...Supreme Court of Canada noted in R v. Oickle, innocent people are induced to make false confessions more frequently than those unacquainted with the phenomenon might expect.2 In North America, we can trace the existence of false confessions back to the Salem Witch Trials, where a number of women were persecuted for witchcraft on the basis of confessions that were obtained through torture and threats.3 More recent false confessions have been obtained under psychological duress and not with torture or threats of physical harm.4 Nevertheless, with the developments in law and policies in place to control interrogation methods, false confessions continue to persist.5 This begs the question, are interrogation methods solely responsible for false confessions, or does some of the responsibility fall on the confessor? Scholars and social scientists agree, that it is not solely harsh interrogation tactics that lead to false confessions but it is the combination of these tactics with psychological factors such as, intelligence and personality, which contribute to the likelihood of a suspect providing a false confession.6 While there are currently solutions for avoiding false confessions, they do not adequately address the needs of the most vulnerable individuals who are often induced into falsely confessing because of a combination of interrogator pressure and low intelligence or introvert personality. Therefore, it may be time for interrogators to adopt an approach that caters specifically...
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...not commit. Until I became a psychology major I felt it was impossible for any sane person to confess to something they did not do and even go to jail for it. There are many reasons an innocent person may make a false confession; for the sake of this discussion I chose confession through coerced internalization. Experts explain that these types of confessions occur when individuals truly believe they are guilty despite the evidence to the contrary. (Chapman 2013) The psychological research has found that some of these false confession happen during interrogation when the interrogator believes the suspect is guilty and they employ whatever means possible to get that confession. So not only will the suspect confess they will form false memories of the crime. (Chapman 2013)The regular american not studying Forensic psychology or criminal justice may assume that an innocent person would only confess if they were beaten or tortured; however there is evidence in our criminal justice system that techniques far less coercive than torture have produced verifiably false confessions in a surprising number of cases. (Contanzo, Krauss 2013) Through the readings for this discussion I have discovered, and while I do not believe it would be fair to say that all investigators use coercion to get confessions, many police interrogation techniques used are designed to elicit a confession and overcome any denial even if the person is innocent. The police interrogation is a psychological process where...
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...Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology Many students are being left behind by an educational system that some people believe is in crisis. Improving educational outcomes will require efforts on many fronts, but a central premise of this monograph is that one part of a solution involves helping students to better regulate their learning through the use of effective learning techniques. Fortunately, cognitive and educational psychologists have been developing and evaluating easy-to-use learning techniques that could help students achieve their learning goals. In this monograph, we discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. We selected techniques that were expected to be relatively easy to use and hence could be adopted by many students. Also, some techniques (e.g., highlighting and rereading) were selected because students report relying heavily on them, which makes it especially important to examine how well they work. The techniques include elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarization, highlighting (or underlining), the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice. To offer recommendations about the relative utility of these techniques, we evaluated whether their benefits generalize across four categories of variables: learning...
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...1. The success of an interview or interrogation depends on a number of personal characteristics and commitments of the investigator. Planning for and controlling the events surrounding both interviews and interrogations are important but are generally viewed as more critical to the success of an interrogation. The success of the interviewer or interrogator and of the interview or interrogation is often determined by the time and dedication committed to preparing for the conversation. The interviewer must become familiar with the facts of the case under investigation and with the victim. The interrogator must learn as much as possible about the offense, the victim(s) and the suspect through the process of collecting, assessing, and analyzing data and theorizing about the motivations and thought processes of the suspect. These are some reasons that planning for an interview or interrogation are important and in many ways similar. In planning for an interview or interrogation, one must determine what questions will be asked to ensure they are good questions that will lead the interviewer or interrogator to the conclusions they are trying to reach. There are some instances where only moderate planning or preparation is necessary for an interview while extensive planning and preparation is needed to conduct an interrogation. The most common type of interview is an on-the-scene interview where extensive planning is not always a possibility. An examples of this is on-the-scene...
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...Seeing a situation from a client’s point of view or empathizing with a patient is not something a forensic psychologist will do. Traditional psychological tests and interview procedures are usually not applicable when dealing with a forensic situation. In forensic evaluations it is important to assess the consistency of factual information. Forensic psychology is the application of psychology to the criminal justice system. This is however, different from forensic science. While a forensic psychology deals with legal issues, such as public policies, new laws, competency, and whether a person is sane at the time of a crime, they focus on the psychological perspectives involved in the legal system. Some examples of when forensic psychology is used in the criminal justice system are treating mentally ill offenders, consulting with attorneys, jury selection, serving as an expert witness, analyzing a criminal’s mind and intent, and criminal profiling. There are some forensic psychologists that choose to focus on research, which could range from the examination of eyewitness testimony, to improving interrogation methods. There are also forensic psychologists that focus on public policy, such as designing correctional facilities and prisons. In 1901 a man named William Stern studied memory by asking students to study a picture for forty-five seconds, and then recall what happened in the picture. This is when eyewitness testimonies began to lose credibility, because...
