False Confessions: From Colonial Salem, Through Central Park, and into the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The chapter provides an overview of the history of research in the area of false confessions. Picking up on the history of scholarly interest in confessions within psychology, four noteworthy areas are covered: (1) Miranda rights to silence and to counsel—a number of suspects lack the capacity to understand and apply the rights they are given; 560 different Miranda warning forms have been identified throughout the U.S. and they vary substantially in content, wording, and format; and innocence is a naïve mental state that leads people to trust the system; (2) the social psychology of police interrogations—the taxonomy introduced by Kassin and Wrightsman (The psychology of evidence and trial procedure, Sage, Beverly Hills, CA, 1985) that is universally used to distinguish three types of false confessions—voluntary, coerced-compliant, and coerced-internalized—is discussed; as well as a description of how the computer crash or ALT key experiment was developed, becoming the first experimental paradigm to be used in the study of false confessions; (3) the reformist movement in Great Britain—the acronym PEACE was used to describe the five distinct parts of the new interview approach (“Preparation and Planning,” “Engage and Explain,” “Account,” “Closure,” and “Evaluate”); and (4) the Innocence Project’s DNA exoneration cases—since 1989, more than 300 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA evidence, and false confessions have been a contributing factor in over 25 % of these wrongful convictions.