Date Posted: 11/5/2012 2:29:49 PM
Posted By: Robinoxd Membership Level: Bronze Total Points: 45
The pages of American Legal History are full of cases about false convictions. This is a problem that can be drawn back to the seventeenth century during the Salem witch trials, whereby more than fifty women falsely confessed to being involved in witchcraft and sorcery. Wrongful convictions, based on false confessions raise questions regarding the process through which innocent citizens are induced to making false convictions that ultimately result in wrongful convictions. The article draws on psychological as well as forensic evidence involving a myriad of methodologies to attempt and identify the influences for false confession. Kassim et al (2004), states that the paper has three salient objectives. First, the article investigates the United States’ science of interrogation and interview by combining a multidisciplinary panel of scholars from clinical psychology, experimental psychology and criminology. The second objective is to find the dispositional and situational factors that influence the voluntariness and dependability of revelations. Thirdly, the article makes policy recommendations that could be implemented to reduce the incidence of police-induced confessions and the subsequent wrongful convictions. A false confession refers to admission of criminal liability, accompanied by details of how, when and motive of crime, by an innocent citizen. Such concessions are difficult to discover since the state does not keep a record of the criminal admissions and such cases are rarely followed up. Kassim notes that American courts have always treated confession evidence with both respect and suspicion. The U.S Supreme courts acknowledge confessions as the most powerful evidence of guilt. “The introduction of a confession makes the other aspects of a trial in court superfluous, and the real trial, for all practical purposes, occurs when the confession is obtained” Colorado v. Connelly 479 U.S 157 (1986). The judicial skepticism of confessionary evidence stems from the knowledge that the police and other relevant authorities sometimes abuse the system to obtain confessions. The author notes that, in recent times, a strikingly high number of cases have been unearthed whereby innocent citizens confessed, were tried, convicted but later got exonerated. One such high profile case is the Central park jogger case whereby five teenage boys were convicted to life imprisonment after confessing to rape charges presented against them. However, the teenagers were exonerated in 2002 after the real culprit presented himself to the police and confessed by adducing detailed evidence. Since Gary Dotson’s exoneration for wrongful conviction in 1989, more than two hundred other convicts have been exonerated to date in the United States under similar circumstances. This goes on to prove that wrongful conviction arising from false evidence is a serious problem facing the criminal justice system. Kassim et al (2004) utilize both qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis in creating the article. The article uses both primary and secondary sources of information. The qualitative analysis involves the use of interviews with convicts and other relevant stakeholders. The quantitative part involves the use of numerical data produced in the research both by Kassim and from other secondary sources. For instance, Kassim quotes results from a study conducted by Drizin and Leo (2004) of wrongfully convicted criminals from 1971 to 2002. The results of the study conducted on 125 cases indicate that ninety three percent of false confessors were male. Shockingly, eighty one percent of the false evidence cases related to murder, followed by eight percent in rape and three percent in arson. The convicted felons were mainly young people, with sixty three percent being under twenty five and thirty two percent being under the age of eighteen. Furthermore, twenty two percent of the wrongly convicted false confessors were mentally retarded while ten percent had a history of mental diagnosis.Kassim uses deductive logic to conclude that the high number of youths and mentally retarded wrongfully convicted as a result of adducing false confessions can be connected to their impaired understanding of Miranda warnings and general legal rights. Kassim proves his point by quoting a comprehensive study in which fifty five of the four hundred and thirty youth of between the ages of ten to sixteen misunderstood more than one provisions of the Miranda warnings. Youth of below the age of fourteen and even adults with an intelligence quotient below eighty five could not accurately interpret more than one provision of the Miranda warnings. A number of studies have revealed that countless defendants, particularly teenagers, who appear to have a sufficient accurate understanding of Miranda warnings, in essence rarely comprehend their significance to situations where they find themselves. The corroboration rule is relevant in adducing evidence and voluntary confessions according to the American Judicial system. The corroboration rule was founded at common law and requires that, in all homicide cases, no suspect can be imprisoned of a homicide without evidence that a death transpired, specifically the presence of a “dead body.” This rule requires that before a confession can be admissible to a jury or court of Justice, the prosecution had to demonstrate that a death, loss, or injury had transpired and that felonious agency was accountable for that death, loss, or injury. The decree was intended to serve three resolutions: to avert dishonest confessions, to offer inducements to the authorities to go ahead investigating even after procuring a revelation, and to guarantee against the predisposition of adjudicators to perceive concessions as dispositive of culpability irrespective of the conditions under which they were attained (Abramovich, 1993).Kassim notes that the United States Supreme Court has set a number of rules regarding adducing of out- of-court confessions as admissions as evidence in court proceedings. Interrogators have been known to use irrational and sometimes harsh methods to get confessions from suspects. In most cases, suspects are made to trust that it is in their greatest wellbeing to own up or take advantage of provisions such as plea bargains. In some instances, interrogators use maximization techniques whereby they make unfounded accusations, override objections and provide false evidence to force out confessions from suspects. On the converse, they may utilize minimization methods that aim to provide the suspect with face saving excuses for committing the crime. The author notes that there are several categories of false confessions; compliant false confessions, voluntary false confessions and internalized false confessions. Voluntary false confessions relate to incidents where innocent citizens own up to offenses that they have not committed without pressure or coercion from any authorities. Psychologists explain this as a desire for notoriety, conscious or unconscious need for self-punishment over past transgressions, inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy for lunatics or the need to protect the actual perpetrator. Compliant false confessions on the other had are as a result of police interference. In such cases, the suspect provides a false concession in a bid to avoid a potentially stressful situation, escape punishment or gain a reward. Internalized false confessions a mostly relate to guiltless, but malleable who when accused of their involvement in a crime capitulate and believe that they have committed the crime. Kassim reveals that out of the numerous studies conducted regarding confessions, three situational risk factors present themselves with astonishing consistency; interrogation time, minimization and presentation of false evidence.
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