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Why people confess to crimes they didn’t commit

334 points by SiempreViernes 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
maxheadroom 7y ago
>More than a quarter of the 365 people exonerated in recent decades by the nonprofit Innocence Project had confessed to their alleged crime. Using guessimation, x would be the numer of people that confessed that were innocent, so 91.25 < x < 182.5, and that, alone, was the principally driving force (assumptive, I'm aware) to convict them - and these are the numbers that we're aware of because of the overturned convictions. Whilst I can understand the reprieve it must give police and the district attorneys in the efforts of building a case, it almost seems as if they just kind of give up applying any further scrutiny, once any confession is had - whether the person actually committed the crime or not. I'm not sure why this breakdown, for lack of a better vernacular at present, occurs though. Is it antipathy? Is it because numbers are more important than anything else (e.g.: for elected positions such as Sheriffs)? Is it because we ply the path of least of resistance to the investigating demeanor? I'm sure a lot of the convictions in the past are biased for varying other degrees but this seems to infer that even without those other degrees of influence, we have a high margin of error for putting innocent people away. Add those varying degrees referenced above into the equation and I'm not so sure that the deflection, "It's not a perfect system but it works," is really applicable, anymore.
- tedmcory77 7y ago
  It’s my understanding they are metric’d on wins....
- stevenwoo 7y ago
  Serial's third season podcast series covered this a bit, since the 1980's or so in the USA, we've decreased funding for the judicial system, and not increased prosecutors funding and staff to commensurate with increased crimes due to larger population (if crime rate stayed the same or even decreased.) This puts a lot of pressure on prosecutors to get plea bargains, the logical gaming of the system by prosecutors is to layer on as many of the hardest charges possible, then offer a plea bargain that has a fraction of the penalty of the initial charges. We do not have enough courthouses to actually let every defendent get judged by a jury of their peers. Even if one is innocent, rational people will choose to plea guilty given that prosecutors have something like a 95% conviction rate in the USA and all the resources of their local/state/federal government behind the prosecution. Someone facetiously but based on my viewing of The Wire and The Shield, large city police departments are judged on finding someone to charge with reported crimes and having a lot of open unsolved crimes is seen as a terrible statistic, there's no extra reward in finding the actual person who did each crime so some might find a perverse incentive to clear crimes no matter what.
pmfgpmfg 7y ago
"under US law, police are allowed to lie" in consideration of this fact, anyone taken into US police custody, for any reason, ever, should refuse to open their mouth, or help police in any way.
- jopsen 7y ago
  The sad thing is that if your neighbor was burgled and the police comes knocking on your door to ask questions, you also have an interest in getting the culprit caught. Yet, you can't trust the police to not entrap you.
sysbin 7y ago
I'm guessing mental abuse of being accused and repetitively in a room for hours. The constant demand upon a person to confess with no end in sight for the person. The experience being unique by the variables of the alleged crime and with whoever is hired to question play into the equation. I think the best situation for an accused person is refusing to talk and until an attorney tells them what to say. Since, mentally I doubt my health (at my best state) could even take anything else in a situation of such importance.
- Ntrails 7y ago
  > I think the best situation for an accused person is refusing to talk [to the police] Simple advice, and easy to follow. Even if you are innocent, understand the police have a job to do and that is to make a case against you. Do Not Help Them.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    In some cases not speaking to the Police can damage your defence later, though.
    - DenisM 7y ago
      Such as?
      - chrisseaton 7y ago
        Such as if you had an alibi that you try to use as a defence in court but you didn't mention it when questioned by Police in the first place. This can cast doubt on the alibi - presumably because people will think you made it up later and if it was true you should have been able to say so in the first place. > it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court https://www.gov.uk/arrested-your-rights https://www.gov.uk/arrested-your-rights
        the_snooze 7y ago
jellicle 7y ago
Wrongly confess: you'll be released today, albeit with a criminal conviction and a fine. Maintain innocence: spend the next 3-18 months in jail, then have a trial without effective counsel, probably lose, be sentenced to time served and a fine. You'll have lost your job, your kids will be in foster care, and your family will have been evicted. It's not complicated. (For more serious crimes, the police still generally promise "you'll be released today", they just don't deliver on that promise. "Just tell us what happened and we can put all this behind us, we just have a few questions." So even though the accused is facing serious punishment for wrongly confessing, the decision still appears similar to the above.)
- abofh 7y ago
  It also helps to remember, the police are not there to find the truth or find your innocence. Their job is to gather evidence sufficient for the DA to charge you and convict you. Once you've been arrested or detained, you're not talking your way out of it, you're just giving them information to pass on to the DA.
  - jopsen 7y ago
    In other countries the police is tasked with doing an impartial investigation. They not allowed to lie, or even interrupt an explanation to attempt to tweak the wording. Using American tactics in other countries could get a police officer fired or worse.
vinceguidry 7y ago
I couldn't read the article in-depth, it's too depressing. What makes it depressing is that it ultimately resolves to income inequality, which in America is only really a problem because of racism. So everywhere you look there's a travesty of justice with no escape other than total upending of society, i.e. telling everyone to not be racist. False confessions wouldn't be a problem if there were a true presumption of innocence. Our justice system doesn't presume innocence in areas where caseloads are high, it takes shortcuts. When people take shortcuts, the costs of that externalization fall the hardest on those with the fewest resources to defend themselves. You're way less inclined to think charitably about someone who looks like all the other people you lock up every single day. With these as the table stakes, that this kind of article is even needed, that if you lock an emotionally-vulnerable person in a room and yell at them for hours, eventually they're going to crack, is just more depressing. If you want a concrete vision of Hell, real Hell, you can't get a more compelling one than that of how America treats its underclass.
