FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY
POLICE : THE REAL CULPRIT?
What are the consequences of police-induced false confessions?
The consequences of wrongful convictions for crime can be serious in many respects. Among the serious symptoms found which appeared after incarceration were lasting anger, panic disorder, permanent personality change, substance abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Two-thirds of the victims of wrongful conviction showed the symptomatology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The high-profile nature of some wrongful allegations and miscarriages of justice can also affect the public’s beliefs about the nature of crime and facts about crime and its perpetrators (Cole, 2009).
The experience of coercive interrogation and falsely confessing may have a negative impact on young people’s attitudes to the police and criminal justice system. A suspect's confession sets in motion a seemingly irrefutable presumption of guilt among justice officials, the media, the public, and lay jurors. This chain of events in effect leads each part of the system to be stacked against the individual who confesses, and as a result he is treated more harshly at every stage of the investigative and trial process. He is significantly more likely to be incarcerated before trial, charged, pressured to plead guilty, and convicted. As the case against an innocent false confessor moves from one stage to the next in the criminal justice system, it gathers more collective force, and the error becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.
This chain reaction starts with the police. Once they obtain a confession, they typically close their investigation, clear the case as solved, and make no effort to pursue any exculpatory evidence or other possible leads, even if the confession is internally inconsistent, contradicted by external evidence, or the result of coercive interrogation. Even when other case evidence subsequently emerges suggesting or demonstrating that the suspect's confession is false, police almost always continue to believe in the suspect's guilt and the underlying accuracy of the confession. Police interrogators are poorly trained about the risks of psychological interrogation and the phenomenon of police-induced false confession, and, like most people, they tend to assume that virtually all confessions are true and thus assume that all who confess are guilty.
Like police, prosecutors rarely consider the possibility that an entirely innocent suspect has falsely confessed; some prosecutors are so skeptical of the idea of police-induced false confession that they stubbornly refuse to admit that it occurred, even after DNA evidence has unequivocally established the defendant's innocence. Once a suspect has confessed, prosecutors tend to charge him with the highest number and types of offenses and set his bail at a higher amount, and they are far less likely to initiate or accept a plea bargain to a reduced charge. Even defense attorneys treat suspects who confess more harshly, often pressuring them to accept a guilty plea to a lesser charge to avoid the higher sentence that will inevitably follow from a jury conviction. Conditioned to disbelieve defendants’ claims of innocence or police misconduct, judges rarely suppress confessions, even highly questionable ones.
If the defendant's case goes to trial, the jury treats the confession as more probative of the defendant's guilt than any other type of evidence (short of a videotape of the suspect committing the crime), especially if, as in virtually all high profile cases, the confession receives pretrial publicity. False confessions are highly likely to lead to the wrongful conviction of the innocent. In their study of 60 false confessions, Leo and Ofshe found that 73 percent of all false confessions whose cases went to trial were erroneously convicted; this number went up to 81 percent in the study of Drizin and Leo of 125 false confessions. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that a false confession is a dangerous piece of evidence to put before a judge or jury, because it profoundly biases their evaluation of the case in favor of conviction, so much so that they may allow it to outweigh even strong evidence of a suspect's factual innocence. Thus the false-confession evidence is highly, if not inherently, prejudicial to the fate of any innocent defendant in the n criminal justice system.
A scene from Brooklyn Nine Nine (NBC)