low-pressure version, the defendant had confessed to the
police immediately on questioning. In the high-pressure
version, he was interrogated aggressively by a detective
who waved his gun in a menacing manner at him. In the
control version, there was no confession in evidence.
Faced with the high-pressure confession, participants
reasonably judged the statement to be involuntary and
self-reported that it did not influence their decisions. Yet
when it came to verdicts, this confession significantly
boosted the conviction rate. This pattern appeared even
in a situation in which subjects were specifically
admonished by the judge to disregard confessions that
they found to be coerced.
Criminal justice statistics reinforce the point that
confessions tend to overwhelm other exculpatory
evidence, resulting in a chain of negative legal
consequences—from arrest through prosecution,
conviction, and incarceration. Archival analyses of
actual cases that contained confessions that were later
proved false innocent have thus shown that when
innocent confessors plead not guilty and proceed to
trial, jury conviction rates range from 73% to 81%.
There are three bases for concern about the way in
which juries can be expected to evaluate confession
evidence in support of conviction. First, common-
sense leads people to trust behaviors that do not
appear to serve a person’s self-interest, such as con-
fessions. Most people believe that they would never
confess to a crime that they did not commit and do not
expect that others would either. Indeed, in a wide
range of contexts, social psychologists have found
that in perceiving the behaviors of others, people tend
to overestimate the influence of dispositions and
underestimate the influence of situational factors—a
phenomenon known as fundamental attribution error.
A second basis for concern is that people, includ-
ing professional lie catchers, are not typically adept at
distinguishing between truth and deception. For
example, although it is common to assume that “I’d
know a false confession if I saw one,” a recent study
has shown that neither college students nor police
investigators were able to differentiate between true
and false confessions made by male prisoners. Hence,
there is reason to believe that lay jurors would have
difficulty in distinguishing between true and false
confessions when presented as evidence.
Third, jurors do not typically see the corruptive
process of interrogation by which confessions are
elicited. In many cases of proven false confessions,
the statements that were presented in court oftencontained accurate details about the crime, statements
of motivation, apologies and expressions of remorse,
and even corrections to errors that the suspects had
supposedly identified. Typically presented with an
oral, written, or taped confession but not the question-
ing that preceded it, however, jurors are not in a posi-
tion to evaluate the source of these details. False
confessions thus tend to appear voluntary and the
product of personal knowledge, masking the coercive
processes through which they were produced.
It is clear that additional safeguards are needed
when confession evidence is presented in court. There
are two possibilities in this regard. One is for trial
courts to permit psychologists to testify as experts—a
practice that is common but not uniform across states.
The purpose of this testimony is to assist juries by
informing them about the processes of interviewing and
interrogation, the phenomenon of false confessions, the
psychological factors that increase the risk of a defen-
dant making a false confession, and other general prin-
ciples (the purpose in these cases is not for the expert to
render an opinion about a particular confession, a judg-
ment that juries are supposed to make).
A second important mechanism is to ensure that
judges and juries can observe the process by which
confessions are produced by videotaping entire interro-
gations. A videotaping policy would have many
advantages: The presence of a camera would deter
interrogators from using highly coercive tactics, pre-
vent frivolous defense claims of coercion, provide a full
and accurate record of how the statement was pro-
duced, and perhaps even increase the fact-finding accu-
racy of judges, who must rule on voluntariness (they
will observe for themselves the suspect’s physical and
mental state, the conditions of custody, and the interro-
gation tactics that were used), and juries, who must ren-
der a verdict (they will see how the statement was taken
and from whom the crime details originated).
Importantly, interrogations should be videotaped
with an “equal focus” visual perspective, showing
both the accused and the interrogators. In numerous
studies, Daniel Lassiter and colleagues have found
that lay people, juries, and even trial judges are more
attuned to the situational factors that draw confessions
when the interrogator is on camera than when the sole
focus is on the suspect.Julia C. Busso and Saul M. KassinSee also False Confessions; Interrogation of Suspects;
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