Abstract
Confessions may be the most pursued form of evidence in criminal investigations. US courts and legal experts have acknowledged, and mock jury studies have affirmed, that confessions have more influence over the outcomes of criminal prosecutions than any other type of evidence (Appleby, Hasel, & Kassin, 2011; Colorado v. Connelly, 1986; Kassin & Sukel, 1997; Miranda v. Arizona, 1966). A majority of criminal cases are solved as a result of confessions made to law enforcement officers (Leo, 2008). This is why interview and interrogation skills are critical to criminal investigative strategies. In one of the most influential studies of law enforcement interrogations in the USA, Leo found that confessing defendants were more likely than non-confessing defendants to accept guilty pleas and forego their rights to a formal trial (Leo, 1996). Reliable confessions advance investigative objectives, save resources, mitigate defense strategies, and profoundly minimize the potential that personal crime victims are “revictimized” when forced to relive their traumatic experiences at trial.
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Notes
- 1.
To avoid the distracting use of alternating or awkwardly pluralized pronouns, criminal suspects sometimes will be referred to using the generic masculine since most serious crime offenders are men.
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McConnell, B. (2017). Criminal Interview and Interrogation in Serious Crime Investigations. In: Van Hasselt, V., Bourke, M. (eds) Handbook of Behavioral Criminology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61625-4_27
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