- 50656E6973 7y ago
  >ultimately resolves to income inequality, which in America is only really a problem because of racism. Income inequality is not restricted to minorities. There are more white people living in poverty/prison than any other racial group.
  - vinceguidry 7y ago
    Then let's talk privilege. America's underclass is created not just by income inequality, but also by the collective belief by those not in the underclass that the underclass is worthless. If this were not the case, then they wouldn't continually create policies to keep them down.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - 50656E6973 7y ago
      Indeed, Dr. King realized in his final years that to truly solve racism, we must resolve classism and extreme materialism.
whack 7y ago
One factor worth considering from the study the article references, which it really should have acknowledged. Tactics such as minimization, are extremely effective in increasing the rate of true-confessions as well, which significantly outnumber the number of false-confessions. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7798075_Investigating_True_and_False_Confessions_Within_a_Novel_Experimental_Paradigm https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7798075_Investigati... "Results indicated that guilty persons were more likely to confess than innocent persons, and that the use of minimization and the offer of a deal increased the rate of both true and false confessions" Condition, True confessions, False confessions No tactic 46% 6% Minimization 81% 18%
- F_r_k 7y ago
  I'm not sure I prefer to have more true confessions of that implies more wrong confessions (even if one might outweigh the other)..
  - hammock 7y ago
    If you look at the stats, the ratios are getting worse
_drimzy 7y ago
Given that people who know the law, can plead the fifth and avoid being interrogated at all, why doesn't the law just ban interrogation of the accused altogether? It creates a divide between people who have access to good lawyers vs those who don't and fall prey to such coercion.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  It really should ban interrogation without a lawyer but also if someone waives their rights they should have a mandatory discussion with a lawyer. If they waived their rights before a lawyer even showed up thats a whole lot of sketchiness going on.
- lostmyoldone 7y ago
  Swedish criminal law implement something that could be considered a partial application of that idea, but instead of outlawing interrogation, any admission of guilt is only to be considered as part of evidence in a case. Thus when the courts do their work correctly, it's almost impossible to be convicted on your admissions alone, especially for more serious crimes. There are however instances where this has still happened, indicating that maybe confeso of guilt should not be admissible as evidence at all, though material evidence found through interrogation probably should.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    " any admission of guilt is only to be considered as part of evidence in a case." This makes sense to me. Someone confessing to a crime is certainly a strong indicator they did it but it's not 100%.
    - BurningFrog 7y ago
      In Sweden any evidence is admissible, and it's up to the judge(s) to decide if and how to weigh it.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    Have there been any cases of someone being exonerated for lack of evidence despite pleading to be arrested for their bloody cannibalistic rape spree?
08-15 7y ago
> John Kogut, a Long Island man who after an 18-hour interrogation falsely confessed How is this not considered torture? How is the confession of a sleep deprived and hence mentally impaired man even valid? Why are the feral cops who interrogated him not in jail for crimes against humanity? On the other hand, why don't they go a step further? Sharp tools, electricity, hallucinogenic drugs, etc. would go a long way towards getting a confession sooner.
- maxheadroom 7y ago
  >On the other hand, why don't they go a step further? Sharp tools, electricity, hallucinogenic drugs, etc. would go a long way towards getting a confession sooner. Chicago[0] beat you to that idea, my friend. [0] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/homan-square https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/homan-square
- pravda 7y ago
  In that specific case, the police did not consider the confession by itself to be enough to falsely convict Mr Kogut and his two friends. So the police took a hair from the victim, put it in an evidence bag, and testified under oath that the hair had been found in the defendants' van. It looks like the innocent men were released in 2003, and have had to wait 15+ years for compensation. https://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/fusco-restivo-halstead-death-1.16018032 https://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/fusco-restivo-hal... But hey, it shows that the criminal justice system works!
ummonk 7y ago
The ancient Artha Shastra had an interesting take on this. Thanks to its time period, it advocated torturing suspects during interrogations (of limited duration). However, due to the near certainty of false confessions in such an interrogation, it instructed the interrogator to attempt to obtain knowledge through the torture that only the guilty could have, such as the location of stolen property or murder weapons.
- Steve44 7y ago
  This is basically the 'ticking bomb' scenario isn’t it. If the question was to keep torturing until “was Mr Bloggs a part of the meeting” is a yes then that is pretty much not valid as the subject will likely say anything to stop it. To find the location of bomb going off in 30 minutes is a very different matter as it’s a clear true or false question with a very direct answer.
  - sorokod 7y ago
    No it isn't. It is information that may be difficult to obtain but trivial to verify.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  I have read that good interrogators will do that without torture. They will check the information they are getting against facts that can be checked. From what I have read about innocent people that got convicted most of these convictions relied on “evidence” where nobody made the effort to sanity check the information and see if it really makes sense.
  - simonh 7y ago
    Also check for the consistency of the person's story. Lying is stressful and you have to remember details you have invented and that don't match your own memory. This is difficult to keep straight, especially over an extended period.
    - 7y ago
kazinator 7y ago
Though sometimes people confess due to interrogation pressure tactics, there is still this phenomenon that the article doesn't touch on: attention-seekers who voluntarily call in and turn themselves in, claiming to be the perpetrator of some widely publicized crime, like a serial killing or whatever.
- Steve44 7y ago
  There is a fair amount of press in the UK at the moment related to a Westminster VIP paedophile ring where it looks like the "victim", a Carl Beech, may have been making it up.
nhumrich 7y ago
