How many confessions are false

Fisher exact tests were calculated to examine differences in diagnoses and prior delinquency between a guilty confessors and guilty non-confessors and b innocent false confessors and innocent non-confessors.

Results are displayed in Table 3. Table 3. Frequencies and percentages of ICD diagnoses and self-reported delinquency by confessors and non-confessors split for interviews when guilty and innocent. Compared to guilty confessors, guilty non-confessors were more often diagnosed with a mental and behavioral disorder due to psychoactive substance use ICD F10—F19; 64 vs.

No other significant differences were found. The current study examined German forensic patients' self-reports on their behavior while being interviewed by the police when either innocent or guilty. All patients stated that they were interviewed by the police for at least one offense they had actually committed.

Little is known about how often people undergo a suspect interview when they are actually innocent. The results of our study suggest that being interviewed as a suspect when innocent is not a rare experience for people with a criminal record. Taken together, the most frequent behavior during police interviews was reported to be making a truthful statement, irrespective of whether patients were guilty or innocent [see also 9 ].

However, studies with samples of incarcerated inmates have also revealed comparable or even higher prior confession rates 20 , However, by calculating a proportion of self-reported confessions within a whole sample, one might well-underestimate the actual prevalence: suspects face the risk of making a false confession only if they are a interviewed when innocent and b waive their right to remain silent.

This is at least true for police-induced confessions. People can, however, come forward to the police with a voluntary false confession without being suspected before. In these cases, a suspect interview would not be conducted without the confession in the first place. From the examples patients mentioned during the survey, it can nonetheless be assumed that this was often not the case in the current sample. Participants reported on cases in which, for example, they knew the real perpetrator but were mistaken for the culprit by the police.

Or they were interviewed for an offense they actually had committed while they were additionally alleged to have committed a crime for which they were not responsible. Put differently, one in four forensic patients who ever had the opportunity to make a false confession claimed to have done so.

Altogether, we view the proportion of false confessions that refer solely to interviews when innocent as a more appropriate estimate for the risk of making a false confession in a police interview than the proportion reported in most previous studies that gave only the overall prevalence proportion of false confessions within the whole sample.

In line with other self-report studies, property offenses were the most common type of offenses for which the patients claimed to have confessed falsely [e. Whether patients denied, confessed, or exercised their right to remain silent during the police interviews differed significantly between interviews when guilty and when innocent.

For denials and confessions, these results are rather trivial. A series of experimental studies have demonstrated that innocent suspects are more forthcoming than guilty suspects [e. Hence, the field data from the current study support these previous findings. Focusing on the suspects' confessions, we asked them why they gave a true or false confession. This reason for false confessions is frequently reported in all self-report studies. However, the percentage in the current study was even higher than in other self-report studies 11 , Whether these differences are due to differences in the way police carry out their interviews in different countries or to different samples characteristics cannot be determined from the current data.

It should, however, be emphasized that police interviewing pressure still constitutes the second most frequently reported reason for a false confession in the current study.

These factors point to substantial social-psychological influences. Even when protecting the real perpetrator is given as the reason, in many cases such constellations do not represent the classic version of a voluntary false confession in which a person confesses in the absence of any external influence 7.

It is far more often the case that these patients were interviewed as suspects for an offense that was actually committed by a person they knew and that they then confessed during the police interview. Many of these patients would possibly not have falsely confessed without the situational effects of interrogation.

With respect to true confessions , the most commonly reported reason was that the evidence was strong. This suggests that strength of evidence is crucial for the decision to make a true confession, and this is once more in line with existing empirical evidence Taken together, some motives were inherently found to be exclusive to true confessions evidence was actually strong or false confessions protecting the real offender, being pressured by the real offender , but there is also an overlap of motives reported for both kinds of confession interview pressure by the police, hope for release from custody.

