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WHAT EVIDENCE IS THERE FOR A LINK BETWEEN MENTAL IMPAIRMENT AND AN INCREASED RISK OF FALSE CONFESSIONS?
Abstract
There has been much research in recent years into the causes of the well-known phenomenon that mentally impaired people tend to be over-represented as defendants in the criminal justice process. Less research, however, has been undertaken into why such defendants and suspects appear to be at a higher risk of making false confessions. This may be because it appears that there is a simple answer to this question: such suspects are mentally impaired and vulnerable to the pressures of the criminal justice system, particularly those involved in being interviewed by the police. This is certainly one valid reason but it is by no means the only reason. Research suggests several causal factors are involved. This paper examines some of these causal factors and in doing so reveals the incremental nature of knowledge construction which various researchers have taken in their studies. Dispositional factors and situational factors are both instrumental in causing false confessions. The paper concludes that there is no one major factor that leads mentally impaired suspects to make false confessions more than suspects who are not mentally impaired but rather it is a combination of factors.
Zusammenfassung
Das Recht, die Aussage zu verweigern, gilt als zentrales Recht der beschuldigten Person im Strafprozess. Mit der Belehrung über dieses Recht geht das Versprechen einher, dass beschuldigte Personen in den Vernehmungen schweigen dürfen, und mit der Protokollierung der Vernehmung, dass dieser Belehrungsvorgang kontrolliert werden kann. Der vorliegende Artikel untersucht mittels einer standardisierten Inhaltsanalyse Protokolle von Beschuldigtenvernehmungen daraufhin, ob diese Versprechen gehalten werden. Die empirische Analyse zeigt, dass eine hohe Belehrungsquote mit einer geringen Schweigerate einhergeht. Es wird geprüft, inwiefern die Art und Weise der Belehrung sowie der Protokollierung der Belehrung einen Einfluss auf die niedrige Schweigerate haben könnte.
Das Recht, die Aussage zu verweigern, gilt als zentrales Recht der beschuldigten Person im Strafprozess. Mit der Belehrung über dieses Recht geht das Versprechen einher, dass beschuldigte Personen in den Vernehmungen schweigen dürfen, und mit der Protokollierung der Vernehmung, dass dieser Belehrungsvor-gang kontrolliert werden kann. Der vorliegende Artikel untersucht mittels einer standardisierten Inhaltsanalyse Protokolle von Beschuldigtenvernehmungen daraufhin, ob diese Versprechen gehalten werden. Die empirische Analyse zeigt, dass eine hohe Belehrungsquote mit einer geringen Schweigerate einhergeht. Es wird geprüft, inwiefern die Art und Weise der Belehrung sowie der Protokollierung der Belehrung einen Einuss auf die niedrige Schweigerate haben könnte.
The right to remain silent is a core principle of criminal proceedings. Cautioning a defendant about this right goes in hand with the promise that they may invoke it at any time. Additionally, the writing of the caution in the report insinuates that the verication of the cautioning may be possible. In this article, we investigate – based on a standardised content analysis of written records of investigative interviews with defendants – whether the promise to respect the right to remain silent and to verify the respectation based on the written record is kept. Our empirical analysis shows a high rate of cautioning and, at the same time, a low rate of defendants remaining silent. We further examine whether the low rate of silence is affected by the manner in which the caution is given and/ or its documentation in the offcial written record.
Recently, in a number of high-profile cases, defendants who were prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced on the basis of false confessions have been exonerated through DNA evidence. As a historical matter, confession has played a prominent role in religion, in psychotherapy, and in criminal law-where it is a prosecutor's most potent weapon. In recent years, psychologists from the clinical, personality, developmental, cognitive, and social areas have brought their theories and research methods to bear on an analysis of confession evidence, how it is obtained, and what impact it has on judges, juries, and other people.