I've had a polygraph before while interviewing for a security clearance position. The questions they asked were pretty standard such as "are you a terrorist" and things. I could unequivocally answer the questions without a thought. But my polygraph took a couple hours and after a while in that room, being asked the same questions over and over, I honestly started to wonder if I was, somehow, a terrorist and they knew it but I didn't.
- noob_slayer 7y ago
  Do you think terrorists identify with that word?
  - sieabahlpark 7y ago
    When you take a polygraph you sign a document saying not to spread the actual questions asked. Specifically he's talking about the counter intelligence portion which is 4 questions centralized around things terrorists would do.
    - noob_slayer 7y ago
      Hmm, if this is in connection with the US government, that would be a violation of Title 18 US Code 1001.
  - beenBoutIT 7y ago
    No, not unless they're insane. It looks more like they deliberately worded it to appeal to mentally retarded individuals suffering from persecutory delusions and the like. 'Terrorist Foiled' sounds better than 'Delusional Idiot Entrapped', especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.
    - wallace_f 7y ago
      You got a lot of downvotes, but the themes in your comment are, in fact, eerily close to reality, even though a lot of people wouldn't believe it. The Intercept has a long-running series documenting the Security State prosecuting people for terrorism, who never were terorrists -- many are mentally ill people given plots and weapons by the FBI: https://theintercept.com/2017/09/03/the-fbi-pressured-a-lonely-young-man-into-a-bomb-plot-he-tried-to-back-out-now-hes-serving-life-in-prison/ https://theintercept.com/2017/09/03/the-fbi-pressured-a-lone... See the full series and list of stories here: https://trial-and-terror.theintercept.com/ https://trial-and-terror.theintercept.com/
grahamburger 7y ago
American Vandal (Netflix original) season 2 deals with this theme and is pretty amazing all around!
rolltiide 7y ago
> Judge Steven Barrett of the Bronx Supreme Court vacated Burton's 3-decade-old conviction, citing such work as the basis of his decision. This worked in a subdivision of a single city, but may never work in rural Wisconsin or the other 30,000+ municipalities in this country which operate under 55 sovereign districts with completely different legal hierarchies. We don't even have total transparency about who is even in most of these municipal prisons and under what circumstances. The work in New York City - "the center of the free world" - is probably the most advanced, and the world's news organizations have barely scratched the surface about whats going on in Riker's Islands and its other prisons. How can we really address this?
blizkreeg 7y ago
In India, confessions in lock-up or to the police are not admissible in court in a criminal proceeding. I've always found that as the way to prevent innocent people from being convicted based on their confession.
sickcodebruh 7y ago
Years ago, my band was harassed aggressively by border crossing guards while entering Canada. They insisted we had drugs with us and wanted us to confess. We knew we had nothing. Separated from my friends, threatened with what would happen when they found things, being told they were calling the dogs to search the car, seeing them going through our stuff, I had moments where I wondered if I had forgotten anything and if it might be better to confess just in case.
- mbrameld 7y ago
  I had a nearly identical experience crossing into Canada back in 2012. It was bizarre. They kept telling me they knew they were going to find someone in my car, which made me think they might actually PUT something in my car to find. Several hours later I was able to continue on into Canada after I repacked everything they had spread out everywhere.
  - sickcodebruh 7y ago
    I’m sorry you went through that, too. Were you also traveling with a band? We had similar tactics applied by Border Agents in Arizona just past the California-Arizona state border last September. This time, I was driving and I knew they were full of shit when they surrounded us, talked about bringing dogs (they always threaten with dogs?), and claimed they smelled drugs in the vehicle. It didn’t go on for as long, they didn’t make us get out or go through our stuff, and copping to something we didn’t do didn’t enter my head, but it felt too familiar. The stakes in these situations were low, we knew this was par for the course when crossing these borders and it was STILL stressful and frightening. I can so easily see how people in more serious situations break when under more intense pressure.
    - mbrameld 7y ago
      I wasn't traveling with a band, just my dog! I was moving from Florida to Alaska, trying to catch the ferry out of Prince Rupert. Weather turned me around in Banff and I went to plan B and drove back into the US to Bellingham to catch the ferry there. Had no trouble at all crossing back into the US at the same crossing. My dog ended up with a gastric dilatation-volvulus the night before I got on the ferry and had to be euthanized. Not the best trip but living in Alaska was amazing.
hvo 7y ago
Well, I am not surprised at all. In US police,not all of them, often lie under oath.It is called ‘Testilying.’[0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/nyregion/police-lying-new-york.html?searchResultPosition=5 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/nyregion/police-lying-new...
michelpp 7y ago
Perhaps one of the best videos on YouTube "Don't talk to the Police": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
apatheticonion 7y ago
Scene from the Wire relating to lie detector machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN7pkFNEg5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN7pkFNEg5c
Tsubasachan 7y ago
Its really unfortunate. Your lawyer will tell you not to take the polygraph. Your lawyer will tell you not to sign a damn thing. Your lawyer will tell you to STFU. Your lawyer will tell you about all the little mindgames and brainwashing that you are going to experience. But if you're poor you don't have a lawyer to save you from the bad people. And its not in the government interest to provide you with one.
- ajscanlan 7y ago
  Can you not be provided a lawyer even if you're poor? I thought that was a right.
  - twoquestions 7y ago
    You have a lawyer you meet at trial and don't get privacy with, and that's provided they're not incentivized (with money or otherwise) to deliberately fail to defend you.
    - justanotherjoe 7y ago
      I just don't think people that went through years of education are still capable of doing something like that. People are motivated by more than just money...
      - mrguyorama 7y ago
        It's not malice. In some places (I believe my state is one), even normal lawyers are required to periodically serve as a public defender. These defenders are just handed cases and required to handle them, period. Now what if it should take you a whole week to go through the facts of the case to properly defend the accused, but it turns out the court handed you about 10 cases that week, and they all have the same issue?
      - c0vfefe 7y ago
        Education has nothing to do with elimination of greed. White-collar crime exists, after all. You can't out-nurture human nature.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

