Why do people make false confessions?

[Rhys_Thomas_00]

A lot of people have in the past confessed to a crime they did not commit but why?
Is it classed as lying or perversion/obstruction of justice at all?
What if we made false Confessions to our Priests, or even merely our brothers and sisters?
Is a false Confession equal or even worse than a denial?

This came up as I had recently been accused of something I didn’t do. I felt like it might be easier if I just confessed to doing it despite my innocence. I ended up writing a letter and the matter has since been resolved, but it made me think: Why did I want to make a false confession?

 

[Fauken]

I imagine because sometimes the punishment is viewed as less. On TV last week, I was hearing a story of two brothers who were falsely accused and convicted of assault, and possibly rape (I can’t quite remember), crimes they were actually innocent of. They were in prison for over a decade. DNA evidence exonerated them of ther rape, but the state still intended to have them charged with something. So the state offered a deal. Plead guilty to a lesser felony assault charge, and walk away free. Or fight it and risk prison. Prison was a nightmare for them both. One brother was so terrified of going back, that he took the deal. The other fought it and was found innocent.

 

[JimG]

Sometimes people have made false confessions after having been browbeaten for hours in a police interview room, and they will do anything to end the interview. Sometimes the false confessions are effectively dictated by the police. See, for example, the case of the Norfolk Four, all of whom falsely confessed to a serious crime that they did not commit.

"Norfolk Four" Pardoned 20 Years After False Confessions | FRONTLINE

 

[FirstFiveEighth]

Two main reasons people make false confessions. The first is as you yourself felt, they feel it is easier and less damaging to just confess to whatever it was.

The second reason is, basically, the malleability of our memory. You’ve probably heard of the general line in regards to propoganda, “say something enough and people will believe it’s true”. The same principle applies to confessions. Many false confessions of a criminal nature are due to the accused being led towards a certain answer by investigators or witnesses. The accused is usually isolated and already treated as guilty- locked in a cell, escorted around by armed guards, etc. Then they are told that they committed some crime and asked why/how they did it. They are being treated this way by what most people consider a reputable and authoritative force, the police. So there you are, the police are telling you that you committed some crime, they are treating you as guilty, and you start to believe that maybe you really were at that time and place. Maybe you really did do that crime and you just misremembered. Then you begin to create a false memory of having done whatever it was you were accused of and now you have convonced yourself that you really did commit the crime. This might sound crazy and far fetched but it is true and false memories are a real thing.

For example, a man was arrested in Oregon, I think, many years ago on charges of sexual harassment of a minor. He was innocent, but the police believed he was guilty. Under many hours of interrogation, the police repeatedly told him he did this crime, this was how he did it, and it would go easier on him if he would just admit that he did it. Eventually the man believed what they told him himself and plead guilty to the crime. They later found the real perpetrator and realized they had charged the wrong man. The lead investigator however was so convinced of his own story that he refused to admit he arrested the wrong man. The man wrongly convicted also was kind of surprised to learn he was right all along! After being proved innocent he said something along the lines of, “They kept telling me I did it, so I thought maybe I really did”.

False memories are actually a big problem in issues dealing with witnesses. Another broad example, in the 80s and 90s psychologists began using techniques to reveal “repressed” memories, especially in regards to child abuse and sexual assault. What they actually were unknowingly doing was leading the client on by saying stuff like, “what do you remember about when he touched you”, and so they were actually implanting false memories that were then used to have people arrested. The older a memory supposedly is, the easier it is to warp or create it. Long story short, you have to be very careful how you question people and don’t load the questions because memories are not really steel traps. More like clay.

 

[angel12]

And there are sometimes mentally-ill people who either want the attention, or convince themselves they did actually do the crime.

 

[JimG]

The cases of false confessions I have read about have not been cases involving false memories. In the most noteworthy cases, the accused knew they full well that they were innocent of the crime and knew no details of the crime. But after 8 or 10 or 12 hours of intensive interrogation by intimidating detectives who told them that they did it and insisted things would be so much better for them if they simply gave a confession, their resolve weakened. They would admit to anything just to end the interrogation.

IIRC, in the case of the Norfolk Four, the accused had no knowledge whatever of the actual details of the crime so that the details had to be practically dictated to them by the interrogators in order for them to write a confession.

In Dorothy Rabinowitz’ book about some alleged child sexual abuse cases in the 1980’s, the situation was rather reversed. The children said nothing had been done to them. They too were subjected to hours of interrogation by a worthless “expert’ who kept prodding them to tell her something bad. They were told they would be rewarded if the told of something bad that had happened. Their parents were told that if they said nothing happened, that was evidence that something had happened. They eventually came up with totally impossible stories which became the prosecution’s improbable case for sending innocent people to prison. The totality of the interrogation transcripts were of course never presented at trial because they would have shown the whole thing to be a farce.

It is also to be noted that a prosecutor sees his job as obtaining a conviction. Once he has a confession or a conviction he is not interested in looking at contradictory evidence, because it only muddies the waters and threatens his win.