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It defies intuition to think innocent people would confess to a crime they did not commit. But, research has shown that everyone has a breaking point. In this episode, Saul Kassin, PhD, talks about the psychology behind false confessions and how law enforcement officials and legislators can take steps to prevent them.
About the expert: Saul Kassin, PhD
Saul Kassin is a distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Kassin pioneered the scientific study of false confessions. He has also studied the effect confessions have on judges, juries, lay witnesses, forensic science examiners and the plea bargaining process. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.
Kassin is past president of APA’s Division 41, American Psychology-Law Society. In 2017, he received the Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy Award from APA and in 2007, he was awarded an APA Presidential Citation for his work on false confessions. His work has been cited all over the world, including by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of Canada. He has appeared as an analyst on television news shows and in documentaries — most notably, Ken Burns’ 2012 film, The Central Park Five. He has also consulted in numerous high-profile court cases.
Transcript
Audrey Hamilton: Would you ever confess to a crime you didn’t commit? Most people answer that question with a resounding no. Yet, according to the Innocence Project almost 30 percent of wrongful conviction cases overturned by DNA testing involved a false confession. So, why do people seemingly of sound mind, implicate themselves? The answers may surprise you, but they shouldn’t. In this episode we speak with a psychologist about how law enforcement, current policies and our own sense of justice can lead to false confessions. I’m Audrey Hamilton and this is Speaking of Psychology.
Saul Kassin is a distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has pioneered the scientific study of false confessions and his research has been integral in preventing wrongful convictions and understanding why innocent people are targeted for interrogation, why they confess and the effect of this evidence on judges and juries. Welcome, Dr. Kassin.
Saul Kassin: Thank you. Good to be here.
Audrey Hamilton: Let’s start off the bat with the most obvious question I think people have about false confessions. Why would anyone confess to something they didn’t do? Do we understand the psychology of why this happens, especially in something like a murder investigation?
Saul Kassin: Right. You know, it’s interesting. That is the most interesting first question because when I ask people would that be something that you would ever do the answer is unanimously and strongly is, “no.” Nobody imagines they would ever do it short of having a gun to their head.
The very short answer is that everyone has their breaking point. But it’s a little more complex than that. It turns out there are three types of false confessions and there are three different storylines as to why an individual would confess to something they didn’t do.
One – there is a category of false confessions known as voluntary false confessions. These are cases, and they often happen in high-profile cases that are in the news, where people come out of the woodwork and volunteer confessions to crimes that are in the news that they didn’t commit. Kind of the poster child instance of that in history is when Charles Lindbergh’s infant son was kidnapped in 1932, 200 people volunteered confessions and all of them were false. You see that again in high-profile cases. Sometimes people volunteer confessions because they’re seeking attention. Sometimes they’re looking to actually protect somebody else who is the culprit. And sometimes it reflects some degree of delusion and it reflects on their mental health. Honestly, I don’t see the voluntary false confessions, while they happen and happen with some degree of regularity and always have, I don’t see them as a particular problem for the criminal justice system. I think it’s interesting that when somebody volunteers a confession to police — police typically react with some degree of skepticism. And they ask the question, well. And so they say you’ve committed this murder – prove it. What do you know about the crime? And if the individual who is offering to admit guilt can’t also provide details about the crime that are accurate as known to the police, then the police don’t follow that case. And so those voluntary false confessions don’t tend to enter the criminal justice system as problematic.
The problematic are the next two types. And these are the types of false confessions that arise from police interrogations. These are innocent people who, when asked about the crime, deny any involvement and then they are subject to a process of interrogation and it is a result of that process of interrogation that a confession is produced. So these are categories of police-induced false confessions.