>More than a quarter of the 365 people exonerated in recent decades by the nonprofit Innocence Project had confessed to their alleged crime. Using guessimation, x would be the numer of people that confessed that were innocent, so 91.25 < x < 182.5, and that, alone, was the principally driving force (assumptive, I'm aware) to convict them - and these are the numbers that we're aware of because of the overturned convictions. Whilst I can understand the reprieve it must give police and the district attorneys in the efforts of building a case, it almost seems as if they just kind of give up applying any further scrutiny, once any confession is had - whether the person actually committed the crime or not. I'm not sure why this breakdown, for lack of a better vernacular at present, occurs though. Is it antipathy? Is it because numbers are more important than anything else (e.g.: for elected positions such as Sheriffs)? Is it because we ply the path of least of resistance to the investigating demeanor? I'm sure a lot of the convictions in the past are biased for varying other degrees but this seems to infer that even without those other degrees of influence, we have a high margin of error for putting innocent people away. Add those varying degrees referenced above into the equation and I'm not so sure that the deflection, "It's not a perfect system but it works," is really applicable, anymore.

tedmcory77 7y ago
It’s my understanding they are metric’d on wins....
stevenwoo 7y ago
Serial's third season podcast series covered this a bit, since the 1980's or so in the USA, we've decreased funding for the judicial system, and not increased prosecutors funding and staff to commensurate with increased crimes due to larger population (if crime rate stayed the same or even decreased.) This puts a lot of pressure on prosecutors to get plea bargains, the logical gaming of the system by prosecutors is to layer on as many of the hardest charges possible, then offer a plea bargain that has a fraction of the penalty of the initial charges. We do not have enough courthouses to actually let every defendent get judged by a jury of their peers. Even if one is innocent, rational people will choose to plea guilty given that prosecutors have something like a 95% conviction rate in the USA and all the resources of their local/state/federal government behind the prosecution. Someone facetiously but based on my viewing of The Wire and The Shield, large city police departments are judged on finding someone to charge with reported crimes and having a lot of open unsolved crimes is seen as a terrible statistic, there's no extra reward in finding the actual person who did each crime so some might find a perverse incentive to clear crimes no matter what.