An experiment demonstrated that false incriminating evidence can lead people to accept guilt for a crime they did not commit Subjects in a fast- or slow-paced reaction time task were accused of damaging a computer by pressing the wrong key All were truly innocent and initially denied the charge A confederate then said she saw the subject hit the key or did not see the subject hit the key Compared with subjects in the slow-pacelno-witness group, those in the fast-pace/witness group were more likely to sign a confession, internalize guilt for the event, and confabulate details in memory consistent with that belief Both legal and conceptual implications are discussed
Confession evidence is powerful but flawed, often in nonintuitive ways. Contradicting widely held beliefs, research reviewed in this article suggests the following: Despite special training in how to conduct interviews, police cannot distinguish better than the layperson whether suspects are lying or telling the truth. Suspects in custody routinely waive their self-protective rights to silence and to counsel--especially if they are innocent. Certain legal but deceptive interrogation tactics increase the risk that innocents will confess to crimes they did not commit. Judges and juries are easily fooled, unable to distinguish between true and false confessions. Appellate courts cannot be expected to reasonably determine whether the error of admitting a coerced confession at trial was harmless or prejudicial. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In recent years, numerous individuals who confessed to and were convicted of serious felony crimes have been released from prison - some after many years of incarceration - and declared factually innocent. Often, these individuals are freed as a result of DNA tests that were not possible at the time of arrest, prosecution, and conviction. DNA testing has also exonerated numerous individuals who confessed to serious crimes before their cases went to trial. In this article, we analyze 125 recent cases of proven interrogation-induced false confessions (i.e., cases in which indisputably innocent individuals confessed to crimes they did not commit) and how these cases were treated by officials in the criminal justice system. This article has three goals. First, we provide and analyze basic demographic, legal, and case-specific descriptive data from these 125 cases. This is significant because this is the largest cohort of interrogation-induced false confession cases ever identified and studied in the research literature. Second, we analyze the role that (false) confession evidence played in these cases and how the defendants in these cases were treated by the criminal justice system. In particular, this article focuses on how criminal justice officials and triers-of-fact respond to confession evidence, whether it biases their evaluations and overwhelms other evidence (particularly evidence of innocence), and how likely false confessions are to lead to the wrongful arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of the innocent. Analysis of the aforementioned questions leads to the conclusion that the problem of interrogation-induced false confession in the American criminal justice system is far more significant than previously supposed. Furthermore, the problem of interrogation-induced false confessions has profound implications for the study of miscarriages of justice as well as the proper administration of justice. Third, and finally, this article suggests that several promising policy reforms, particularly mandatory electronic recording of police interrogations, will minimize the number of false confessions and thereby inject a much needed dose of justice into the American criminal justice system.
Persons with mental illness may be at risk for false admissions to police and to prosecutors because of the defining characteristics of mental illness, but potentially because of heightened recidivism rates and increased opportunities. We surveyed 1,249 offenders with mental disorders from six sites about false confessions (FCs) and false guilty pleas (FGPs). Self-reports of FC ranged from 9 to 28%, and FGPs ranged from 27 to 41% depending upon site. False admissions to murder and rape were rarely reported. We also examined differences between those claiming false admissions and those not. Minorities, offenders with lengthier criminal careers, and those who were more symptomatic were more likely to have self-reported false admissions than their counterparts.
Evidence for acquiescence (yea-saying) in interviews with people who have mental retardation is reviewed and the different ways it has been assessed are discussed. We argue that acquiescence is caused by many factors, each of which is detected differentially by these methods. Evidence on the likely causes of acquiescence is reviewed, and we suggest that although researchers often stress a desire to please or increased submissiveness as the most important factor, acquiescence should also be seen as a response to questions that are too complex, either grammatically or in the type of judgments they request. Strategies to reduce acquiescence in interviews are reviewed and measures that can be taken to increase the inclusiveness of interviews and self-report scales in this population suggested.
This study compared the legal abilities of defendants (N = 212) with current primary psychotic disorders (n = 44), affective disorders (n = 42), substance abuse disorders (n = 54), and no diagnosed major mental illness (n = 72). Defendants with primary psychotic disorders demonstrated more impairment than did other defendants in their understanding of interrogation rights, the nature and object of the proceedings, the possible consequences of proceedings, and their ability to communicate with counsel. Psychosis was of limited value as a predictor however, and high rates of legal impairment were found even in defendants with no diagnosed major mental illness. Sources of within-group variance were examined to further explain this finding. Policy and clinical implications of these results are discussed.