The way in which the two categories differ is the most common form is you bring a person in who denies involvement, who is now subject to a harrowing and relentless interrogation — promises may be made, threats may be made, promises implied, threats implied, stress level is increased, they’re isolated, they’re away from anybody who’s familiar – and essentially, to make a long story short, everybody has a breaking point. And these are cases where individuals are innocent, who know they’re innocent, break down and confess in order to extract themselves from a very bad situation. They do what psychologists have known people to do in stressful decision-making situations, which is they maximize their opportunity to get themselves out of that situation. And as for the long-term consequence, well, I’ll worry about that when the time comes. They’re just not thinking clearly anymore. Classic, recent, historic, I think, example, the Central Park Five. There was a case when five false confessions were produced in a single investigation. And every one of those 14-, 15- and 16-year-old boys who confessed later said, “I knew I didn’t do it. I thought I was helping myself out by cooperating.” And so that is, I think, the most common type of false confession. An innocent person, broken down and the metric of the fact that these are what we call compliant false confessions — that is they confess as an act of compliance, while privately remaining knowledgeable that they are innocent. The metric of that is as soon as the pressure of the situation is lifted, they recant the confession. But it’s too late. It doesn’t matter. Nobody pays attention to, nobody trusts the recantation as much as they do the confession.
The third type of false confession is in some ways, when I first discovered this — we wrote about this — Larry Reitzman and I wrote about this in 1985 — was the most vexing because there wasn’t the psychology in place yet to explain it. We called it internalized false confessions. These are instances where an innocent person denying any involvement is put through a series of interrogation tactics and ultimately comes out not only willing to sign a confession as an act of compliance but they come to internalize the belief in their own guilt. They come to believe they have committed this crime. Now, that is a different type of process and a different story than what happens in the compliant false confessions.
What happens in internalization is this — what’s fascinating about them — I’ve seen about a dozen of them firsthand where we can actually watch the process. And what’s fascinating is the names change, the dates change, the places change, the script is almost always about the same. And the script is this – a subject is brought in who is vulnerable to manipulation. And when I say vulnerable I mean either they are vulnerable dispositionally. They may be mentally, intellectually impaired. They may be young – they may be 12-, 13-, 14-, 16-years-old. They may have been deprived of sleep and therefore rendered vulnerable to manipulation. They may be under so much stress or traumatized because a loved one had just been found murdered and, in fact, they’re being accused of that murder. Whatever it is, they are vulnerable. They are in a stressful state of mind. And as a result of the process of interrogation, they are continuing to deny involvement and then the detective doing the interrogating launches into a series of tactics that shocks most Americans to know is lawful. They start to lie to the suspect about the evidence. So, for example, Marty Tankleff, 17-years-old, young 17-years-old, wakes up one morning in 1990 and he finds lights are on all over the house. He finds that his parents have been bludgeoned. His mother is dead in a pool of blood. He runs to his father’s study and sees him gurgling, still alive but unconscious, also surrounded by blood. He calls the police. The police come. They identify him for no good reason as the suspect. And while his family is off at the emergency room in a hospital with his father. And he wants to be there. He keeps saying he’d like to be with his family. “Not until we’re done here. Not until we’re done here.” He’s in an agitated, traumatized state. The detectives begins to launch into a series of lies about the evidence.
He says “Marty, you said you had nothing to do with this. How does that explain the fact that your hair was found in your mother’s grasp?”
And, Marty said, and that wasn’t true. Marty said, “Well, I don’t know how that could be possible.”
And then he asked, “It looks like you used the shower this morning.”
And Marty said, “No, I didn’t.”
Because they couldn’t explain there were two bloody murder scenes in this house. And Marty’s clean. They arrive at the scene and he’s clean. They convince him that they did a humidity test on the shower in his bedroom and that it proved that the shower had been used that morning. That was a lie.
So now Marty is starting to wonder what the truth is and he’s getting confused and disoriented. And then the detective gets up and physically leaves the room, leaves Marty in there with his partner. He comes back in and says “Marty, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is I just contacted the hospital. Your father has regained consciousness. The bad news is he said you did this.” And that was a lie. And Marty said, “My father never lies. If he said I did this I must have done this.”
That is the pattern that you see. Vulnerable suspect, dispositionally or rendered vulnerable, lied to about the evidence, starting to get confused about reality. In some cases the degree of internalization ends with they no longer can attest to their own innocence. They’re confused. In some cases, it becomes a full blown belief that they committed this crime and a search for the details as to how they did it. And so what happens is they eventually confess by using words like, “I guess I did it,” “I guess I must have done it.” Always that kind of tentative, fragmentary language. And then ultimately they produce a fuller confession filled with the kinds of details that were handed to them through the process of interrogation. So if you’re an observer in court and all you’re hearing is that final statement, there’s no way you can get past it.
