False confessions: How the innocent admit, are convicted of crimes they didn't commit

[TalkingDog]

http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2010/09/false_confessions_how_the_inno.html

But more than 40 others have given confessions since 1976 that DNA evidence later showed were false, according to records compiled by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Experts have long known that some kinds of people -- including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led -- are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There are also people like Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance by interrogators.

New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim that only the defendant could have committed the crime.

An article by Garrett draws on trial transcripts, recorded confessions and other background materials to show how incriminating facts got into those confessions -- by police introducing important facts about the case, whether intentionally or unintentionally, during the interrogation.






I'm glad the Innocence Project is taking an interest in this.

[Jackpine Radical]

1. This work has been getting a lot of attention

in forensic psychology circles.

[TalkingDog]

2. It reminds me of the satanic child abuse scares.

Where the parents, police or psychologist would ask, perhaps unintentionally, leading questions. Or give info that would later crop up in testimony.

An acquaintance of ours saw his step-daughter go to prison for several years after being falsely accused in the Eden NC case. She never confessed to anything, preferring prison to being labeled a child abuser. Very sad. Sick really.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. That was a time of total insanity.

I do know that a lot of us didn't buy into the whole hysteria, though. And psychologists like Ralph Underwager and his wife Holly Wakefield took a lot of heat for speaking out and writing about the craziness. We now have an overblown form of hysteria surrounding the issue of sex offenders and sex offender commitment.