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...ability to do things quickly and efficiently, causing extreme difficulty. Hebb has even reported a few people who said they had experienced hallucinations from the absence of stimulation (Olson & Hergenhahn, 2009). Hebb’s research was extremely helpful in the studies of airplane pilots and of truck drivers. Many of these workers had reported having hallucinations while on the job. Hebb discovered the hallucinations were due to the fact they were not experiencing enough mental stimulation to keep their brains alert and active. From the age of 43 until he retired at the age of 68, Hebb worked as a psychology professor at McGill, teaching students about his research and his life work (Olson & Hergenhahn, 2009). Hebb was also quite influential in the advancements of interrogation techniques; his research of sensory deprivation techniques was very beneficial in the realm of interrogation. There are many of his ideas regarding...
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...Enhanced Interrogation Enhanced Interrogation, also known as torture, has been around all around the world in many instances. The most notable use of enhanced interrogation was after the terrorist attack on 9/11. The U.S. uses locations known as black sites outside of the country for their enhanced interrogation. The question on whether enhanced interrogation or torture should be allowed arises when these methods work or when they fail. Although enhanced interrogation works sometimes, we, as a country, should not use it because it is a violation of Article 5 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. The failures of enhanced interrogation outweigh the successes of it heavily. Considering this fact, CIA members water boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, suspected mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, 183 times. With that being said, the odds of enhanced interrogation being successful are not any that should be notable to accept. The amount of times that enhanced interrogation has failed compared to the amount of times it has succeeded implies it is not in favor to be continued using. Even in the first torture scene of the movie Zero Dark Thirty, the torture done on the terrorist does not work except after countless times he endured the suffering. An example of enhanced interrogation failing in reality is in Chomsky’s article when he notes that under the Bush administration “when [the detainees] kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder.” The CIA...
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...susceptible the individuals are to suggestibility. The interrogation process, age, and other vulnerabilities among adolescents is what makes individuals confess to something they did not do. This has been evident in many cases in the United States, and other studies that have tired to prove this...
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...1b) Discuss the problems of conducting research into the detection of lies (15) When conducting research into detecting lies, researchers could potentially face many problems. These could be ethical or practical. The study by Mann attempted to find out about the police’s ability to detect liars. They studied this as we cannot know for sure if the police are good at identifying liars as the public are not allowed to observe recordings of interviews as a suspect is always innocent until proven guilty. The aim of this research was to test police officers ability to distinguish truth and lies during interviews with suspects. Her research was made up of 99 police officers from Kent. This alone is a practical problem as it means the sample is geographically limited to only one area and means the sample can only be representative of this area or other police forces. Perhaps the MET or the FBI have different methods of detecting lies and are either better or worse than much larger forces. A problem in conducting research with this sample was that there wasn’t a control group of non-police officers to test the hypothesis of this study; therefore it was not proved that police officers were better at detecting lies. This research was a field experiment meaning that the ethical guidelines may be challenged as Mann would have had to have gained the full permission of the participants before conducting the study. In this study, Police officers were shown 54 video clips of 14 suspects of...
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...The Negative Effects of Police Deception in Interrogation Andrew Maynard CJUS 420-B02 Mr. Jeffery Fox July 1, 2013 The Negative Effects of Police Deception in Interrogation Police interrogation today is defined as; Interrogation is police questioning a suspect in order to find answers about a crime that has been committed. The suspect that is being questioned by police is entitled to know his or her rights. The evidence in the trial will be in admissible if the interrogator of the suspect does not inform the suspect of his or her rights ("Interrogation law and," 2001). In Miranda v. Arizona, the Supreme Court ruled that the police have to read to the suspect detained the rights they are given under the Constitution U.S. Legal (2001). These rights protect the individual from falling into the trap of deceptive interrogation. Many people do not understand that if they just kept quiet and wait for a lawyer, their so-called innocence can be saved. Deceptive interrogation by law is acceptable, with the reading of the Miranda rights, and the police will use this tool as much as they can as long as it doesn’t exceed the boundaries they are placed under. Deceptive interrogation is unnecessary for law enforcement to exercise in order to convict the accused. Today’s methods of interrogation are more mental then physical as mentioned before. There are several tools police can use as a means of deceiving a suspect in order to obtain a confession or information. One common strategy...
