Links To And Excerpts From “Coerced to Confess: The Psychology of False Confessions”

Posted on August 7, 2024 by Tom Wade MD

Today, I review, link to, and excerpt from “Coerced to Confess: The Psychology of False Confessions”. By ,October 21, 2014.

This article was originally published on The Psych Report before it became part of the Behavioral Scientist in 2017.

All that follows is from the above resource.

On a spring night in 1989, a 28 year-old white woman was brutally raped and nearly murdered while jogging through Central Park. Early in their investigation, police brought in five black and hispanic teenage boys between the ages of 14 and 16 for questioning. During interrogations lasting up to 30 hours, all five confessed to taking part in the crime. Within 72 hours of the attack, the jogger still in a coma, the NYPD believed they had solved the crime.

The case quickly gained national attention and set off a media storm about crime, race, and the justice system in America. Then New York City Mayor Ed Koch called it the “crime of the century.” Twelve days after the arrest of the five boys, Donald Trump took out full page ads in The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post and New York Newsday calling for New York to “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!”

But those five teenage boys — Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr., and Kharey Wise, who became known as the Central Park Five — didn’t commit the crime. They had falsely confessed. Fast-forward to 2002, when convicted rapist and murder, Mathias Reyes, admitted to the rape of the jogger. An analysis of the DNA evidence confirmed that he was the rapist, and the convictions of the Central Park Five were vacated.

Yet, in 1989, despite quickly recanting their confessions, despite the lack of physical evidence linking them to the crime, and despite the only DNA evidence taken from the victim belonging to a man (Reyes) not one of the five, the New York City District Attorney prosecuted and juries convicted the five boys. Collectively they spent about 41 years in prison for a crime they did not commit.

It was only just last month that the case of the Central Park Five finally came to a close. A Federal judge in New York approved a $41 million dollar settlement between New York City and The Central Park Five in a civil case the five men brought against the city in 2003, after their convictions were overturned. Despite the settlement, New York City still denies any wrongdoing in the case.

The recent settlement of the Central Park Five case got us thinking about the psychology behind false confessions. Why did they confess to crimes they did not commit? Why did these confessions trump all other evidence in the case? Why did the judge, jury, and DA place so much emphasis on the confessions, despite conflicting DNA and non-existent physical evidence? And, most importantly, is it possible to prevent false confessions that can lead to such serious breakdowns of justice?

We spoke with Saul Kassin, Psychology Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Williams College, who has researched false confessions for over thirty years, to find out more about the Central Park Five case, why people confess to crimes they did not commit, and how certain interrogation techniques can promote or limit the incidence of false confessions. (Full disclosure: Saul Kassin serves on the Advisory Board of this publication.)

Evan Nesterak: What factors contribute to why a person, and in the case of the Central Park Five, five teenagers, would confess to a crime they didn’t commit?

Saul Kassin: That is in some ways the ultimate question, because it is the most counterintuitive behavior, I think, that people can conceive of. Over the years, I have found that lay people have an easier time understanding why someone would kill themselves — they understand suicide and the motivations for it — than they do why someone would confess to a crime he did not commit.

The reason why people confess to crimes they did not commit is because they are subject to pressures of interrogation, a highly aggressive form of social influence. In the interrogation, especially in American style interrogation, people can become so stressed and so broken down and they start to feel so hopeless about their current situation that they come to believe in a rational way a confession is in their best interest. In some cases, they get so confused by the fact that American police are permitted to lie about evidence — and I mean lie about DNA, prints, surveillance footage, polygraph results — that in some cases people accused of crimes, particularly kids and others who are limited intellectually, become so confused by the lies that they actually come to believe they have committed this crime they did not commit. They wonder why it is they can’t recall it. They are led to believe that it is possible for people to transgress without awareness, for people to do something terrible and repress it. So they develop basically an inference that they must have committed this crime.

