8.6: Examining False Confessions

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the goal of ethical interviewing, questioning, and interrogation is to elicit the truth, and the truth can include statements that are either inculpatory confessions of guilt or exculpatory denial of involvement in a crime. Whenever an investigator has interrogated a suspect, and a confession of guilt has been obtained, that investigator needs to take some additional steps to ensure that the confession can be verified as truthful before it goes to court. These additional steps are required because, although the investigator has not used any illegal or unethical techniques, the court will still consider whether the accused, for some reason, has confessed to a crime they did not commit. A skilled defense lawyer will often present arguments alleging that psychological stresses of guilt or hopelessness from exposure to overwhelming evidence have been used to persuade a suspect to confess to a crime they did not commit. In such cases, it is helpful for the court to hear any additional statements made by the accused, such as those that reveal that the suspect had direct knowledge of the criminal event that could only be known to the criminal responsible.

In police investigations, there are many details of the criminal event that will be known to the police through their examination of the crime scene or through the interview with witnesses or victims. These details can include the actual way the crime was committed, such as the sequence of events, the tools used in the crime; or the means of entry, the path of entry/exit, along with other obscure facts that could only be known by the actual perpetrator. There are opportunities in a crime scene examination for the investigator to observe one or more unique facts that can be withheld as “hold back evidence.” This hold-back evidence is not made part of reports or media release and is kept exclusively to test for false confessions. Confessing to the crime is one thing, but confessing to the crime and revealing intimate details is much more compelling to the court. Regardless of the effort and care that investigators take to not end up with a false confession, they still occur, and there are some more common scenarios where false confessions happen. It is important for an investigator to consider these possibilities when a confession is obtained. These situations are:

• The confessor was enlisted to take the blame — On occasions where persons are part of organized crime, a person of lower status within the group is assigned or sacrificed to take the blame for a crime in place of a person of higher status. These organizational pawns are usually persons with a more minor criminal history or are young offenders, as they are likely to receive a lesser sentence for the offense.
• The Sacrificial Confessor — Like the confessor enlisted in an organized criminal organization, there is another type of sacrificial confessor; the type who steps forward to take the blame to protect a friend or loved one. These are voluntary confessors, but their false confession can be exposed by questioning the confessor about the hold back details of the event.
• The Mentally Ill False Confessor — This type of false confessor is encountered when there is significant media attention surrounding a crime. As Pickersgill (2015) noted, an innocent person may voluntarily provide a false confession because of a pathological need for notoriety or the need to self-punish due to guilt over an unrelated past offense. Additionally, those suffering from psychosis, endogenous depression, and Munchausen Syndrome may falsely confess to a crime they did not commit (Abed, 2105). As with other false confessors, these people can be discovered using hold-back detail questioning.