And so that third category of false confessions — fascinating — you see it over and over again — again not nearly as prevalent as the compliant false confessions. But, it’s a third story line where the process of interrogation actually converts the beliefs and memories and sometimes they actually confabulate memories of what they did and how they did it.
Audrey Hamilton: What is the most common thing that you see in these interrogations that leads you to believe someone may not be telling the truth or is feeling intimidated? I think you’ve touched a little bit on this already but I’m curious in some more examples how are law enforcement officials contributing to these false confessions?
Saul Kassin: They are contributing mightily to false confessions. And there’s two things I should say about this. First, imagine yourself sitting in a courtroom watching a videotaped confession. So the suspect has been brought to the point of giving a statement and at that point, the videotape recorder is turned on and a statement is given and that statement later is played in court. I can tell you as an empirical matter we’ve done these studies and certainly the wrongful convictions, experiences of people who have been wrongfully convicted will attest. Judges, juries, lay people — they can’t tell the difference between a true confession and a false confession just by watching the confession. I went into a prison outside of Boston with colleagues. We had prisoners on tape confessing to the crimes for which they were incarcerated and then we asked each one to make up a confession to a crime he did not commit. People cannot tell the difference between those two sets of confessions. And the story of every false confession is not just a story of what happened in the police interrogation room. It’s a story of the fact that once that false confession was taken and recanted and the person pled not guilty and went to trial, in every instance, a prosecutor, judge, jury and, typically, an appeals court, believed that false confession.
The second terrible subplot in these cases is not just that the false confession was taken, it’s that all of the safety nets we believe were built into the system fail. People believe false confessions. So, first thing it’s important to know is there’s no way to identify what it is that law enforcement does simply by watching the final statement. That’s why what’s most important and whenever I clamor for reform and other psychologists in this area clamor for reform, the number one rule for reform is, record the entire process.
Audrey Hamilton: The minute they walk in the door.
Saul Kassin: The minute they walk in. And in fact, I’m sitting here right now in the District of Columbia Metro Police — DC Metro Police went to the system years ago. They’ve got interview rooms set up and as soon as somebody walks into the room the motion activation system turns on the lights and turns on the camera. Simple as that. Every interaction is recorded. It’s the only way that a judge and a jury can make a reasonable determination as to what happened. You can’t know from listening to the final product.
Now, I keep saying judge and jury. The judge, almost always when a confessor recants and goes to trial, the judge ends up having to rule in a pre-trial suppression hearing as to whether or not that confession was voluntary because by law if the judge determines that it was not voluntary then it should not be admissible into evidence and the case is usually closed.
So every judge has to rule on whether the confession was voluntary. Most times confessions are ruled voluntary. They go into trial and then it’s up to the jury to determine whether it’s a credible confession. I don’t know how a judge is competent to determine voluntariness without watching the process. I don’t know how a jury can know whether it’s a good confession without watching the process. And the reason all of this can be so confusing is another empirical fact. When you look at analysis of real, known, proven, false confessions taken right out of the Innocence Project case files…
Audrey Hamilton: Right, this is the one where they use DNA to…
Saul Kassin: Yes. Right, so these are DNA exonerated men and women who had confessed. So we know now that they are actually innocent and that the confessions were false. When you go back and look at those confessions, 95 percent of them contained facts about the case that were spot on accurate with regard to the crime and that were not in the public domain. Facts that only the perpetrator could have known. The problem is, the police knew those facts too. And somehow, advertently or inadvertently, those facts made their way into the final statement.
So, imagine a judge or a jury ruling on a confession determining if it is a good confession. They’re not just hearing an admission of guilt, they’re hearing an admission of guilt followed by a full narrative story. This is what I did. This is how I did it. This is who I was with. This is why I did it. This is what I saw and heard along the way.
