Yesterday, the New York Times published an article that calls for an end to the police tactic of lying to suspects in pursuit of a confession. As it stands, there is almost no limit to the magnitude or type of lies that police can tell someone. Confession evidence is important in the overall criminal justice scheme, but the evidence is clear – countless innocent people have confessed to crimes they did not commit. In fact, the Innocence Project’s data shows that nearly 30% of the 375 DNA exonerations that they have obtained involved convictions obtained by way of false confessions.
The Central Park Five
These cases have existed for quite some time in the United States. Many people may remember the Central Park Jogger case from 1989, where the police elicited false confessions from five teenage boys. All were wrongfully convicted, and spent years in jail. As stated by one of the exonerated:
“It’s hard to imagine why anyone would confess to a crime they didn’t commit. But when you’re in that interrogation room, everything changes. During the hours of relentless questioning that we each endured, detectives lied to us repeatedly. They said they had matched our fingerprints to crime scene evidence and told each of us that the others had confessed and implicated us in the attack. They said that if we just admitted to participating in the attack, we could go home. All of these were blatant lies.”
Scientific support
Scientific proof lends credence to these stories. First, false information can substantially alter a person’s perceptions, beliefs, emotions and memories. Second, experiments have shown that when innocent people are brought into a lab and accused of cheating on a test or stealing money, the introduction of false evidence doubles or triples the amount of people who wrongly confess.
Law enforcement support
Even law enforcement has been shown to be receptive to ending the use of deception and lying to secure confessions, as this type of sanctioned deception undermines the legitimacy of the court system and of the the broader principles of justice.
The article can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/false-confessions-police-interrogation.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
Record Expungements and Felony Reductions
Have you have already been convicted of a crime, been charged and found not guilty, or had the charges dismissed?
Did you know you may have the right to expunge your criminal record?
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