More often than many real­ize, inno­cent peo­ple false­ly con­fess to crimes they did not com­mit, accord­ing to a recent review in the Chicago Tribune. For exam­ple, Kevin Fox, was accused of sex­u­al­ly assault­ing and mur­der­ing his 3‑year-old daugh­ter in Illinois. He con­fessed to the crime after spend­ing 14 hours in inter­ro­ga­tion, dur­ing which police ignored his requests for a lawyer and told him that they would arrange for inmates to rape him in jail. Fox was lat­er released after DNA evi­dence exclud­ed him as a sus­pect, and anoth­er man was sub­se­quent­ly charged with the crime. Saul Kassin, psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, explained the pres­sures that could lead to this hap­pen­ing, ​“The inter­ro­ga­tion itself is stress­ful enough to get inno­cent peo­ple to con­fess. But add to that a lay­er of grief and shock and per­haps even some guilt — ​‘I should have been there’ — and then that the par­ent is try­ing like hell to be coop­er­a­tive because they want the mur­der of their child solved.” Trauma, lack of sleep and high­ly manip­u­la­tive inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques can cause false con­fes­sions to even the most heinous crimes, includ­ing ones car­ry­ing the death penal­ty. Experts believe that false con­fes­sions account for an esti­mat­ed 25% of wrong­ful con­vic­tions. ​“We know that for cer­tain kinds of peo­ple, par­tic­u­lar­ly those with men­tal ill­ness and men­tal defi­cien­cies, but oth­er peo­ple as well, the psy­cho­log­i­cal inten­si­ty of an inter­ro­ga­tion can prove absolute­ly as tor­tur­ous as phys­i­cal pain,” said Lawrence Marshall, a Stanford University law pro­fes­sor who co-found­ed Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions.

(L. Black and S. Mills, ​“What caus­es peo­ple to give false con­fes­sions?” Chicago Tribune, July 11, 2010). See also Innocence and Causes of Wrongful Convictions.

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