pmfgpmfg 7y ago

"under US law, police are allowed to lie" in consideration of this fact, anyone taken into US police custody, for any reason, ever, should refuse to open their mouth, or help police in any way.

jopsen 7y ago
The sad thing is that if your neighbor was burgled and the police comes knocking on your door to ask questions, you also have an interest in getting the culprit caught. Yet, you can't trust the police to not entrap you.

sysbin 7y ago

I'm guessing mental abuse of being accused and repetitively in a room for hours. The constant demand upon a person to confess with no end in sight for the person. The experience being unique by the variables of the alleged crime and with whoever is hired to question play into the equation. I think the best situation for an accused person is refusing to talk and until an attorney tells them what to say. Since, mentally I doubt my health (at my best state) could even take anything else in a situation of such importance.

Ntrails 7y ago
> I think the best situation for an accused person is refusing to talk [to the police] Simple advice, and easy to follow. Even if you are innocent, understand the police have a job to do and that is to make a case against you. Do Not Help Them.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  In some cases not speaking to the Police can damage your defence later, though.
  - DenisM 7y ago
    Such as?
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      Such as if you had an alibi that you try to use as a defence in court but you didn't mention it when questioned by Police in the first place. This can cast doubt on the alibi - presumably because people will think you made it up later and if it was true you should have been able to say so in the first place. > it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court https://www.gov.uk/arrested-your-rights https://www.gov.uk/arrested-your-rights
      - the_snooze 7y ago

jellicle 7y ago

Wrongly confess: you'll be released today, albeit with a criminal conviction and a fine. Maintain innocence: spend the next 3-18 months in jail, then have a trial without effective counsel, probably lose, be sentenced to time served and a fine. You'll have lost your job, your kids will be in foster care, and your family will have been evicted. It's not complicated. (For more serious crimes, the police still generally promise "you'll be released today", they just don't deliver on that promise. "Just tell us what happened and we can put all this behind us, we just have a few questions." So even though the accused is facing serious punishment for wrongly confessing, the decision still appears similar to the above.)

