post-conviction exonerations.
These cases tend to confound our expectations: physical coercion is rare, the confessions are often rich in detail, and multiple innocent suspects may confess to acting together.Indeed, in one of the most famous examples—the so-called Central Park Jogger case—five teenagers all admitted to participating in the brutal rape of a woman only to be exonerated by later DNA analysis.While some who falsely confess do come to believe that they committed the crime, most are completely aware that they are innocent. And researchers are beginning to understand how this baffling behavior can come about.
Front and center is the common approach to questioning suspects.The generally accepted gold standard, the Reid Technique of Interviewing and Interrogation, which has been used to train more than half of the police officers in the United States, not only fails to guard against false confessions but actually appears to encourage them.
Using the Reid approach, when someone like Juan is brought in for questioning, detectives determine whether he is telling the truth through a nonconfrontational interview, and then, ifhe appears to be lying and his guilt is “reasonably certain,” they proceed to an aggressive interrogation designed to extract a confession. Unfortunately, as we will explore in detail later, police officers are no better than the rest of us at detecting deceit.And far from correcting officers’ erroneous intuitions about lying, the Reid technique relies heavily on unreliable gut instincts and dubious cues to deception.
This means that a significant number of the people who end up being subjected to the harsh interrogation phase of questioning under the Reid approach are actually innocent.Indeed, it is innocent people who are more likely to waive their rights to remain silent and to have a lawyer present in the first place.They tend to assume—as we all do—that what they themselves know to be true will also be readily evident to outsiders.Since they didn’t commit the crime in question, there is little risk of talking to the police in an open way; if anything, clamming up or requesting an attorney would imply guilt.But, in reality, once the interrogation phase is under way, innocence is off the table: investigators are advised to repeatedly accuse the suspect of having committed the crime and prevent the suspect from offering denials or alternative explanations. All efforts are directed toward gaining the coveted confession.To this end, the Reid manual heartily embraces lying about the evidence in the government’s possession. If you want to get a hardened criminal to admit to a crime, you can’t just play nice.
As a result, the environment is one of maximum psychological coercion: the suspect is completely isolated in a windowless room and may be harangued and berated for hours on end.Many who falsely confess later say that they admitted to committing the crime simply
Juan Rivera, though, did falsely confess—and he is not alone.False confessions and incriminating statements are the leading contributors to wrongful homicide convictions, present in over 60 percent of the known DNA murder-exoneration cases in the United States.More broadly, they appear to have been a factor in about 25 percent of all post-conviction exonerations.
These cases tend to confound our expectations: physical coercion is rare, the confessions are often rich in detail, and multiple innocent suspects may confess to acting together.Indeed, in one of the most famous examples—the so-called Central Park Jogger case—five teenagers all admitted to participating in the brutal rape of a woman only to be exonerated by later DNA analysis.While some who falsely confess do come to believe that they committed the crime, most are completely aware that they are innocent. And researchers are beginning to understand how this baffling behavior can come about.
Front and center is the common approach to questioning suspects.The generally accepted gold standard, the Reid Technique of Interviewing and Interrogation, which has been used to train more than half of the police officers in the United States, not only fails to guard against false confessions but actually appears to encourage them.
Using the Reid approach, when someone like Juan is brought in for questioning, detectives determine whether he is telling the truth through a nonconfrontational interview, and then, ifhe appears to be lying and his guilt is “reasonably certain,” they proceed to an aggressive interrogation designed to extract a confession. Unfortunately, as we will explore in detail later, police officers are no better than the rest of us at detecting deceit.And far from correcting officers’ erroneous intuitions about lying, the Reid technique relies heavily on unreliable gut instincts and dubious cues to deception.
This means that a significant number of the people who end up being subjected to the harsh interrogation phase of questioning under the Reid approach are actually innocent.Indeed, it is innocent people who are more likely to waive their rights to remain silent and to have a lawyer present in the first place.They tend to assume—as we all do—that what they themselves know to be true will also be readily evident to outsiders.Since they didn’t commit the crime in question, there is little risk of talking to the police in an open way; if anything, clamming up or requesting an attorney would imply guilt.But, in reality, once the interrogation phase is under way, innocence is off the table: investigators are advised to repeatedly accuse the suspect of having committed the crime and prevent the suspect from offering denials or alternative explanations. All efforts are directed toward gaining the coveted confession.To this end, the Reid manual heartily embraces lying about the evidence in the government’s possession. If you want to get a hardened criminal to admit to a crime, you can’t just play nice.
As a result, the environment is one of maximum psychological coercion: the suspect is completely isolated in a windowless room and may be harangued and berated for hours on end.Many who falsely confess later say that they admitted to committing the crime simply
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