...Innocence is surpassed by confessions. Many are times when the confessions are false. False confessions are made to incriminate a suspect of a crime and have them convicted of the crime that they did not commit. False confessions are made when the mode of interrogation is aimed to put the suspect under pressure, where the police subject the suspect to long hours of interrogation with no rest, interrogation in the absence of an attorney, race difference in the interrogation room and perception of torture during interrogation. This was the case in the interrogation of Amanda Knox. The aim of this paper is to determine why innocence is surpassed by confessions. False confessions have been used to convict innocent victims over the years all over...
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...sense. Naturally, it is difficult to understand why anyone would confess to a crime they didn’t commit. However, false confessions are one the leading causes of wrongful convictions.1 As the 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...
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...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. Through research of actual cases, law journals, false confession experts’ research, and the...
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...It seems absurd that someone would confess to a crime that they didn't do, and subject themselves to undeserved punishment, but it happens more often than it should. In fact, one out of four people who were exonerated with DNA evidence after a wrong conviction had given a false confession or incriminating statement that led to their arrest. There are many reasons as to why one may give a false confession; there needs to be reforms within the justice system to assure these confessions do not lead to false convictions. The issues revolving around false confessions have been explored in literature many times, even in literary works dating back to early nineteenth century Britain. In Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's novel Frankenstein, a secondary...
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...ch y Psychology can assist law enforcement by profiling criminal suspects assessing in truthfulness of suspects and evaluating the validity of their confessions. Psychological theory and techniques can be used to improve police officers evaluations of criminal suspects. * Profiling is usually performed at the beginning of criminal investigation when the police need help focusing on certain types of people who might be the suspect * Once a suspect has been identified law enforcement officials use other procedures to determine whether any of them should be charged. * Police look for visual and verbal cues to determine whether they are giving truthful responses Suspects are sometimes given a lie detector test to encourage them to confess. * The tests provide more information about their guilt or innocence. * They conflict with some psychological findings about their accuracy. * Sometimes they are submitted into evidence. * Many psychologists question the validity of the test. The police interrogate suspects and encourage them to confess because the confessions make it more likely that suspects will successfully prosecute and eventually convicted the suspects. Psychological finding often conflict with the courts evaluations of a voluntary confession. There is some evidence psychological characteristics are linked to behavioral patterns and they can be detected by a psychological analysis of crime scenes. * Criminal profiling is used to...
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...This legal study will examine the meaning of voluntariness for the rule of confessions under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The premise of voluntariness for confessions defines the right of individuals to not be coerced into giving a statement that may incriminate them after being arrested and/or being interrogated by the police. In the framework of Canadian case law, it is important to understand the necessity of an “operating mind” as the foundation of a voluntary confession, which must not be exploited or manipulated by police during an arrest. Law enforcement must follow the rules of confession in order maintain the voluntarism of the person being arrested or detained:. The case R v. Oickle (2000) of the Canadian Supreme Court defines the voluntariness of the confession that law...
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...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 is the use of fabricated documents. In the Case State v. Cayward, a man sexually assaulted a 5-year-old girl and killed her. Cayward, being the suspect, the police could not convict him for the crime. The prosecutor in the case told the police to fabricate documents containing evidence from Cayward. During an interview with Cayward, the police revealed the convincing fabricated documents...
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...The Practical Application of the Age of Criminal Responsibilities It is crucial to understand the purpose and the consequences of having the minimum age of criminal responsibilities set at a young age. There have been many studies completed that give appreciation to the rights of children and give an understanding of their specific capabilities. Being informed about children’s culpability, their competence to participate in the criminal justice system (CJS) and the consequences of criminalising them at a young age are crucial areas that need to be looked at in detail when thinking of setting with a minimum age of criminal responsibilities (Farmer, 2011). Adolescents are around the age of maturity and go through many developmental changes in life. It is of utter most importance to focus on the culpability of young individuals when it comes to unlawful behaviours they engage in, how competent these individuals are when it comes to engaging in the Youth Justice System (YJS), and the consequences of getting them involved in the criminal justice system at a young age. These issues must be addressed and taken into consideration when creating the minimum age of criminal responsibility. Culpability Culpability refers to understanding and being responsible for the actions and consequences of a wrong. During adolescence, there are substantial developments in executive functioning (EF), emotional processing and social cognition (Farmer, 2011). These EF skills play a critical role...
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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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...(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 real life police interviews. The clips were of head to torso range of the individual...