abofh 7y ago
It also helps to remember, the police are not there to find the truth or find your innocence. Their job is to gather evidence sufficient for the DA to charge you and convict you. Once you've been arrested or detained, you're not talking your way out of it, you're just giving them information to pass on to the DA.
- jopsen 7y ago
  In other countries the police is tasked with doing an impartial investigation. They not allowed to lie, or even interrupt an explanation to attempt to tweak the wording. Using American tactics in other countries could get a police officer fired or worse.

vinceguidry 7y ago

I couldn't read the article in-depth, it's too depressing. What makes it depressing is that it ultimately resolves to income inequality, which in America is only really a problem because of racism. So everywhere you look there's a travesty of justice with no escape other than total upending of society, i.e. telling everyone to not be racist. False confessions wouldn't be a problem if there were a true presumption of innocence. Our justice system doesn't presume innocence in areas where caseloads are high, it takes shortcuts. When people take shortcuts, the costs of that externalization fall the hardest on those with the fewest resources to defend themselves. You're way less inclined to think charitably about someone who looks like all the other people you lock up every single day. With these as the table stakes, that this kind of article is even needed, that if you lock an emotionally-vulnerable person in a room and yell at them for hours, eventually they're going to crack, is just more depressing. If you want a concrete vision of Hell, real Hell, you can't get a more compelling one than that of how America treats its underclass.

50656E6973 7y ago
>ultimately resolves to income inequality, which in America is only really a problem because of racism. Income inequality is not restricted to minorities. There are more white people living in poverty/prison than any other racial group.
- vinceguidry 7y ago
  Then let's talk privilege. America's underclass is created not just by income inequality, but also by the collective belief by those not in the underclass that the underclass is worthless. If this were not the case, then they wouldn't continually create policies to keep them down.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - 50656E6973 7y ago
    Indeed, Dr. King realized in his final years that to truly solve racism, we must resolve classism and extreme materialism.

whack 7y ago

One factor worth considering from the study the article references, which it really should have acknowledged. Tactics such as minimization, are extremely effective in increasing the rate of true-confessions as well, which significantly outnumber the number of false-confessions. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7798075_Investigating_True_and_False_Confessions_Within_a_Novel_Experimental_Paradigm https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7798075_Investigati... "Results indicated that guilty persons were more likely to confess than innocent persons, and that the use of minimization and the offer of a deal increased the rate of both true and false confessions" Condition, True confessions, False confessions No tactic 46% 6% Minimization 81% 18%

F_r_k 7y ago
I'm not sure I prefer to have more true confessions of that implies more wrong confessions (even if one might outweigh the other)..
- hammock 7y ago
  If you look at the stats, the ratios are getting worse

_drimzy 7y ago

Given that people who know the law, can plead the fifth and avoid being interrogated at all, why doesn't the law just ban interrogation of the accused altogether? It creates a divide between people who have access to good lawyers vs those who don't and fall prey to such coercion.

giancarlostoro 7y ago
It really should ban interrogation without a lawyer but also if someone waives their rights they should have a mandatory discussion with a lawyer. If they waived their rights before a lawyer even showed up thats a whole lot of sketchiness going on.
lostmyoldone 7y ago
Swedish criminal law implement something that could be considered a partial application of that idea, but instead of outlawing interrogation, any admission of guilt is only to be considered as part of evidence in a case. Thus when the courts do their work correctly, it's almost impossible to be convicted on your admissions alone, especially for more serious crimes. There are however instances where this has still happened, indicating that maybe confeso of guilt should not be admissible as evidence at all, though material evidence found through interrogation probably should.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  " any admission of guilt is only to be considered as part of evidence in a case." This makes sense to me. Someone confessing to a crime is certainly a strong indicator they did it but it's not 100%.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    In Sweden any evidence is admissible, and it's up to the judge(s) to decide if and how to weigh it.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  Have there been any cases of someone being exonerated for lack of evidence despite pleading to be arrested for their bloody cannibalistic rape spree?

