Who would confess to a murder they didn’t commit? Maybe you. | Nancy Franklin | TEDxSBU

imagine you did something really bad justice serve might involved you confessing and taking responsibility and feeling the consequences of what you've done right imagine instead that you didn't do something bad everything else is the same should you confess of course not right but would you confess hold that thought let's talk about the criminal justice system because the justice system is designed so that you actually can say that you committed a crime and that may be appealing to some people so for example if you are guilty and you know the evidence against you is overwhelming and you want to strike a deal then you might plead guilty in fact about 95 percent of cases in the u.s. end in a plea and you can imagine how choked the courts would be if every one of those cases had to go to the trial so you might be thinking wow 95 percent we must be mostly perfect right about 50 years of psychological research offers a very different world of explanation so you may know something about the wrongful conviction cases that have been emerging over the past decades that three-quarters of those have involved eyewitnesses incorrectly identifying what turns out to be an innocent suspect and there are other common contributors to wrongful conviction I'm here to talk about one in particular false confession or coerced confession so I want you to think about the possibility that in many cases it's actually not the actual perpetrator who's in prison but someone who amounts to another innocent victim right that's an awful prospect for a civilized society to have to you know bear the weight of and the moral costs are added to by the financial costs about sixty thousand dollars a year to incarcerate an inmate you know public assistance may be for a family who's lost a wage earner maybe millions of dollars if this leads to an exoneration and lawsuit that might follow but you know why would somebody confess to let's say a murder that they didn't commit it just seems preposterous right well let's go into the interrogation room and see how this might unfold so once you are in the interrogation room you actually are presumed guilty and it's the job of the interrogator to elicit a confession from you there are methods for that because the presumption is that whoever is in that interrogation room is not going to be forthcoming with a confession so there are methods and they include things like get in the person's face and don't let them off the hook you know don't entertain their denials urge them to think about the consequences of continuing to not cooperate and remember this is you you found yourself in this interrogation room you don't know how it happened you're facing this barrage of questions and accusations meanwhile this room is actually quite stressful simply to be in your isolated you may be held for hours on end and in fact in false confession cases that turns out to be more than 16 hours on average on end you may have to go to the bathroom you may be hungry and then let's add one more layer on top of that the police are actually allowed to bluff about the evidence that they have against you so they may come in and say we have your fingerprints at the scene we have eyewitnesses who've named you or who've identified you there's surveillance video you failed the polygraph test for you this is a nightmare right you don't know how this could have happened but here you are and they're saying that they have all this evidence and so you might find yourself sort of weighing two possibilities you know roll the dice go to court maybe the jurors will believe them find you guilty maybe you'll get life maybe worse or you know maybe cut your losses in this horrible predicament you find yourself in maybe you can get a better more merciful sentence so I'm thing you know and you're weighing these two possibilities it may turn out to be a rational decision rational to choose to make a false confession in a case like that but you all are Ted people right so you know you know better than that you're well educated you got good coping skills you know maybe you wouldn't fall prey to those tactics but you know what you probably wouldn't be likely to be in that interrogation room in the first place so this is hypothetical for you let's talk about people it's not hypothetical for minorities people who live in low-income areas people who are non-native english-speakers you can imagine what an interrogation is like for them right illegal immigrants who are facing the prospect of being deported if they don't cooperate people who have members of their family or social circle who are known to police or you know people who have their own criminal record even but who didn't do this you can imagine anybody in any of those categories being frightened you know terrified to be in that interrogation room and fear may lead to risk aversion and risk aversion puts you at risk for making a false confession meanwhile you can imagine what the interrogator or how the interrogator is interpreting the fidgeting the crying you know the signs of nervousness that you're portraying right those are not actually signs of guilt but the interrogator might interpret them as that and get harsher with you and the fact is that stressed people are more likely to confess but that's the problem right these tactics lead to confession and we can't know whether the confession is is accurate or not so let's get back to you you know we we had you be rational earlier let's put you in the position of someone like this where you're terrified and all you want to do is get out right what is it that I'm gonna have to do to have them let me go and that puts you at risk as well right as the the hours we're on you get worn down what becomes more salient to you is the room that you're in and how uncomfortable it is and you become more likely to do what it takes to get out of there rather than think about the long-term consequences of relenting and saying that you did it there are groups of people who are particularly susceptible to that so I want to tell you about some of them let's start with intellectually impaired people they are less likely to think about those long-term consequences they are more deferential to authority figures they're more easily led by questions or suggestions made by an interrogator and you can imagine how those things might combine think about that so the interrogator might ask who shot the victim and the intellectually impaired innocent suspect has no idea but they want to be cooperative and they think they may they may think that they need to guess or that they're expected to and so they do not realizing that they're not only implicating the person they named but they're implicating themselves they're implying that they were their intellectually impaired people are actually over-represented among the exonerated in false confession cases and so you know while you might be likely or at least at risk for making a false confession don't kid yourself you're not actually who I'm most worried about let me tell you a couple other groups who I am very worried about let's talk about the mentally ill so that interrogation room is stressful it's isolating it's awful for any of us but even more so for mentally ill people who might also be dealing with other risk factors like delusions or impulsivity or poor judgment addicts imagine being in that stressful situation for hours on end while your withdrawal withdrawal symptoms are getting worse and worse imagine trading years of your free so that you can get out of this room and go have effects which may be a cigarette imagine that it's an addiction that's the straw that breaks an innocent suspect how about children children who are one-third of the false confession exoneration cases compared to adults they're more deferential to authority figures they're more emotionally volatile they're poor at risk perception they are poor at seeing the long-term consequences of their actions which makes them very vulnerable and in fact you know with