And then, my colleagues and I also content analyzed some known false confessions. They often contain physical reenactments, hand drawn maps, apologies and expressions of remorse. Corey Wise of the Central Park Five – not only did he admit to taking part in the rape of a jogger, which he had nothing to do with. Embedded in his statement, which was videotaped, was an apology. He said, “this is my first rape and it’s going to be my last. I’m never going to do this again.”
That’s a false confession. That’s the sight and sound of a false confession. There’s no way a judge and a jury can know how to measure that without having heard the process that gave rise to it. Now, thankfully, 25 states require the recording of interrogations. At least in serious felony cases.
Audrey Hamilton: How do you think psychological research can be used to help educate law enforcement on changing the way they conduct interrogations?
Saul Kassin: Fascinating question. There are many ways in which psychologists have exerted influence over practice. One is, it is clear that many of the techniques that have been used —and I should say that there is not one technique for interrogation. There tends to be an American style, confrontational style set of techniques that are shaped around what the law permits and those techniques are confrontational meaning that the goal is to accuse right out of the gate accuse the suspect of having committed the crime. And in fact, the opening salvo of an American style interrogation is an accusation of guilt. And a refusal to accept denials. So, when a subject denies that having any involvement post-accusation typically what the American detective will do is call that person a liar, say no, we know what happened. We want you to tell the truth. And the process then proceeds kind of relentlessly for some degree of time. I should say, the average interrogation lasts for 30 to 60 minutes. But if you look at false confession cases, they’re six hours, eight hours, 10 hours, 14 hours — and so this is this relentless process.
Now, it starts with an accusation. Eventually what happens is the American interrogator fashions a set of tactics that are designed both to make it stressful to continue to deny and less stressful to continue to confess.
Audrey Hamilton: Get it over with. I’m done with this process.
Saul Kassin: Get it over with and along the way not only does the interrogator imply that we have all sorts of evidence against you, most countries do not allow their police to lie about the evidence. It makes the suspect feel overwhelmed as if they have no choice, as if there is an air of inevitability. And so now you’re looking for an expedient way out.
Well, here comes the second set of tactics, which I have collectively used the term minimization to describe it. Minimization is, and you see this in every one of these cases, minimization is you know, I think you’re a good person. I don’t think you intended to do this. I don’t think this is something you went in there intended to do. It’s possible you may have had too much to drink. It’s possible somebody put you up to it. You were under pressure. You were provoked. There are externalizations of blame, moral justification. The implication is, you know what, I don’t think this is such a big deal. So, the crime and the implications of that crime are minimized. It is not a coincidence that every one of the Central Park Five boys and their families who were present, when their interrogations had concluded and they were put under arrest, they were shocked. They all thought they were going home. The most common comment you hear when a microphone is put into the face of an exoneree who had confessed is, “So why did you confess?” The typical thing they say is because they wanted to go home.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the case of Brendan Dassey from “Making a Murderer,” the Netflix documentary. Dassey was 16-years-old. He gave a confession. Shortly after giving that confession, there is a jaw-dropping moment when he says, “Am I going to get back to school in time? I have a project due.” He had no idea he was going to be under arrest and he’d never go home again. And that tells you what kind of interrogation tactics were used. Minimization tactics are the final way to take a subject who has been broken down, lead to believe there’s no way out. But, if you cooperate with us we think this is no big deal.
Again, as am empirical matter we’ve done these studies. When people hear minimization tactics, the take-home message that they infer when we ask them is leniency. This person will not be treated with a harsh punishment. And so that’s the American-style interrogation.
But there are others. In Europe, there is a sweeping set of reforms. You ask can psychology make change? Psychology has already made change. We have contributed to the fact that 25 states now record interrogations. In Europe, there is a sweeping reform that started in the United Kingdom, started in England. And that reform is to move away from the confrontational style investigation to what they call investigative interviewing, where the goal is to gather information, to figure out what happened – to determine whether or not this person has information. Secondarily, to solve the crime by confession. In England, they went to a new model as a result of some false confession cases in the 1980s. And as a result of reforming their form of – moving from the kind of interrogation that we see in the U.S. to investigative interviewing – they have reported no change in their ability to close cases. No change in their ability to get confessions. And they’re no longer seeing this rash of false confession cases they used to report. Unlike in the United States, there has been a concerted effort to bring psychologists and practitioners together to create this new model. Here, there is a greater amount of resistance to moving in that direction. And that is why, at least as a backup if you can’t reform the process of interrogation, at the very least you can make it transparent so that judges, juries and prosecutors can see what happened. The way everybody saw Brendan Dassey’s interrogation, taken at a time when the state of Wisconsin required the recording of interrogation, there was a public outcry when Netflix showed that documentary because people got to see the process not just the final outcome.