08-15 7y ago

> John Kogut, a Long Island man who after an 18-hour interrogation falsely confessed How is this not considered torture? How is the confession of a sleep deprived and hence mentally impaired man even valid? Why are the feral cops who interrogated him not in jail for crimes against humanity? On the other hand, why don't they go a step further? Sharp tools, electricity, hallucinogenic drugs, etc. would go a long way towards getting a confession sooner.

maxheadroom 7y ago
>On the other hand, why don't they go a step further? Sharp tools, electricity, hallucinogenic drugs, etc. would go a long way towards getting a confession sooner. Chicago[0] beat you to that idea, my friend. [0] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/homan-square https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/homan-square
pravda 7y ago
In that specific case, the police did not consider the confession by itself to be enough to falsely convict Mr Kogut and his two friends. So the police took a hair from the victim, put it in an evidence bag, and testified under oath that the hair had been found in the defendants' van. It looks like the innocent men were released in 2003, and have had to wait 15+ years for compensation. https://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/fusco-restivo-halstead-death-1.16018032 https://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/fusco-restivo-hal... But hey, it shows that the criminal justice system works!

ummonk 7y ago

The ancient Artha Shastra had an interesting take on this. Thanks to its time period, it advocated torturing suspects during interrogations (of limited duration). However, due to the near certainty of false confessions in such an interrogation, it instructed the interrogator to attempt to obtain knowledge through the torture that only the guilty could have, such as the location of stolen property or murder weapons.

Steve44 7y ago
This is basically the 'ticking bomb' scenario isn’t it. If the question was to keep torturing until “was Mr Bloggs a part of the meeting” is a yes then that is pretty much not valid as the subject will likely say anything to stop it. To find the location of bomb going off in 30 minutes is a very different matter as it’s a clear true or false question with a very direct answer.
- sorokod 7y ago
  No it isn't. It is information that may be difficult to obtain but trivial to verify.
maxxxxx 7y ago
I have read that good interrogators will do that without torture. They will check the information they are getting against facts that can be checked. From what I have read about innocent people that got convicted most of these convictions relied on “evidence” where nobody made the effort to sanity check the information and see if it really makes sense.
- simonh 7y ago
  Also check for the consistency of the person's story. Lying is stressful and you have to remember details you have invented and that don't match your own memory. This is difficult to keep straight, especially over an extended period.
  - 7y ago

kazinator 7y ago

Though sometimes people confess due to interrogation pressure tactics, there is still this phenomenon that the article doesn't touch on: attention-seekers who voluntarily call in and turn themselves in, claiming to be the perpetrator of some widely publicized crime, like a serial killing or whatever.

Steve44 7y ago
There is a fair amount of press in the UK at the moment related to a Westminster VIP paedophile ring where it looks like the "victim", a Carl Beech, may have been making it up.

nhumrich 7y ago

I've had a polygraph before while interviewing for a security clearance position. The questions they asked were pretty standard such as "are you a terrorist" and things. I could unequivocally answer the questions without a thought. But my polygraph took a couple hours and after a while in that room, being asked the same questions over and over, I honestly started to wonder if I was, somehow, a terrorist and they knew it but I didn't.

noob_slayer 7y ago
Do you think terrorists identify with that word?
- sieabahlpark 7y ago
  When you take a polygraph you sign a document saying not to spread the actual questions asked. Specifically he's talking about the counter intelligence portion which is 4 questions centralized around things terrorists would do.
  - noob_slayer 7y ago
    Hmm, if this is in connection with the US government, that would be a violation of Title 18 US Code 1001.
- beenBoutIT 7y ago
  No, not unless they're insane. It looks more like they deliberately worded it to appeal to mentally retarded individuals suffering from persecutory delusions and the like. 'Terrorist Foiled' sounds better than 'Delusional Idiot Entrapped', especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.
  - wallace_f 7y ago
    You got a lot of downvotes, but the themes in your comment are, in fact, eerily close to reality, even though a lot of people wouldn't believe it. The Intercept has a long-running series documenting the Security State prosecuting people for terrorism, who never were terorrists -- many are mentally ill people given plots and weapons by the FBI: https://theintercept.com/2017/09/03/the-fbi-pressured-a-lonely-young-man-into-a-bomb-plot-he-tried-to-back-out-now-hes-serving-life-in-prison/ https://theintercept.com/2017/09/03/the-fbi-pressured-a-lone... See the full series and list of stories here: https://trial-and-terror.theintercept.com/ https://trial-and-terror.theintercept.com/

grahamburger 7y ago

American Vandal (Netflix original) season 2 deals with this theme and is pretty amazing all around!

