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Humans

How an aggressive interrogation can make you a murderer

More than a quarter of those exonerated by DNA evidence have made a false confession or incriminating statement at some point. Why on earth would you do that?

By Linda Geddes

15 June 2016

interrogation

Alberto Giuliani/LUZphoto/eyevine

Sweat snakes down your face as you’re grilled by two detectives. No matter how intensive the interrogation gets, there’s one thing you know for certain – no way are you going to confess to a crime you didn’t commit. Yet false confessions happen more frequently than you might think. According to the US Innocence Project, more than a quarter of those exonerated by DNA evidence have made a false confession or incriminating statement at some point – even to such serious offences as rape or murder.

Gisli Gudjonsson, an emeritus professor at King’s College London who has worked on UK cases involving false confessions, believes many adults simply struggle to cope with the reality of a police interrogation or being locked up in a cell. “A common feature is that they believe that everything is going to be sorted out – that no one will believe their confession and the truth will somehow come out; unfortunately, in most cases it doesn’t.”

There are also other reasons for confessing. Some people do it voluntarily, either to cover for someone else or because they crave attention. In other cases, people gradually begin to believe – typically as the course of interrogation subtly alters their thinking – that they were involved in a crime and just can’t remember doing it. An extreme example of this was the Geirfinnur case, in which six innocent people were convicted of the murder of two men in Iceland in 1974. All were driven to confess following periods of solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and extensive questioning.

28% of overturned convictions examined by the US Innocence Project involved the extraction of false confessions*

Such …

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