The Truth Project

The United States Constitution grants Americans the “right to a speedy and public trial,” with an assumption that the trial is impartial and fair. Recent data suggest a nontrivial number of cases fail to meet this standard. During interrogations, suspects can be presented with false evidence, long interrogations can undermine a suspect’s cognitive ability, and minimization tactics often mislead suspects into believing justice is on their side. These dynamics facilitate false confessions and wrongful convictions, which are common in the United States and globally. We argue the current approaches to understand and predict innocence in legal cases are insufficient and interdisciplinary research is required to prevent innocent people from going to jail. In this review, we cover research on wrongful convictions and false confessions, ending with The Truth Project ( www.truth-project.io ), a new global framework to connect scholars and facilitate research into behavioral patterns of innocence.

Language of Criminal Confessions

Confession evidence is powerfully persuasive, and yet many wrongful convictions involving false confessions have surfaced in recent years (Innocence Project, 2021; National Registry of Exonerations, 2021). Although police are trained to corroborate admissions of guilt, research shows that most false confessions contain accurate details and other content cues suggesting credibility as well as extrinsic evidence of guilt. Hence, a method is needed to help distinguish true and false confessions. In this study, we utilized a corpus-based approach to outline the linguistic features of two sets of confessions: those that are presumed true (n = 98) and those that have been proven false (n = 37). After analyzing the two corpora in LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) to identify significant categories, we created a logistic regression model that distinguished the two corpora based on three identified predictors: personal pronouns, impersonal pronouns, and conjunctions. In a first sample comprised of 25 statements per set, the model correctly categorized 37 out of 50 confessions (74%); in a second out-of-model sample, the predictors accurately classified 20 of 24 confessions (83.3%). A high frequency of impersonal pronouns was associated with confessions proven false, while a high frequency of conjunctions and personal pronouns were associated with confessions presumed to be true. Several patterns were observed in the corpora. In the latter set of confessions, for example, “I” was often followed by a lexical verb, a pattern less frequent in false confessions. Although these data are preliminary and not to be used for practical diagnostic purposes, the findings suggest that additional research is warranted.

How Trauma May Magnify Risk of Involuntary and False Confessions Among Adolescents

Empirical research on police interrogation has identified both personal and situational factors that increase criminal suspects’ vulnerability to involuntary, unreliable, or false confessions. Although trauma exposure is a widely documented phenomenon known to affect adolescents’ perceptions, judgments, and behaviors in a wide array of contexts (especially stressful contexts), trauma history remains largely unexamined by interrogation researchers and virtually ignored by the courts when analyzing a confession. This article argues that trauma may operate as an additional personal risk factor for involuntary and false confessions among adolescents by generating both additive and interactive effects beyond youths’ general, developmentally-driven vulnerabilities in police interrogations. First, we briefly review adolescent trauma symptomatology, emphasizing the heterogeneity of adolescents’ responses to trauma. Next, using Leo and Drizin’s (2010) “Three Errors” framework of police-induced false confessions, we systematically apply clinical findings to each of the three police errors—misclassification, coercion, and contamination—to outline the psychological mechanisms through which adolescents with trauma histories may be at increased risk for making involuntary or unreliable statements to police. Finally, we offer considerations for interrogation research, clinical forensic practice, police practices, and courtroom procedures that could deepen our understanding of trauma’s role in the interrogation room, improve the integrity of investigative and adjudicatory processes, and ultimately promote justice for adolescent suspects with trauma exposure.

The Truth Project

The United States Constitution grants Americans the “right to a speedy and public trial,” with an assumption that the trial is impartial and fair. Recent data suggest a nontrivial number of cases fail to meet this standard. During interrogations, suspects can be presented with false evidence, long interrogations can undermine a suspect’s cognitive ability, and minimization tactics often mislead suspects into believing justice is on their side. These dynamics facilitate false confessions and wrongful convictions, which are common in the United States and globally. We argue that the current approaches to understand and predict innocence in legal cases are insufficient and interdisciplinary research is required to prevent innocent people from going to jail. In this review, we cover research on wrongful convictions and false confessions, ending with The Truth Project (www.truth-project.io), a new global framework to connect scholars and facilitate research into behavioral patterns of innocence.