rolltiide 7y ago

> Judge Steven Barrett of the Bronx Supreme Court vacated Burton's 3-decade-old conviction, citing such work as the basis of his decision. This worked in a subdivision of a single city, but may never work in rural Wisconsin or the other 30,000+ municipalities in this country which operate under 55 sovereign districts with completely different legal hierarchies. We don't even have total transparency about who is even in most of these municipal prisons and under what circumstances. The work in New York City - "the center of the free world" - is probably the most advanced, and the world's news organizations have barely scratched the surface about whats going on in Riker's Islands and its other prisons. How can we really address this?

blizkreeg 7y ago

In India, confessions in lock-up or to the police are not admissible in court in a criminal proceeding. I've always found that as the way to prevent innocent people from being convicted based on their confession.

sickcodebruh 7y ago

Years ago, my band was harassed aggressively by border crossing guards while entering Canada. They insisted we had drugs with us and wanted us to confess. We knew we had nothing. Separated from my friends, threatened with what would happen when they found things, being told they were calling the dogs to search the car, seeing them going through our stuff, I had moments where I wondered if I had forgotten anything and if it might be better to confess just in case.

mbrameld 7y ago
I had a nearly identical experience crossing into Canada back in 2012. It was bizarre. They kept telling me they knew they were going to find someone in my car, which made me think they might actually PUT something in my car to find. Several hours later I was able to continue on into Canada after I repacked everything they had spread out everywhere.
- sickcodebruh 7y ago
  I’m sorry you went through that, too. Were you also traveling with a band? We had similar tactics applied by Border Agents in Arizona just past the California-Arizona state border last September. This time, I was driving and I knew they were full of shit when they surrounded us, talked about bringing dogs (they always threaten with dogs?), and claimed they smelled drugs in the vehicle. It didn’t go on for as long, they didn’t make us get out or go through our stuff, and copping to something we didn’t do didn’t enter my head, but it felt too familiar. The stakes in these situations were low, we knew this was par for the course when crossing these borders and it was STILL stressful and frightening. I can so easily see how people in more serious situations break when under more intense pressure.
  - mbrameld 7y ago
    I wasn't traveling with a band, just my dog! I was moving from Florida to Alaska, trying to catch the ferry out of Prince Rupert. Weather turned me around in Banff and I went to plan B and drove back into the US to Bellingham to catch the ferry there. Had no trouble at all crossing back into the US at the same crossing. My dog ended up with a gastric dilatation-volvulus the night before I got on the ferry and had to be euthanized. Not the best trip but living in Alaska was amazing.

hvo 7y ago

Well, I am not surprised at all. In US police,not all of them, often lie under oath.It is called ‘Testilying.’[0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/nyregion/police-lying-new-york.html?searchResultPosition=5 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/22/nyregion/police-lying-new...

michelpp 7y ago

Perhaps one of the best videos on YouTube "Don't talk to the Police": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

apatheticonion 7y ago

Scene from the Wire relating to lie detector machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN7pkFNEg5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN7pkFNEg5c

Tsubasachan 7y ago

Its really unfortunate. Your lawyer will tell you not to take the polygraph. Your lawyer will tell you not to sign a damn thing. Your lawyer will tell you to STFU. Your lawyer will tell you about all the little mindgames and brainwashing that you are going to experience. But if you're poor you don't have a lawyer to save you from the bad people. And its not in the government interest to provide you with one.

ajscanlan 7y ago
Can you not be provided a lawyer even if you're poor? I thought that was a right.
- twoquestions 7y ago
  You have a lawyer you meet at trial and don't get privacy with, and that's provided they're not incentivized (with money or otherwise) to deliberately fail to defend you.
  - justanotherjoe 7y ago
    I just don't think people that went through years of education are still capable of doing something like that. People are motivated by more than just money...
    - mrguyorama 7y ago
      It's not malice. In some places (I believe my state is one), even normal lawyers are required to periodically serve as a public defender. These defenders are just handed cases and required to handle them, period. Now what if it should take you a whole week to go through the facts of the case to properly defend the accused, but it turns out the court handed you about 10 cases that week, and they all have the same issue?
    - c0vfefe 7y ago
      Education has nothing to do with elimination of greed. White-collar crime exists, after all. You can't out-nurture human nature.