False Positive Error Reduction in Criminal Investigation

False Confessions in America

What factors do you see as relative to the increasing number of false confessions in America?

The literature on police investigations is clear on four points: 1) Investigators are overconfident in their abilities to make judgments about suspects; 2) innocent people put themselves in harm's way because of misplaced belief in the interview / investigation aspects of the criminal justice system; 3) the interview behavior of innocent people evokes unnecessarily aggressive interrogation responses from trained investigators; and 4) the interview and interrogation behavior of investigators elicits behavior from suspects that often results in false confessions. The participants in criminal investigations that involve interviews and interrogations seem caught up in a Parisian Apache dance, in which the behavior of either participant brings about an escalation in the behavior of the other…and the battle rages on until the parties arrive at some resolution. In roughly 25% of wrongful convictions "…contained confessions in evidence" (Kassin, 2005, p. 215).

If you were an investigative supervisor what issue or dynamic would you address to safeguard your agency from obtaining false confessions?

An important consideration of the problem of false confessions is that the training that investigators receive in order to make them more effective interviewers / interrogators actually imparts a false confidence in their abilities, which results in more "false positive errors, presuming innocent suspects guilty" (Kassin, 2005, p. 215). This paradox is less likely to be addressed through more of the same type of training, instead seeming to point to some awareness training that precisely conveys to the training participants how inaccurate their best thinking may actually be. Moreover, solutions to the problem must make crystal clear that the tautological thinking exemplified by this example is not acceptable at any level: When police investigators, "confident of their training-based skills at interviewing and interrogation…" were asked about being "concerned that their persuasive methods of influence might cause innocent people to confess," most often responded: "No, because I do not interrogate innocent people" (Kassin, 2005, p. 216). This type of presumptive attitude can -- and does -- lead to a serious miscarriage of justice. In order to head off the upward spiral of more robust and cunning interrogation techniques, it is important that investigators be focused on the importance of obtaining facts relevant to a crime rather than determined to obtain a confessions from suspects who -- according to the "warehouse of psychology research" -- are more likely to be innocent than guilty (Kassin, 2005, p. 219).

If you were to determine during an interview that the subject was providing you a false confession, what steps would you take to ensure reliability?