False Confessions in Law Courts

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Coerced Confessions
Mental Problems and Falsehoods
Expert Testimony Demands
Conclusion
Bibliography
Endnotes

Introduction

Every defendant who appears in the law courts is innocent until the court effects a judgment to pronounce the accused culpable of the alleged offenses. However, an increasing problem in the law courts is the aspect of false testimonies or false confessions that the witnesses, the claimants, and the defendants often present.¹

Whereas the juries in the law courts may prove to be impartial in their case judgments, false confessions from the law offenders or the defendants present some legal dilemmas. False confessions lead to improper judgments, legal controversies, and judicial confusions that arise from a dilemma concerning whether the defendants often remain rightly punished or not.² This essay investigates the reasons why people give false confessions in the law courts.

Coerced Confessions

Whereas judges are the final custodians of the courts who ensure that justice prevails within the law courts, the process of obtaining justice normally begins during the police arrests. Police form an integral part of the prosecution system as they often engage with the law offenders directly during the police arrests and at the courts.³

While a criminal prosecution may depend on the custodial confessions because of the lack of tangible physical evidence, some confessions are false due to coercions. The criminal justice systems have witnessed increased cases where innocent suspects have presented incriminating statements.⁴ The American police system directly contributes to the process of investigating criminals or law offenders. The investigations begin with the interrogation process where the police investigators scrutinize the law offenders.⁵

Evidence from the police systems and the courts in America reveal that the police investigators have often demonstrated incompetence intellectual interrogation.⁶ Knowing that some defendants are highly suave, the police investigators tend to employ persuasive methods or coercive techniques to extract incriminating evidence from the suspects.⁷

Police investigators use a confrontational process where intimidations and forceful extractions of wrong information apply during the pre-interrogation and interrogation interviews. Innocent citizens end up accepting the verdict and suffer wrongful convictions because of the police-induced confessions. Crane vs. Kentucky is an example of the police-induced confessions.⁸ In this 1986 case, the defendant successfully appealed in the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against a concluded case at the lower courts citing that a coerced interrogation brought about a false confession.⁹

Coerced or police-induced confessions occur predominantly due to the lack of knowledge about the personal rights enshrined in the constitution.¹⁰ Acceptable interrogation tactics and the perceptions that law offenders must produce expert testimonies, often obliterate the confidence of the suspects during police grilling.¹¹

The Miranda Waiver that appeared after the case of Miranda vs. Arizona [1966] provided the accused with a certain level of immunity against the coercive interrogations.¹²

The Miranda Waiver that resulted from the U.S Supreme Court decisions, outlines that interrogators must notify the caught suspects about their constitutional rights to help them to make informed decisions during confessions. With regard to the Miranda Waiver, suspects must only produce information voluntarily, intelligently, and knowingly.¹³However, the present police interrogation process rarely allows for such legal exceptions.

Mental Problems and Falsehoods

A significant challenge for the court juries in identifying and dealing with false confessions, is when dealing with mentally incapacitated witnesses, defendants, or plaintiffs. The problem of false confessions sometimes occur when the people presented before the courts to testify have some mental disorders or cerebral problems that make them produce voluntary or complaint false testimonies.¹⁴

Complaint confessions occur when mentally retarded individuals consider providing self-incriminating evidence to avoid a stressful situation pertinent to the case scenario, a punishment, or when they want to achieve something or a promised reward.¹⁵ Mentally retarded individuals may also produce voluntary false testimonies in the law courts without the interrogations from the police.¹⁶ More often, people with mental problems suffer from amnesia that makes them produce false confessions.

In a recent case of the year 2000 in North America, a court case established as Corethian Bell vs. Chicago Police [2000] is similar to this situation. Corethian Bell, who was a mentally retarded woman, produced a self-incriminating confession to the coercing police after a wearisome grueling process during the police interrogation.¹⁷

A DNA investigation at the crime scene revealed that Corethian never committed the alleged crime, and due to her mental incapacitation, the initial false confessions made her culpable for the uncommitted offense.¹⁸ Psychological falsehoods also contribute towards giving false confessions. Mentally fit individuals can produce self-incriminating confessions to receive jury empathies or confess wrongly due to the overwhelming nature of the case scenario. These stress-compliant individuals often confess to halt a stress or to save others.