Years ago, my colleague (Larry Wrightsman) and I identified two types of false confessions that come from police interrogation. One we called coerced-compliant false confessions. These are cases, like the Central Park jogger case, where innocent people, who know they are innocent become so stressed, so broken down, and so confused as to what their best means of escape is that they confess fully knowing they’re innocent. In these cases they typically recant the confession almost immediately as soon as the pressure of the situation is lifted. The other type of confession is what we called coerced-internalized false confessions, and these are the cases where individuals actually come to believe in their own guilt as a function of the lies and their own suggestibility.

The Central Park jogger case involves clearly coerced-compliant false confessions. That was a case in which five kids, 14, 15, and 16 years old, each of them [was] lead to believe that he would get to go home if he confessed. Each one calculated–given that they had been there from 14-30 hours of interrogation under tremendous pressure–that it was in his own best interest to cooperate.

Interestingly none of them actually confessed to raping the jogger. Each one implicated the four others and each one stated that he himself played a minimal role. So collectively there were five confessions, but in fact each defendant pointed a finger at the others.

EN: Why do you think despite all the evidence in the Central Park Five case pointing to someone other than the 5 boys, that their confessions were still seen as enough evidence to prosecute and convict all of them? Why do you think the confessions held so much weight?

SK: It’s virtually impossible for judges and juries to see past confessions whether they’re true or false. You’re absolutely right about the Central Park jogger case. Most people don’t realize, as a matter of history, that these five kids were coerced into confession in the spring of 1989 within 72 hours of the crime. That summer, before they went to trial, the DNA results came back from the FBI lab. There were three sets of semen samples picked up from the victim and the crime scene. All three samples were linked to a single person, and that person was not any of the five. The prosecutors knew that at the time and had to make a decision. The decision they made was, despite the DNA, they could still get [convictions] on the theory that just because we didn’t get all of them, doesn’t mean we didn’t get some of them.

When you stop to think about that theory, it implied that each of the five boys was for some reason protecting some unknown, unnamed sixth individual. Despite all the pressure the boys were under, implicating themselves, implicating their friends, somehow all of them protected somebody else. So that fact, that the DNA was available, contradicted their confession. Since the now-known-by-DNA rapist did not appear in any of their stories, it means that their confessions were false as a factual matter.

That was known to the judge when he ruled the confessions voluntary at a pretrial hearing. It was known to the two juries that later convicted the boys. But as the jurors later said afterwards, ‘they confessed.’ And if you think the odds of a single false confession are unlikely, what are the odds of five false confessions in a single case. Nobody could fathom the possibility that five boys gave false confessions.

What makes the confessions so compelling that even DNA can’t destroy them, is that the confessions in these cases were not simple admissions of guilt. Rather, a confession is a statement that says, this is what I did, this how I did it, this is why I did it. These are statements filled with vivid details, often accurate details that only the perpetrator could have known. They are statements that contain expressions of remorse and apologies. One of the Central Park Five, Kharey Wise could be seen on tape saying this was my first rape and it’s going to be my last. I’m really sorry. I’m not going to do this again.

I just don’t see how a judge or a jury can look past those kinds of statements. They contain the details and they contain all the cues that we look for in credible statements. The reason these statements are so tricky for judges and juries is that typically what they get to see is only the confession on camera. What they don’t get to see, and never saw in those Central Park jogger cases, was the 14 to 30 hours of interrogation that preceded and produced those confessions.

Social psychologists have long talked about the Fundamental Attribution Error. We observe a person’s behavior and we immediately draw the inference that that behavior reflects on that person. It is the same thing that happens with juries. They watch somebody confessing, they fully realize nobody confesses to a crime he didn’t commit, unless he committed it. And so they look at that confession, and they initially believe it, they reflexively believe it. The reason they reflexively believe it is it contains all those content cues. What they don’t see are all the situational forces that came to bear on these kids, and why it is they seem to know things about the crime that only the perpetrator could have known. It’s not until a judge and a jury can watch the entire process that they can even hope to get it right.

