#false confessions

Police Interrogations: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [source]

New book by Saul Kassin coming out on May 15, 2022

I finally got around to watching Making a Murderer on Netflix. I enjoyed it and so I started rummaging through the web looking for similar content and came across this book.

A good question and we don’t really know. By which I mean: this is not something we can accurately and ethically measure. I can tell you what comes up in the interviews I’ve read with survivors and torturers, but I don’t think we can really make a guess as to what’s the most common outcome.

 Here are some things that victims have described happening after giving out false information.

 The torturers assume the information is true and stop, returning later to ‘see what else they know’.

The torturers assume the information is false and continue torturing.

The torturers acknowledge that the information is probably false and that they don’t believe the victim knows anything but keep them imprisoned and continue torturing them anyway.

The torturers do not appear to notice that the victim has tried to tell them something.

The torturers assume the information is true and do not stop.

The victim is charged with a crime based on the ‘information’ they have given out.

The victim is charged with a crime but it is not based on what they actually said.

The victim is released.

The victim is held for a little longer (the time frame depends on local laws but a week to a month is the sort of range you’d expect), possibly tortured further and then released.

The victim is moved to another jail. This can lead to them being released if the other jail is run by genuine investigators.

Outside groups (human rights groups, advocacy groups, political groups and sometimes local movements led by friends or family) become involved in the victim’s case. This can lead to torture stopping but does not always.

 This isn’t a definitive list. It’s situations that I can remember reading survivors describe.

 It’s also worth pointing out that torturers can also choose to hold on to people who tell them absolutely nothing (which happened to Alleg, he describes it in The Question) or release them just as arbitrarily.

 Actually I think that’s probably the main take-away point here: the torturers’ decisions are usually arbitrary.

 I would say that I see descriptions of people being held for longer by torturers more often then I see descriptions of them being quickly released. However I think that could be because news agencies and human rights organisations tend to prioritise stories where victims are unjustly held for longer periods. It’s seen as ‘worse’ and it sells more newspapers and generates more public support.

 It’s also worth remembering that torturers don’t always ask for information. Sometimes victims are targetted because of a minority status and the ‘aim’ is to enforce social hierarchies/instil fear.

 For instance if a group of police officers go out and beat a group of Roma children that were in a nice part of town because they were ‘obviously planning a robbery’: that’s torture as well. And in cases that follow this pattern the victims aren’t usually arrested or held for more then a few hours. They’re abused and released without any questions being asked.

 Which brings me to the last question: torturers don’t really have a way of telling if victims lie.

 Part of what makes torture so terrible for genuine investigation is that it takes away an organisations ability to fact-check. You can read more about how that works here.

 So, no, victims are generally not killed because torturers find out they lied.

 They can be killed because torturers assume they’re lying, but I get the impression it’s more common for torturers to just… keep torturing if they think someone’s lying.

 The impression I get is that a lot of torture victims are killed by accident. Many are ‘lawfully’ executed based on false confessions and some are deliberately killed just because torturers were angry or didn’t like them or- a dozen other dumb, unsatisfying ‘reasons’.

 If you’re writing characters who are captured and tortured ‘for’ information then you can realistically make their fate seem quite random. A lot of it is arbitrary. A lot of it is down to luck and factors beyond the control of both the victim and the torturer.

 The trick is to make whatever option you choose narratively satisfying. And part of how you do that is by showing a lasting impact on the character.

 Perhaps they were released within an hour, while someone else who was picked up at the same time is falsely convicted and imprisoned for years. The character might go through the rest of the story wondering why they ‘got off easy’, spurring them on in whatever path they choose to take and colouring their interactions with others.

 Or may be the reverse happens and they’re left having to grapple with irrational envy for the character who ‘got off lightly’.

 You don’t have to use either of these, I’m just trying to give you an idea of your options and show how you can make random, arbitrary things more narratively interesting by tying them to the character’s motivation.

 I hope that helps. :)

Available on Wordpress.

Henry Lee Lucas was an American serial killer who confessed to over 100 murders while in prison. He is confirmed to have 3 victims and his crimes are thought to have spanned from 1960-1983.

Born in 1936 to a poor family, Lucas was described as an attention seeker and liar who lost his eye aged 10 after it became infected. Lucas’ mother was a prostitute who wold force her son to watch him having sex with clients and make him cross-dress in public allegedly so she could pimp him out. Lucas dropped out of school early and began drifting around Virginia. He claimed, and later recounted, that he had committed his first murder in 1951, strangling a teenage girl.