Audrey Hamilton: You’ve also studied quite a bit about why people waive their protections, like Miranda rights, you know, you have the right to remain silent. I’m interested in an experiment you did that was published in the Journal of Law and Human Behavior where you had people pretend they were either guilty or innocent, like a mock theft of $100. Innocent people signed their Miranda waiver twice as often as guilty suspects. Why would they do that? Obviously, this wasn’t a real crime, but what does this tell you about why people agree to talk even if they’re innocent? How can this harm them in actual criminal investigations?
Saul Kassin: Um, this was an important topic. In part, because, I had spent a good amount of time – I occasionally work as a consultant or an expert witness on cases involving false confessions and I talk to those who had given false confessions – and one signal that came through loud and clear, because you know, what they all have in common, is they all gave false confessions. But they have something else in common – they all waived their Miranda rights. We’re handed one means of protecting of ourselves and that is, at any moment, we can clam up and say we want a lawyer. We don’t have to talk. We don’t have to put ourselves through this hideous process. And so I asked them, “Why?” And, it’s fascinating. They all give you exactly the same answer in almost exactly the same words: “Why didn’t you get a lawyer?” “Well, I didn’t need a lawyer.” “Well, why didn’t you need a lawyer?” “Well, I didn’t do anything wrong.” They had this naïve belief in the power of their innocence to prevail.
The idea came to me because there had been data showing that Miranda waiver rates are very high. The police worried in 1966, when the U.S. Supreme Court forced them to read people their rights and get a waiver of those rights before they could interrogate them, they worried that nobody will ever talk to us again. That hasn’t happened. Eighty percent, roughly 75 to 80 percent, of suspects waive their Miranda rights. And that’s a statistic you find in this country and elsewhere where comparable rules are in place. And so you ask yourselves the question, why? And then you look more carefully at those data and you find that people who have never been in trouble before, people who don’t have a history with the criminal justice system and, therefore, people just as a base rate matter more likely to be innocent, are much more likely to waive their rights. So, based on those observations and my conversations with the wrongfully convicted, we brought that into the laboratory. I say this because this is not a mere laboratory phenomenon. The idea for it came from the real world. So, now we bring it into the laboratory and we have people go through the motions of stealing, or not stealing, $100. They know it’s not real. But they are then put into the laboratory interrogation room and confronted with a detective who walks in, introduces himself as Detective McCarthy, has either – we actually vary whether his demeanor is hostile and close-minded, or whether he seems open and willing to hear their story. They are all incentivized to make themselves appear innocent. And, the first thing he does is read them their rights and look to see whether they’re willing to sign the waiver. And, by a large margin of 81 percent to 36 percent, those who had nothing to hide, those whose accounts of their whereabouts of what they did would be truthful, 81 percent of them waived their rights compared to only 36 percent of them who actually had committed the mock crime. And they told us exactly what the wrongfully convicted say, “Well, I didn’t do anything wrong. He’ll see that.”
Two explanations I have for what was happening here and they’re kind of related — one is, people have a belief in a just world. Now, we know that. There is research in psychology on the belief in a just world. People tend to believe that the world is generally a just place. Good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. The fact of the matter is, if I did nothing wrong, that will come out. Justice will figure that out. And the second interesting phenomenon in psychology that I think is informative, is what is called the illusion of transparency. People believe that their truths-telling and their lies are transparent. People believe that when they utter the truth, others will believe them. And that when they lie, others will figure that out. And that illusion of transparency gives comfort to the person who did nothing wrong. So, when you hear the wrongfully convicted talk about why did you waive your rights — and, in fact, in some cases they explain, “The reason I gave in and confessed was, I figured, you know what, they’ll proceed with their investigation and, in the end, they’ll see I did nothing wrong.”