EN: That leads into the recent Department of Justice announcement that it will require interrogations to be recorded, something you’ve recommended for a while. Do you think this will limit the number of instances of false confessions?

SK: I do. By and large all over the country where law enforcement have gone to a taping mechanism, they come out and rave about it. Once they start to tape, they won’t want to stop– that’s what the evidence has shown. It’s hard for people to imagine a win-win-win situation in almost anything in life, but I think that’s exactly what this is.

As soon as you put a camera in the interrogation room, it makes the detectives who do the interrogations more accountable for their actions. It means they will likely not use the most aggressive and most egregious tactics of interrogation, the type that would produce false confessions. Right away I think the presence of a camera has the potential to deter a number of false confessions.

Second, even if it doesn’t in some cases deter the use of egregious tactics and the production of false confessions, it now provides judges with an opportunity to evaluate the situation and circumstances under which the confession was taken. Before a confession ever gets to a jury, at a pretrial hearing, the judge rules whether the confession was voluntary or coerced. If it was not voluntary, if it was coerced, then the judge will remove it from evidence and the jury never gets to see it.

Well, how can a judge determine if a confession was voluntary if he or she does not see the process? By observing recorded interrogations, judges will make more informed judgments of voluntariness. And if they do deem a confession to be voluntary, juries are in a better position to determine whether that confession is credible, or whether so much pressure was brought to bear on the suspect that they cannot trust it.

The third winner in the situation is police. Attorney Tom Sullivan has conducted hundreds of phone interviews with police detectives all over the country who have gone to taping, and uniformly, almost to a person, they now embrace it. The reason is they say they no longer have to spend as much time in court defending their practices. If a defendant claims he was coerced, turn on the tape. Second, many of them say that they get to review the tapes and often what they see in the tapes sheds light on the suspect’s guilt or innocence.

I think that it is a win for defendants, a win for police, and win for judges and juries.

EN: One of the most prominent methods used by police and other law enforcement agencies for interrogating suspects is The Reid Technique, a very aggressive interrogation method linked to the production of false confessions. You’ve been very critical of the Reid technique, for its lack of grounding in behavioral science research. Can you describe the Reid technique and your critique of it?

SK: I don’t think we have enough time for my critiques of the Reid Technique. It’s psychological, but not informed by psychology.

In the most general of terms, it is a two-step process. You bring an individual in who may or may not become a suspect and you interview the person. In that pre-interrogation interview they train their detectives to use all sorts of behavioral cues, verbal and nonverbal cues, to determine whether this person is lying or telling the truth. Using these behavioral cues, they claim that they can train interrogators up to an 85 or 90 percent level of accuracy in judging truth or deception. That number is out of step with all of science of human lie detection, which suggests that people are barely better than they would be by flipping a coin. [This] suggests that the behavioral cues which are recommended by the Reid Technique — whether or not the suspect breaks eye contact, whether the suspect is fidgety, whether the suspect crosses his legs or folds his arms, — are not significantly diagnostic of deception.

Yet, the judgment made at that point is critical because if in the interrogator’s judgment this person is telling the truth they send him or her home and that’s the end of it. If in their judgment the person is lying, however, then they move on to the next step: Interrogation. At first glance, the fact that there is this two-step process makes sense. First, a diagnostic process is used. Then only those who are seen as deceptive are interrogated. There problem is, first of all the diagnostic tool doesn’t work, and there is now empirical research showing that when you train people in using the cues recommended by the Reid technique, it doesn’t make them any better at what they do, it only makes them more confident. They don’t become better human lie detectors; they only become more confident lie detectors. That’s not a good combination.

When an interrogator moves a suspect on to the process of interrogation, which is accusatory and confrontational, it means also that the process of interrogation is by definition a guilt presumptive process. The judgment has already been made that the suspect is lying and is a criminal. It is therefore no surprise that opening salvo of a Reid-style interrogation is an [accusatory] statement — we know you did this, don’t lie.

See the link to the article for the completion of the article.

Further Reading & Resources

 

 

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