Every now and then, we hear about shocking cases of people being released from prison. Perhaps a piece of new evidence or new forensic technology proved their innocence. And in some of these cases, they falsely confessed to the crimes they did not commit. In this article, we’ll talk about this scenario.

Why would someone falsely confess to a crime they didn’t commit?

For average, law-abiding citizens, it seems unimaginable to confess to a crime they did not commit. However, such confessions are not as rare as one would imagine. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law’s article on false confessions says:

“Police-induced false confessions result from a multistep process and sequence of influence, persuasion, and compliance and usually involve psychological coercion. Police are more likely to elicit false confessions under certain conditions of interrogation, however, and individuals with certain personality traits and dispositions are more easily pressured into giving false confessions.”

Police-elicited false confessions have the following scenario:

“Investigators first misclassify an innocent person as guilty; they next subject him to a guilt-presumptive, accusatory interrogation that invariably involves lies about evidence and often the repeated use of implicit and explicit promises and threats as well. Once they have elicited a false admission, they pressure the suspect to provide a postadmission narrative that they jointly shape, often supplying the innocent suspect with the (public and nonpublic) facts of the crime. These have been referred to as the misclassification error, the coercion error, and the contamination error.”

How can false confessions be prevented?

There’s massive legislation and a collection of rulings in the US that help protect defendants from being sentenced on the basis of false confessions. In his book, The Innocent Man, Grisham points out a couple of these:

• According to the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects against self-incrimination, a person has no obligation to answer the police’s questions.

“No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

• Hopt v. Utah, 1884: a confession is not admissible if extracted by physical force or threats of violence.

• Bram v. United States, 1897: the statement must be free and voluntary and not extracted by physical force, threats, or promises.

• Blackburn v. Alabama, 1960: coercion can be mental and physical. There are four crucial factors to determine whether psychological coercion took place: 1) the length of the interrogation, 2) whether it was prolonged in nature, 3) when the confession took place, as nighttime confessions are particularly suspicious, and 4) the competence of the suspect.

• Miranda v. Arizona, 1966: defendants should be given a full and effective warning of their rights at the outset of the interrogation process.

If you’d like to learn more about the legal history of confessions, this article on Britannica.com is a good starting point.

In Part 2, we’ll talk about lying witnesses, and the infamous jailhouse snitches, whose false testimonies ruined many innocent lives.