armed with that knowledge you can see why it's easy to see cases like all five innocent suspects in the Central Park five case which you may be familiar with all of them adolescents falsely confessing to that brutal attack anyone else yeah people people who believe in the criminal justice system you know that may have been you so here you are in the interrogation room and you know it's a mistake and you're sure that they're gonna discover it's a mistake they'll find that evidence that exonerates you and implicate someone else and so you as an innocent suspect may innocently sign a confession expecting that that evidence is going to come save you when it's not necessarily there and remember I said before that the police can Bluff about the evidence against you imagine this happening the police come in and say we found the murder weapon we've sent it to the lab we're gonna you know get the DNA off of it that may be a great bluff for a guilty suspect it may lead them to confess you're thinking they found the weapon they found the DNA yeh right so what I can do is go ahead and confess I can get out of this room they'll find out who the real perpetrator is it'll be fine there may not be that gun or they may get a DNA hit on someone else and then they may decide that there were multiple perpetrators and you're not off the hook your attorney of course is going to want to have protected you against all of this and had you not signed the confession in the first place but you as an innocent suspect who believes in the criminal justice system you are likely to have waived your right to counsel and your your right to silence you are likely to have provided a very detailed alibi explaining where you really were that day not realizing that any discrepancy in details can be used to show that you're a liar okay so think about where you are now you've made your confession this ship is starting to sail is there any way to turn it sure you can retract your confession you can request a trial you now have quite damning evidence against you you have your own words against you and what you're facing now likely is more serious charges and more numerous charges against you the opportunity that you may have for a favorable plea deal is now eroded because they have a stronger case against you and then there's more sort of avalanching consequences of this your attorney may not work as hard as she otherwise would have given that you've made this confession and there is evidence for this in the exoneration cases eyewitnesses who found find out that you've confessed are more likely to testify against you your own alibi witnesses who find out that you've confessed are less likely to testify for you forensic analysts who you know are looking let's say to match the fingerprint at the scene to whoever did it once they find out that you've confessed are more likely to make that false match to you there's more so think about jurors and judges who when they see that you've retracted your confession might consider that a shame act of a you know horrible criminal and it may be in part due to that that judges are more likely to mete out harsher sentences in cases of false confession and you certainly can't blame jurors who have been exposed only to that last moment of your interrogation right when the when the cameras finally turned on and there you are talking in great detail with flat emotion about this horrible crime that you committed the jurors don't get to see the hours of you protesting your innocence they don't get to see the intimidating circumstances they don't get to see all of the times that you had to go through those details before you got them down pat and let's talk about those details it turns out that in almost every single rape or murder false confession case that confession had included details that only the perpetrator and the police would have known how do you know about it because it came out during questions and during accusations throughout the interrogation so they get woven into your confession and you can imagine how damning that is when a juror hears those details coming out of your own mouth so somehow thankfully we actually do have hundreds of exoneration cases involving false confessions I don't want you thinking about those hundreds though I want you thinking about the likely tens of thousands of people currently in prison who fallen prey to this I want you to think about you know as you're walking down the street it can happen to him and him and you know maybe the homeless guy who lives on the corner we don't want any of these people going to prison for a murder that they didn't commit and we certainly don't want to run into the actual perpetrator who went free because these guys went to prison so here's what we know this happens people do confess to crimes that they didn't commit even murder and often in one in four of exoneration cases that's why we need to know about this because it's so prevalent and it's so perplexing it's not a matter of you know a few bad cops taking people into the back room and slapping them around until they make a confession it's actually much more scary than that this can happen in a justice system that consists of nothing but good people who want to do well you know people who trust the system and each other and themselves and so we need to be very clear that meaning well here is not the same as doing well we can make improvements and that's where psychological research comes in we can identify where the problems are that can help us understand the underlying causes and can lead us to implement improvements and I want to tell you something optimistic in this talk so let me tell you about a couple of very easy ways to make some improvements particularly with regard to false confessions so first you may have thought about this already videotaped the whole interrogation it's easy it's not expensive and it allows the judge and the jurors to look for potentially coercive circumstances to see how a suspect story changes over time and to be able to evaluate the confession inside of a meaningful context second trained interrogators and more effective methods both of eliciting information from guilty suspects and protecting innocent suspects here's one way that we know works the interrogator walks into the room and says you don't know what I know I'm gonna ask you questions and I'm gonna listen for what I know to be the right answers I'm gonna listen for complete answers and if I ever see you lying to me or not telling me everything that I know you know then we're done and the possibility of me helping you is over and remember you don't know what I know let's begin right so it's actually it's a more effective way of bluffing and it's a great way to incentivize the guilty person to actually tell what they know and it it adds some protections against risks that we've talked about four innocent suspects here's what I know as a cognitive psychologist errors are woven into the fabric of being human perception memory judgment interpersonal dynamics there's problems all over the place but they're predictable and systematic they're predictable and systematic and even though they feed on each other and magnify each other if we know what they are we can look for them we can implement policies that are designed to anticipate them and counteract them we have a criminal justice system that depends very very heavily on humans so what we know is that there are errors woven into that fabric as well we can make this system better we know how to do it in many many different kinds of ways we must do it as possible victims as possible suspects as members of a civilized society it's in all of our best interests to make sure that the actual perpetrator goes to prison and no one else it's the best measure of justice that I know of thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 60,811

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Activism, Criminal justice, Policy, Prison, Psychology

Id: c431D5Tj_aU

Length: 19min 15sec (1155 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 21 2016