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...Areiann Johnson Final Paper April 16, 2012 False Confessions She was killed Mr. Cope. She was raped and murdered! You are in shock. You are confused. You feel indescribable, unbearable pain. This pain is so emotional that it affects you physically too! Someone has ripped your heart out of your chest and made you watch as they relentlessly take a knife to it. All hope is lost. You will surely die from this ordeal. At least you wish you could! Your heart is weak; it drops into your stomach making you nauseated. How will you ever heal? You have been broken. Now every thought that runs through your mind is consumed with your desire for revenge. You want nothing more than to catch the person that has taken someone so precious from you; to make them suffer as you have. Police ask you to come in for questioning. You want to help them do their job and find the perpetrator. You have no idea that the real reason they asked you to come in is because you are their main suspect. They believe you did it. They think that you have taken your own daughters life and have sexually abused her, your little princess…impossible! Billy Wayne Cope is a religious man and has spent numerous hours in church activities with his twelve year old daughter Amanda. On November 29, 2001 Amanda was found on her bed raped and strangled to death. Billy Wayne Cope became police detectives’ main suspect. He initially thought he was helping catch the person that has done this horrific thing...
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...wrongful conviction. If someone is wrongfully convicted, that person is punished for an offence he or she did not commit and the actual perpetrator of the crime goes free. As well, public confidence in the system declines when wrongful convictions are identified. There are several elements that cause a miscarriage of justice, such as non-disclosure of evidence by police or prosecution, confirmation bias on the part of investigators, fabrication of evidence, poor identification, and unreliable confessions due to police pressure or psychological instability. They are all considered unjust as they violate the principle of justice. The three major causes for wrongful conviction are false confession, eyewitness error, and official misconduct. When a defendant has confessed to committing a crime, the vast majority of police, prosecutors, and jurors see it as rock-solid evidence of guilt. Many of these involved children or suspects with mental illnesses or mental retardation. Even more cases involve adults with no history of mental illness or retardation who...
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...technicalities to unsure that the truth is said and justice is indeed done. There never needs to be a mistake when it comes to justice and the law. Laws are made to help criminal investigators solve the crime and ensure the guilty is caught and punished. The development of new laws causes the criminal investigators responsibilities to change quite often. The new laws can affect the criminal investigators because if they don’t process the case correctly the person that is guilty may walk away free and without being punished to the full strength of the law. A good example is the law stating that a person has to give there confession on video camera in the state of Connecticut. The confession must be recorded on more serious crimes. This means that by law that if the confession is not recorded electronically or digitally that the case may not stick on the person. A guilty individual may squeeze through the cracks and not be punished by the law. Also recording the confession can help the criminal investigators by being able to look over the confession and see if there was anything that was missed. It is like preserving the crime scene that is very important to a criminal investigator (Laws About Crime Scene Investigators, 2011). The crime scene but be unaltered, so it can be looked at...
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...plan to find reasons for wrongful convictions, the actual number, statistics, of individuals that have been wrongful convicted, and those individuals who have stepped up to make a difference in this dilemma. Although there aren’t any statistics kept by the Criminal Justice Department on the number of crimes that were recorded as wrongful convictions, research has estimated about 5% of the cases that are tried annual result in a false conviction. Since 1989, 1,241 people have been wrongfully convicted and later cleared of all charges based on evidence that they were innocent, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the law schools at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University (Clark 2013). The Michigan Innocence Clinic was the first clinic of its kind to work on non-DNA exonerations. Their work has revealed particular circumstances far too often seen in cases of wrongful conviction. These cases show us how the criminal justice system is in need of much repair and how the Michigan Innocence Clinic can combat troubling trends of the system. In each case that have been worked on, the Michigan Innocence Clinic have uncovered overlapping causes of wrongful convictions. There are many causes of wrongful convictions, but there are a few common causes that the Michigan Innocence Clinic have found:...
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...Constitutional Issues in Criminal Procedure CJC 3110- Spring 2011 April 24, 2011 The Goal most directly associated with my topic is course Goal 1: “Articulate the procedural considerations in the handling of criminal cases.”, and my personal interest in the Fifth Amendment: Due Process and Obtaining Information Legally. My curiosity has always been in the scope of the law surrounding the criminal justice, but more specifically I like to know in more detail about how to obtain the information and the confessions in such a manner that it will not be tossed out of the court. A piece of evidence can make or break the case. If that evidence is not collected properly than the prosecution is looking at a huge loss. Knowing this information is not only helpful in the criminal justice career, but also in our everyday personal lives. If a person caught in a situation where they are being interrogated by the police, it’s good to know what to expect and the full rights. One more key interest in the Fifth Amendment is the Miranda rights and the details surrounding when the rights are given, told, to the person. The objective is to show how cases are handled, and how Fifth Amendment plays one of major roles in the handling of criminal cases. The details of the case are important, and knowing when to make a move and ask certain questions, or making someone confess. Due Process is such an important concept of American law that no precise definition accurately suits it, although the concept...
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