Safeguards

This chapter examines safeguards for suspects and defendants who provide false or coerced confessions, opening with laypersons’ typical acceptance of confessions. The authors then review protections from law enforcement, particularly recommendations that police video-record interviews and interrogations with a balanced perspective. The authors next explore court decisions that shape jurors’ roles in evaluation of confession evidence; they then discuss the growing body of scholarship that investigates jurors’ perceptions and trial decisions. The authors then examine judges, ways that judges differ from jurors and juries, and ways that judges remain vulnerable to false or coerced confessions and the testimony of experts. The authors emphasize the limited effectiveness of these safeguards to prevent a false confession from becoming a mistaken conviction.

Conclusions and Recommendations

This final chapter provides an array of recommendations that address individual factors, interactions, and the totality of the circumstances. The authors recommend continuing education about interviews, interrogation, and confession for police, attorneys, judges, and others. The authors then provide recommendations for these processes, including mandatory video-recording, protections for vulnerable suspects, management of investigatory biases, the elimination of deception, and other reforms as well as an endorsement of nondeceptive and nonconfrontation interrogation tactics. The authors propose a series of legal changes, including actions by courts and legislatures, greater incorporation of expert testimony, and conviction integrity units. The book closes with recommendations for scholars and a review of the totality of the circumstances of police interrogation and confession in the United States.

The Current Nature of Police Interrogation

This chapter opens with a review of the false confession and mistaken conviction of Matt Livers, which powerfully depicts many of the ways the totality of the circumstances shapes interrogation and suspects’ decisions to confess. The authors present interviews and explore ways that interviews contrast with interrogations. Police interviews typically include attempts at behavioral deception detection; therefore, this chapter examines the wide and deep research literature and recommends caution for police, particularly regarding the ways that biases interfere with deception detection. The chapter then introduces Miranda warnings, including their content and limitations, before concluding with a review of the widely used method of interrogation promoted by John E. Reid & Associates, Inc.

Costs and Consequences of Deception, Coercion, and False Confessions

This chapter introduces readers to the Norfolk Four, whose false confessions led to years in prison despite failure of their confessions to fit evidence and differences among their confessions. The authors examine the legal process by which investigators corroborate confessions. The authors then move from legal to psychological issues, including typical cognitive biases and social factors that interfere with corroboration of confessions. The authors next examine ways that confessions corrupt the subsequent investigations and evidence, particularly when officers, intentionally or unintentionally, contaminate and format a confession so that it appears to fit the evidence. The chapter concludes with a review of the ways the totality of the circumstances can increase the likelihood of mistaken conviction.

Introduction

The introduction presents readers with the framework of the project, opening with the definition and the relevance of the totality of the circumstances in understanding police interrogation and confession in the United States. The authors illustrate their totality-of-the-circumstances approach by evaluating similarities and differences between the false confessions of Stephen and Jesse Boorn in the early 1800s and Jeffrey Deskovic in the late twentieth century. Despite substantial differences in evidence, legal requirements, trial procedures, and other details, the errors and larger totality of the circumstances in both cases reveal important similarities that the authors explore throughout the book.

Deceptive Interrogation Tactics

This chapter dives into the myriad deceptive tactics used by police interrogators. The authors open with the false confessions of the Tucson Four, who faced extensive deception. The authors then turn to a philosophical discussion of deception, followed by examination of the ways that lies by police officers affect suspects, the public, and officers themselves. Next, the chapter reviews forms of police deception, including deception about Miranda, deceptive interrogation tactics, and elaborate role-playing activities as well as courts’ responses to deception during interrogation. This chapter also explores the experimental literature on interrogation and confession with particular attention to research about deceptive interrogation tactics. The chapter concludes with a review of the ways that deception shapes the totality of the circumstances.

Expert Testimony

The authors start this chapter with an interview with Dr. Charles Honts, who has served as an expert witness over one hundred times, as a polygraph examiner and about false and coerced confessions. The authors discuss requirements and potential roles of expert witnesses, and then move to relevant topics about which clinical and/or experimental experts may testify. The authors then examine the legal standards and ongoing disputes about admissibility of expert testimony at trial before moving to scientific studies of the impacts of expert testimony on triers of fact. The chapter concludes with a review of experts and the totality of the circumstances.

False Confessions and Their Causes

The authors open this chapter with an examination of the complex false-confession case of the Beatrice Six, in which six innocent defendants pleaded guilty to or were convicted of a heinous assault and homicide. The chapter discusses this miscarriage of justice in the light of the myth of psychological interrogation, which compounds the already-intense difficulties of identifying false confessions and stopping the process by which these confessions lead to mistaken convictions. The authors present categories of false confessions and then explore three general causes of false confession: vulnerable suspects, investigatory biases, and dangerous interrogation tactics. The chapter concludes with an examination of the ways that causes can interact and the ways that multiple causes and interactions can shape the totality of the circumstances.

Historical Developments in Policing and the Practice of Interrogation

The opening chapter examines the history of civilian policing and the implications this history has for the emergence, development, and current practice of police interrogation in the United States. In particular, the authors emphasize the political nature of early-twentieth-century policing and the related coercive interrogation tactics, which led to backlash from legal investigations, journalists, courts, and law enforcement officers who were reformers. In response to these critiques, policing separated from political patronage, established academies and other educational requirements, and replaced coercive interrogation tactics with deception. The chapter closes with contemporary pressures for reform and comparisons of current reforms with earlier changes in interrogation practice.