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...THESIS: There needs to be better laws, and guidelines for questioning and interrogating suspects, to reduce the amount of false confessions which lead to wrongful convictions. BACKGOUND: In the last few years there has been a lot of news coverage of convicted people being found innocent after serving years in prison for crimes they did not commit. It can take several years and many appeals for the false confessor to have their case heard in the court system; if at all. Courts seem to have the tendency to accept the confession at face value and are reluctant to question it. I believe this happens because “law enforcement” took the confession and judges tend to believe that all rules were followed by police. I believe that if the prosecution is going to use a confession in their case, and as one of their strongest pieces of “evidence”, a hearing should be set to decide on the validity of the confession. Even when defense attorneys file motions to have them thrown out due to allegations of coercion, the courts deny the motion almost instantly, which leads to a wrongful conviction. This is the very reason new laws, and guidelines need to be implemented in regards to questioning and interrogating a suspect by police, in order to get a confession. OBJECTIVE: My intention is to show that with stricter laws and guidelines for questioning and interrogating suspects, the amount of false confessions would drop considerably, and in turn the wrongful conviction rate would drop as well...
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...(UNCAT) since 1984. Any use of torture was considered not only as an infringement of the human rights, but also an infringement to the same convention which United States was a signer. Nevertheless, the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist incursion changed the United States position against torture. Officials who were highly concerned about the security of the country voted for a start of a war against terrorism. During the same period any interrogation techniques, whether conventional or unconventional, were used on suspects to gain intelligence about any presumable imminent terrorist attack. The United States violated the UNCAT and began torturing its suspects. Many incidents reported by the media since 2002 revealed that prison guards were instructed to “prepare” prisoners for the interrogation suggesting the use of torture to intimidate them before the interrogation starts (“The Legal Prohibition”). These events caused a debate on the authorization of torture. The UNCAT signed by the United States defines torture as a dehumanizing interrogation...
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...psychologist. Seeing a situation from a client’s point of view or empathizing with a patient is not something a forensic psychologist will do. Traditional psychological tests and interview procedures are usually not applicable when dealing with a forensic situation. In forensic evaluations it is important to assess the consistency of factual information. Forensic psychology is the application of psychology to the criminal justice system. This is however, different from forensic science. While a forensic psychology deals with legal issues, such as public policies, new laws, competency, and whether a person is sane at the time of a crime, they focus on the psychological perspectives involved in the legal system. Some examples of when forensic psychology is used in the criminal justice system are treating mentally ill offenders, consulting with attorneys, jury selection, serving as an expert witness, analyzing a criminal’s mind and intent, and criminal profiling. There are some forensic psychologists that choose to focus on research, which could range from the examination of eyewitness testimony, to improving interrogation methods. There are also forensic psychologists that focus on public policy, such as designing correctional facilities and prisons. In 1901 a man named William Stern studied memory by asking students to study a picture for forty-five seconds, and then recall what happened in the picture. This is when eyewitness testimonies began to lose credibility, because...
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...With the reading it states that the prosecution may not use statements, whether exculpatory or inculpatory, stemming from custodial interrogation of the defendant unless it demonstrates the use of procedural safeguards effective to secure the privilege against self-incrimination. This means with custodial interrogation this is questioning initiated by law enforcement officers after a person has been taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom of action in any significant way. As for the procedural safeguards, unless other fully effective means are devised to inform accused persons of their right of silence and to assure a continuous opportunity to exercise it, the following measures are required. This is something that needs to be followed very strictly because if they do not read the Miranda rights the case is thrown out because if the suspect is not given this then the whole confession is out. Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed. The defendant may waive effectuation of these rights, provided the waiver is made voluntarily, knowingly and intelligently. If, however, he indicates in any manner and at any stage of the process that he wishes to consult with an attorney before speaking there can be no questioning. Likewise, if the individual is alone and indicates...
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...“On the Witness Stand” Hugo Munsterberg in 1908 published “On the Witness Stand”, a collection of articles he had previously written explaining the need for experimental psychology in the court room. In reviewing several court cases, he was intrigued with the verdict based on the eyewitness testimony. Could these eyewitness testimonies be considered unreliable? Decisions based on the judge and jury through the questioning of the lawyers, disregarded the mental state of the witness. In his book, Hugo Munsterberg, explains the mind of the eyewitness through illusions, memories, emotions and suggestibility. Illusion is a perception. Munsterberg in his book describes several cases that make you wonder if each eyewitness was at the same scene. For example, when describing the road conditions, one witness claimed the road was dry while another said it was muddy. In another scenario, it was important to know the number of people present at a riot was larger than forty. One eyewitness mentioned there was no more than twenty while another said it was more than a hundred. So, is your mind playing tricks on you? In order to prove that everyone’s visual perception varies, Hugo Munsterberg developed several experiments. One of his experiments among 100 young men was to show a poster with 50 black squares for approximately five seconds. When asked how many squares the answers varied from twenty-five to two hundred squares. He continued to perform experiments based on perception...
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