FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY
"YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT"
If you’ve ever watched any of the tens of thousands of hours of television devoted to crime dramas, you know the first warning given to suspects who are arrested and questioned. “Anything you say can and will be used against you.” (more commonly known as the Miranda warning).
Miranda was the culmination of 30 years of Supreme Court cases that were designed to protect criminal suspects from abuse in police interrogations. In 1966, false confessions were a rare problem. However, fifty years later, we have seen hundreds of exonerations of innocent defendants who confessed to terrible crimes after they received Miranda warnings.
Ernesto Miranda's Police File Photo, 1963
Do innocent people really confess without torture?
Why would an innocent person ever confess to a murder or some other terrible violent crime?
Torture would explain it. That was the issue in Brown v. Mississippi in 1936, the first case in which the Supreme Court excluded a confession from a state court prosecution. Three suspects had been tortured for days.
Between 1936 and 1966 the use of torture to extract confessions declined greatly, a major accomplishment by American courts and criminal justice reformers. When Miranda was written, a shift was underway to more “modern” methods of interrogation: isolation, deception, manipulation and exhaustion rather than beating. Without torture or threats of death or violence, it seems implausible that an innocent suspect would confess to a serious crime. That is precisely why confessions are such powerful evidence of guilt.
Juan Rivera
In some cases, even exculpatory DNA evidence doesn’t help. In October 1992, after a grueling four-day interrogation, 19-year-old Juan Rivera falsely confessed to the rape-murder of an 11-year-old girl in Lake County, Illinois. In fact, he confessed twice. His first confession was so riddled with factual errors that the detectives made him do it again to “clear up” the inconsistencies, even though Rivera was plainly in a state of mental collapse.
Rivera was convicted of murder in 1993, and again in 1996 after his first conviction was reversed for a host of legal errors. In 2005, DNA tests proved that a different man was the source of semen recovered from the body of the victim. Rivera’s conviction was vacated but the prosecution took him to trial again, and in 2009, despite the DNA evidence, Rivera was convicted a third time. Finally, in 2011, the Illinois Appellate Court ruled that Rivera’s conviction was “unjustified and cannot stand” and dismissed the charges.
John Restivo
False confessions by co-defendants.
In many cases, innocent suspects who confess implicate others who are also innocent. Some do it because that’s the story their interrogators want to hear. John Kogut, for example, not only falsely confessed to his own involvement in murder, he also said he did it with two friends Dennis Halsted and John Restivo, both of whom (like Kogut) spent 20 years in prison before they were exonerated in 2005.
And some innocent suspects who confess blame others to deflect responsibility and reduce their punishment. Richard Ochoa was facing the death penalty for the murder of Nancy DePriest in Austin, Texas in 1988. He confessed, named his roommate Richard Danziger as the actual killer and agreed to plead guilty and testify against Danziger. Both were convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Both were exonerated by DNA in 2002.
Dennis Halsted
Who falsely confesses?
All sorts of people falsely confess, but two groups are particularly vulnerable: young suspects and those with mental disabilities.
In 1983, for example, Earl Washington, a 22-year-old black man with an IQ of about 69, was arrested in Culpeper, Virginia, for burglary and malicious wounding. Over two days of questioning, Washington “confessed” to five separate crimes, four of which were not pursued because his confessions did not match the actual crimes and the victims could not identify Washington as the criminal. Washington was convicted and sentenced to death in January 1984. He was exonerated by DNA 16 years later, in 2000.
Overall, of exonerees with reported mental illness or intellectual disability, 72 percent had confessed.
Young suspects fared almost as badly. Forty percent of exonerees who were under 18 at the time of the crime falsely confessed, including 53 percent of 14- and 15-year olds, and 86 percent of the few who were 13 years old or younger. By comparison, only 7 percent of adult exonerees without reported mental disabilities falsely confessed.
Why do all these innocent defendants confess?
Innocent suspects confess because they are terrified and confused and exhausted; because they are deceived or tricked; because they don’t understand what they are doing; because they feel hopeless and helpless and isolated.
Miranda was a step in the Supreme Court’s campaign to eliminate violence in interrogations. But Miranda also ratified the “modern practice of in-custody interrogation". It described how this is done:
The officers who conduct “modern” interrogations may lie about the evidence and tell the suspect that his fingerprints were found at the scene; that a co-defendant already confessed and put the blame on him; that he was seen by an eyewitness. They routinely say that they already have him dead to rights and that this is his only chance to tell his side of the story and help his cause; that the victim must have provoked him; that what he did is understandable. They may describe dire consequences if he does not come clean, perhaps the death penalty, and imply leniency if he does.
The Supreme Court recognized that this process “exacts a heavy toll on individual liberty, and trades on the weakness of individuals,” but it did not forbid any of these practices. As a result, Miranda is regularly cited as authority for the legality of all of these coercive techniques.
By the time they confess, Miranda is a distant memory, if not entirely forgotten. The process works. Many suspects confess after Miranda warnings and most are guilty; that’s why these techniques are used and trusted. But some are innocent.
Remedies for False Confessions