Expert Testimony Demands

The laws require suspects or witnesses to remain truthful and honest when confessing to produce what the law refers to as an expert testimony. Innocent civilians remain incriminated and wrongfully charged in the law courts due to the growing demand for producing expert testimonies.¹⁹

During the tactful police interrogations where the suspects remain pressurized to produce legitimate information through coercive techniques, innocent individuals ascribe to the rule of law that requires people to ensure that they produce expert testimonies.²⁰ The need to produce expert testimonies is often a public legal demand that impels innocent individuals to cooperate with the law enforcers, although in a manner that they produce false confessions.²¹

Failure to cooperate with the police officers is another offense that innocent people fear committing since they fear attracting legal issues that would result from noncompliance allegations.

Even before the police engage in interrogating the suspects during the pre-interrogation interviews, the police often demonstrate and presume guiltiness in the suspects due to the legal demands of the expert testimony.²² The limited intelligence of the police interrogators in detecting truth and deception amongst the law offenders often results to the provision of false confessions due to the expert testimony demands.²³

The legal demands placed on the police interrogators to produce expert evidence from the testifiers often force the police to use isolation techniques and confrontational methods to incriminate innocent people wrongfully.²⁴ Isolations of extended periods normally increase the pressure of the custodial cross-examination and increases the torture that impels the innocent suspects to submit to the false allegations.²⁵ This means that the rising urge to provide expert testimonies makes police to employ coercive interrogations to extract wrong information.

Conclusion

It is often unusual for the lawbreakers or the suspects to confess to the charges presented against them in the court of law, knowing that such convictions would be unfavorable to them. However, some situational factors such as coercion from the police investigators, stress associated with the case problem, anxiety over the case situation, or the mental health problems of the testifiers result in the provision of false confessions.

Police interrogators often use intimidation and coercion to extract incriminating confessions from the innocent persons because these law enforcers fear to produce incompetent evidence against the defendants. Mental problems of the testifiers cause amnesia that makes individuals to produce self-incriminating confessions. False confessions can be in a form of a stress-compliant, a coerced-compliant, or an internalized confession.

Bibliography

Costanzo, Mark, Netta Shaked-Schroer, and Katherine Vinson. “Juror Beliefs about Police Interrogations, False Confessions, and Expert Testimony.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 231–247.

Kassin, Saul. “On the Psychology of Confessions: Does Innocence Put Innocents at Risk?” American Psychologist 60, no. 3 (2005): 215-228.

Leo, Richard, and Jon, Gould. “Studying Wrongful Convictions: Learning From Social Science.” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 7, no. 7 (2009): 8-30.

Perez, David. “The (in) admissibility of false confession expert Testimony.” Touro Law Review 26, no. 1 (2010): 23-74.

Watson, Clarence, Kenneth Weiss, and Claire Pouncey. “False Confessions, Expert Testimony, and Admissibility.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 38, no. 2 (2010): 174-186.

Endnotes

Richard Leo and Jon Gould, “Studying Wrongful Convictions: Learning from Social Science,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 7, no.7 (2009): 8.
Ibid.
Ibid.
David Perez, “The (in) admissibility of false confession expert Testimony,” Touro Law Review 26, no. 1 (2010), 26.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Saul Kassin, “On the Psychology of Confessions: Does Innocence Put Innocents at Risk,” American Psychologist 60, no. 3 (2005), 219.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Clarence Watson, Kenneth Weiss, and Claire Pouncey, “False Confessions, Expert Testimony, and Admissibility,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 38, no.2 (2010), 180.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Mark Costanzo, Netta Shaked-Schroer, and Katherine Vinson, “Juror Beliefs about Police Interrogations, False Confessions, and Expert Testimony,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 236.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Saul Kassin, “On the Psychology of Confessions: Does Innocence Put Innocents at Risk,” American Psychologist 60, no. 3 (2005), 222.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Richard Leo and Jon Gould, “Studying Wrongful Convictions: Learning from Social Science,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 7, no.7 (2009): 12.
Ibid.
Ibid.
David Perez, “The (in) admissibility of false confession expert Testimony,” Touro Law Review 26, no. 1 (2010), 29.

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