Nonetheless, possible responses were limited by the categories used in this study. To explore the reasons for true and false confessions in a more differentiated way, future research should include interviews with true and false confessors. In the current study, prior imprisonment tended to be more prevalent among innocent false confessors compared to innocent non-confessors 71 vs. However, this difference was not statistically significant.

Although this lack of significance may be due to the small number of cases, one might also argue that a longer criminal history will be associated with a higher number of suspect interviews and thus with a higher probability of being interviewed when innocent.

Previous findings showing an association between criminal history and false confession 11 might simply reflect the heightened probability of being interviewed occasionally when innocent. However, in the current sample, participants who were interviewed only when guilty did not differ in terms of prior imprisonment and prior forensic treatment from those who were interviewed when guilty and when innocent.

Patients diagnosed with a mental retardation did not self-report higher false confession rates than other patients. This was rather unexpected in light of existing research on the vulnerability of suspects with low intelligence [e. The present result may be due partly to a self-selection process: patients with more severe intellectual deficits probably did not volunteer to participate in this study or could not be included because they lacked the capacity to give informed consent or had difficulties in understanding and answering the questions.

Some limitations have to be addressed: first, the sample probably does not represent the population of forensic patients in Germany. Participation required sufficient intellectual capacity to understand the questionnaire, maintain attention for a period of time, and communicate with basic German language skills. This might have excluded patients who may be even more prone to false confessions. Second, reports are based on persons and not interviews. Asking participants to report an interview behavior that they had displayed at least once in the past may have distorted the data on participants with multiple police interviews.

They may well have shown the reported behavior only in one exceptional situation that deviated from their typical—more frequently shown—interview behavior. However, this approach can certainly be used as a basis to estimate whether a certain interview behavior e.

Nonetheless, the study is further limited by the questionable validity of self-report information with its susceptibility to motivational and memory errors. There is a lack of external criteria to corroborate the reported information on behavior during police interviews. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that the percentages of self-reported false confessions in international studies are quite similar to those in the current study. In addition, those groups that have already proven to be vulnerable on the basis of exoneration file studies also prove to have higher false confession rates in self-report studies than others, and this can be viewed as supporting the validity of the self-report data.

Results of the current study confirm previous international self-report studies showing that a false confession is not a rare event. Rates are similar to those found in the international literature on persons with mental disorder.

Until recently, these findings had received little attention in German law enforcement practice However, in , the German Parliament passed legislation requiring certain suspect interviews by the police, including interviews of underage suspects and of suspects with mental disorder or disorders, to be audio- or videotaped from onward The current study shows—together with other self-report studies [e.

Proven false confessions in exoneration cases typically refer to offenses such as homicide or sexual assault that have a low base rate. In contrast, self-report studies suggest that false confessions occur frequently in more prevalent but less serious crimes.

Self-reported false confessors name the protection of the true perpetrator as a frequent reason for a false confession [see also 8 , 9 ]. However, this does not necessarily mean that people enter the police station and confess to a crime despite never being suspected.

Exonerations have been won in 38 states; since , there have been exonerations. The average length of time served by exonerates is The average age of exonerees at the time of their wrongful convictions is Among a total of exonerations of all kinds documented between and , 15 percent involved false confessions.

Of the 24 exonerations in New York State, 13 have been based upon false confession. Two-thirds of murder convictions overturned by DNA evidence turned out to have been based on false confessions. Over jurisdictions nationwide, including the states of Alaska, Minnesota and Illinois, regularly record police interrogations. The fact is that false confessions are one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions.

Research studies have pinpointed the reasons why false confessions happen and what reforms are needed. False confession cases always result from the way that an interrogation has taken place. The purpose of an interrogation is for law enforcement to collect information or obtain a confession and admission of guilt.

If the officer believes that the subject is involved in the crime, then an accusatory interrogation takes place. At this stage, the officer asks questions believing that the subject is guilty and the goal is to have the subject admit guilt. Other researchers have created experiments where psychologically coercive techniques were used to capture false confessions in an experimental setting.

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