Recently, an alarmingly high incidence of wrongful convictions has been documented in the United States, in large part because of “Innocence Projects” that use DNA analyses from crime scenes to exonerate innocent persons. The best-known Innocence Project, administered through the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, has helped to free 138 people who had been wrongfully incarcerated. Approximately 25 percent of these cases involved false confessions arising from inappropriate police interrogations. Among these false confession
In recent years, DNA exoneration cases have shed light on the problem of false confessions and the wrongful convictions that result. Drawing on basic psychological principles and methods, an extensive body of research has focused on the psychology of confessions. This article describes the processes of interrogation by which police assess whether a suspect is lying or telling the truth and the techniques used to elicit confessions from those deemed deceptive. The problem of false confessions emphasizes personal and situational factors that put innocent people at risk in the interrogation room. Turning from the causes of false confessions to their consequences, research shows that confession evidence can bias juries, judges, lay witnesses, and forensic examiners. Finally, empirically based proposals for the reform of policy and practice include a call for the mandatory video recording of interrogations, blind testing in forensic crime labs, and use of confession experts in court.
The Supreme Court's Miranda decision rested upon the unverified assumptions that suspects who received the now-famous warnings not only would possess information ensuring that subsequent waivers were "knowing and intelligent," but also would possess the tools necessary to resist the pressures inherent in custodial interrogation, thus ensuring that confessions were "voluntary." The flaws in these assumptions are exposed when they are applied to mentally retarded people. The authors of this Article tested a sample of mentally retarded individuals to determine if they could understand the Miranda warnings, then compared these results to those obtained for a control group of nondisabled people. The results show that, in contrast to the nondisabled controls, mentally retarded people simply do not understand the warnings. They do not understand the context in which interrogation occurs, the legal consequences of confessing, the meaning of the sentences comprising the warnings, or even the warnings' individual words. For mentally retarded people, the Miranda warnings are words without meaning.
Confessions are routinely offered as evidence and are potentially damning to defendants. However, not all confessions are truthful. Suspects can be coerced into falsely confessing to crimes that they did not commit, and in a subset of cases, the confessors come to genuinely believe they committed the crimes and sometimes create vivid ‘memories’ of their activities. Against the backdrop of a model of cognitive processes involved in correct and incorrect remembering known as the source monitoring framework, this paper examines how coercive tactics routinely used in interrogations may give rise to memory illusions and distortions that can contribute to false confessions in which individuals believe they are guilty and create false memories to support those beliefs. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Criminal defendants with mental retardation face special problems in the process of interrogation and confession, particularly with regard to the knowing, intelligent, and voluntary waiver ofMiranda rights. Despite this, little attention has been paid to empirical measurement of this form of competency in mentally retarded adults. The present research uses scales originally developed by Grisso (1981) to measure competency to waive such rights in juveniles. Two samples of mentally retarded adults, one in a sheltered workshop setting and the other composed of current probationers, were tested. Both samples scored substantially lower on measures ofMiranda comprehension than Grisso's samples of juveniles and adults. There were also differences between the samples that appear attributable to differential levels of criminal justice experience. It is concluded that the Grisso scales may be helpful in determining competency to waiveMiranda rights in defendants with mental retardation. In addition, the present data raise strong concerns about the ability of many such defendants to make intelligentMiranda waivers. Policy recommendations are discussed.
To access publisher full text version of this article. Please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links field The main aim of the study was to replicate a previous study into personality factors associated with confessions and denials. It was hypothesised that antisocial personality traits and active involvement in criminal behaviour would be associated with false confessions and false denials. The participants were 666 university students in Iceland. Each was asked about false admissions made to teachers and parents in the past, as well as about confessions or denials (true and false) made to the police during questioning. The participants completed questionnaires relating to offending and personality. One-quarter (25%) of the participants stated that they had in the past been interrogated by the police in relation to a suspected offence, of whom 54% said they had confessed. The base rate of guilt in the study of those interrogated by the police was 66%. Only two participants (1.2% of those interrogated) claimed to have made false confessions to the police, whereas 6.2% claimed to have made false confessions to teachers or parents at some time in their lives. False confessions to teachers and parents were significantly associated with antisocial personality traits and the extent and seriousness of self-reported delinquency. In conclusion, antisocial personality characteristics, impulsivity, and the extent and seriousness of self-reported delinquency were the most significant predictors of who had a past history of making false confessions to teachers and parents
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