Interrogation Room
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Research Paper: Why do innocent people confess in the interrogation room?
An accused is found guilty because of his/her own confession that he/she made in the interrogation room. He/She spends many years in jail without saying anything. However, another person comes forward and accepts responsibility for that same crime a few years later. As it turns out, the person who initially confessed to the crime was innocent. So, why did he/she confess to a crime he/she did not commit? To answer this question, one has to go inside the interrogation rooms of Canada. First of all, the interrogators tell the suspects that the police have evidence against them. Second, the interrogators ask
suggestive and leading questions that influence the suspects to believe that they are guilty. Finally, the confessions of the accused are obtained through coercion. Thus, there are three main reasons why innocent people confess to a crime: proof, suggestive questioning, and coercion.
The first technique that interrogators use to obtain a confession is that they go into an interrogation room already assuming that the suspect is guilty. He/She fabricates fake evidence against the accused in order to get a conviction. This procedure is best described in the words of Witt:
In the face of increasingly relentless interpersonal pressure, the suspect is pushed to
account for the purported evidence. By training, the interrogator interrupts any
denial or introduction of exculpatory evidence offered by the suspect (e.g., I wasnt
there, I was at my brothers house), and insists that the suspect explain the facts
(e.g., your fingerprints were on the gun). As the list of purported evidence grows,
wrongly accused suspects develop some theory of what is going on. Some guess
that someone has set them up by planting evidence. Others opine that they are
being railroaded by the policeЖthat the police have deliberately decided to
show false evidence to produce a false conviction. Both types of theory are based
on the suspects partial acceptance of the interrogators version of the facts: that the
evidence, though false, does exist. (“Review”)
During this stage, the suspect might try to reject any evidence against him/her and
deny all charges. Hartwig, Granhag, and Vrij explain the disadvantage of the suspects
denials for the interrogator: “Denials are unwanted as they put the interrogator in a
disadvantaged situation. The idea is that the more a denial is repeated, the more difficult
it will be for the interrogator to persuade the suspect to confess. The optimum way of
handling denials, therefore, is to negate them before they are voiced” (“Police”). The
interrogators try their best to turn down denials even before they are expressed because if
the suspect succeeds in denying, it will be impossible for the interrogator to get a
confession. As a result, the interrogators job is to get a confession out of the suspect and
he/she could care less if it is obtained through false evidence.
The second technique interrogators use to obtain a confession is suggestive
questioning. During this stage, the interrogator asks leading questions that influence the
responses of the suspect. With this technique, they try to get the suspect to say what they
want them to say. This questioning technique is explained by Naish in a review of
Gudjonssons book called The Psychology of Interrogations, Confessions, and
Testimony:
A sizeable portion of the book deals with the issue of suggestion and suggestibility,
both in the context of influencing witnesses and leading questions, and also
addressing the possibility that suggestible innocent people may be lead to believe
that they are in fact guilty. Within these topics Gudjonsson describes the
suggestibility scale that he has produced, for assessing what he terms “Interrogative
Suggestibility”. Subjects scoring high on this measure are presumed to be those
likely to change their stories if an interrogation is mishandled. The author cites
research showing that “false confessors” tend to score high on this scale. These are
the people who make a conviction, but subsequently withdraw, claiming police
pressure for example, as a reason for their earlier admission. (127)
The author mentions in the review of Gudjonssons work that some people are
pressured by the police during an interrogation. This type of technique is called coerced
internalized. The interviewer asks these types of questions to make the suspect
believe that he/she committed the crime: “So, where did you hide the knife after
killing him?” “Did anybody else help you bury the body in the backyard?” As more
leading questions are asked, suspects feel more pressured from the police to give an
answer and it is more likely that suspects will start to believe that they committed the
crime; henceforth, they will confess to a crime they did not commit.