Now this gets to, I think, a very important point that I did not see coming until I had conversations with some of these false confessors and it is a concept that I’ve gone on to call the phenomenology of innocence. An innocent person, you would think that the thing that protects an innocent person is his or her knowledge of his innocence, right? I’ll be damned if I’m going to confess to something I didn’t do! However, innocent people sometimes confess after hours of interrogation, because they’re led to believe there is additional evidence coming. And, when they’re led to believe that there’s additional evidence coming, that belief, in fact, becomes a promise of future exoneration, which paradoxically makes it easier to confess. So, a number of innocent people have confessed just to get out of a bad situation believing when the police do the rest of their investigation, they’ll see this wasn’t me. So, in a funny way, innocence can be your own enemy in that situation. Um and that is the same phenomenon, the same explanation as to why innocent people waive their rights. They’ll look you right in the eye and say, “We’ll I didn’t need a lawyer. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Audrey Hamilton: I think it’s interesting that you’re studying this and, you were telling me this before we actually started recording, but you think it’s important for psychologists to be out there making people aware.
Saul Kassin: It’s very important. It’s very important. You know, the psychology underlying false confessions is basic. We have a wealth of studies that we’ve done in laboratories, in field settings, in surveys and what not, from the 1980s forward. All of it has been summarized in a white paper that APA Division 41 has produced. All of it is summarized in, now, seven amicus briefs that the APA has submitted to various states courts. But, in a sense, we almost didn’t need that literature to understand the underlying psychology, it is so basic. If you understand the principles of reinforcement, if you understand the way Skinner used to shape rats in a Skinner Box, if you understand the reward contingencies that affect people’s decision-making, if you remember back to Milgram’s obedience experiments, where people were under pressure, step by step, increasingly to violate their conscience — all of that is directly relevant to what happens in an interrogation room. And, so, psychologists, I think, are uniquely poised to help in these matters. And the reason I think raising public awareness is important — I have spent, and others have spent, a lot of years trying to reform the system from the top down. We speak to state legislators. We speak to state innocence commissions. We talk to groups of judges. We try to get the laws changed from the top down. And that has been somewhat successful. But, what has become apparent to me and it has become apparent in some very high profile cases – like the Central Park Five, like Brendan Dassey’s situation – what has become apparent, is that another way to manage this, another way to exert our influence and, I think, help to reform a broken system, is to get involved in raising public awareness.
Again, I think the “Making a Murderer” documentary tells me a lot. Here’s a case where 16-year-old Brendan Dassey, 10 years ago, gives a confession. Now, mind you, the jury got to see the tape, or parts of the tape, of that interrogation but they didn’t get to hear from an expert explaining that tape. And, so he gets convicted. Appeals within the state are exhausted. Everything looks like he’s going to spend the next 25 years to life in prison. Then in December of 2015 the documentary is aired. There is a public outcry. Twenty million people watched the documentary in the first month or so and there is outrage over the treatment of Brendan Dassey and his confession. Within six months, a federal judge overturns his conviction, arguing that the confession was coerced. That judge had his ruling appealed and then a three-judge federal panel affirmed that ruling. Now, Dassey, at the moment we are speaking right now, is still incarcerated in Wisconsin because the prosecutor’s office has appealed those federal decisions and wants to go back and re-try him and has argued that he should remain incarcerated to that point. But the fact of the matter is, Dassey wasn’t going anywhere until public awareness was raised. That is another way, in which, we can make important change. And, I don’t know that there’s another profession as uniquely poised as psychology and, you know what, if we don’t step in to inform the public about what’s happening somebody else will fill that void who is less expert and less informed.
Audrey Hamilton: Well, Dr. Kassin, thank you so much for being here today. It’s been really interesting.
Saul Kassin: My pleasure.
Audrey Hamilton: Thanks for listening. If you would like more information on the topics we discussed or if you would like to hear more episodes, please go to our website. With the American Psychological Association’s Speaking of Psychology, I’m Audrey Hamilton.