In 1960, Lucas killed his mother during an argument, he claimed she struck him so he stabbed her. He was sentenced to 20-40 years in prison but was released after 10. In 1971 he was convicted of attempting to kidnap 3 schoolgirls. He later befriended murderer Ottis Toole, the two began a sexual relationship and Lucas began a relationship with Toole’s niece Frieda ‘Becky’ Powell, the pair ran away to California. In 1983, he was arrested for unlawful firearm possession an later confessed to a double murder, leading police to the remains of the two bodies. He was incarcerated for his crimes. The confession led police to trust Lucas and prove him capable of murder.

In November 1983, Lucas was transferred to a jail in Williamson County, Texas where he attempted suicide. Lucas claimed he was abused and tortured and denied legal help. In. interviews Lucas confessed to additional  unsolved killings. The task force officially ‘cleared’ 213 unsolved murders based on his confessions and Lucas received special treatment for his confessions, he was taken to restaurants, rarely handcuffed and allowed to wander freely through the jail. Lucas’ confessions were criticised as imprecise, he originally claimed to have killed 60 people, then raised this number to over 100 and then gave a figure of over 3000. He also frequently withdrew confessions and made statements such as ‘I am not a serial killer.’ DNA evidence has verified Lucas did not kill 20 of his supposed victims.

I am finishing my pre-scientific research paper on false confessions and thought it might interest some people. Here’s a summery of my paper, in 3 parts.

Why are false confessions relevant?

A false confession is defined as a confession to a crime that the confessor did not commit. In court, confession evidence strongly influences the jury’s and judge’s decisions, which can in effect lead to miscarriages of justice. The coercive properties of interrogation are still widely unknown to the general population. An exact number of false confessions cannot be stated, as many cases are yet to be discovered, but there have been a multitude of proven cases, showing that the existance of this issue cannot be refuted.

The Three Types of False Confessions

False confessions can generally be classified as voluntary, internalized/persuaded or compliant/coerced.

Voluntary false confessions are made out of free will and in the absence of interrogation. The suspect is motivated by a personal benefit, like fame, protecting a loved one or punishing themselves for something they have done wrong.

Internalized/persuaded confessions happen when the suspect genuinely believes they commited a crime. They mistrust their memory and affirms the nerrative that the investigators suggest. An example for this is the common “blackout theme”, in which the suspect is lead to believe they were intoxicated at the time of the crime. These confessions are usually accompanied by hypothetical language and uncertainty of the confessor.

Compliant/coerced confessions occur in response to suggestive interrogation techniques. They were more common in the past, when US police used violence to extract confessions (discussed further in The Third Degree). In this case, the suspect knows they are innocent, but incriminate themselves to escape coercive interrogation. I will focus on this type of false confession.

The Third Degree

In the 19th century, the police force in America was largely corrupt and trying to combat the rise in crime with desperate measures. This lead to the use of the Third Degree, a practice in which police used physical or psychological abuse to extract confessions.

Physical abuse ranged from minor cases to suspects being whipped, beaten or kicked or otherwise tortured. Investigators would later claim the suspect had fallen down the stairs or had been beaten by cell mates. Psychological abuse included deprivation of sleep or food, isolation and hour long questioning.

These strategies were, of course, illegal, but were kept hidden to the public. This also lead to the real perpetrators of crime remaining unknown.

The Wickersham Commission established in their 1931 report that the Third Degree commonly lead to false confessions and miscarriages of justice. With the public losing trust in police, the US police was forced to take on new methods and Third Degree practices became uncommon. Unfortunately, cases of violence during interrogation still sometimes surface.

Professionalizing Interrogation

With the rise of policing as a science came the founding of the first federal crime laboratory and police academy in the 1930s. Interrogation manuals and polygraphs (so-called lie-detectors) were introduced. The hope was that now confessions would be less likely to be challenged in court.

Interrogation manuals would claim they could make investigators human lie-detectors with 85-100% accuracy. John Reid and Fred Inbau’s interrogation manual “Criminal Interrogation and Confession” is the most well-known manual, now in its fourth edition. Some of the coercive strategies it introduced are still used today. It suggests, for example, making the interrogation room uncomfortable for the suspect, limiting distractions and using “themes” in interrogations that minimize the crime. The psychology of interrogation and coercion will be discussed in part 2.