A review of the literature unequivocally reveals false confessions are oftentimes deliberately sought after by overzealous criminal justice interrogators who are much more preoccupied with ascertaining a confession -- and an ensuing conviction -- than they are with ascertaining the truth about a particular crime.

Organization

This paper is organized by explaining the concept that false conceptions are deliberately extracted by far too many interrogators for the purposes of a conviction -- regardless if doing so is truthful or not. The author of this document explores this tenet from a variety of differing viewpoints which support it. However, there is a counterpoint to this thesis which is then elucidated. This counterpoint reveals that there are certain circumstances in which law enforcement have taken active measures to determine the truth without the presupposition of guilt or the outcome of a jury trial. Finally, the paper deconstructs those specific circumstances prior to concluding they are largely inapplicable to the vast majority of interrogations relevant to the court cases examined within this document.

Broad Discussion of the Literature in a Funnel Format

False confessions do not occur infrequently within the criminal justice system. There are a variety of reasons explicating this reality, ranging the gamut in scope and focus. On the one hand, many interrogators readily assume suspects are guilty or, perhaps even worse, simply want to convict them in order to benefit their own particular careers and paths of advancements. In other instances, the criminal justice system wants to punish defendants who have opted not to accept a plea bargain as a way of dissuading people from even utilizing a jury trial as a viable option within the criminal justice system. Despite such speculation, this much is clear regarding the... Specifically, a review of the literature indicates too many interrogators are single-mindedly focused on extracting confessions in order to gain convictions that they are on actually doing more work to uncover the truth about an alleged crime.
One of the more cogent pieces of literature which demonstrates this fact is "Inside interrogation: The lie, the bluff, and false confessions" by Perillo and Kassin. This research study offers empirical evidence that certain techniques utilized by investigators in interrogation scenarios, have the effect of producing confessions on the part of innocent people. Still, the most convincing facet of this article occurs in the introduction in which it denotes the frequency of false confessions garnered by deliberately deceptive interrogation techniques as occurring as frequently as 25% of the time in which there are "DNA exoneration cases" (Perillo and Kassin, 2010, p. 327) in America. Another highly effective facet of this research article is its explanation of coercive methods utilized to procure false confessions: the bluff tactic. This ploy involves interrogaters introducing false evidence which does not directly implicate the suspect, yet which still plays a considerable factor in engendering false confessions. This theoretical premise is readily substantiated with empirical evidence in the form of a series of quantifiable experiments predicated around the "Kassin and Keichel computer crash paradigm" (Perillo and Kassin, 2010, p. 327). The boons of this approach is that this original research presents empirically validated evidence of the efficacy of the bluff tactic, alongside other coercive means, in getting innocents to falsely confess. However, drawbacks of this research include…