For my issue brief, I will be researching and constructing a paper on false confessions. From the small amount of research I have done so far, I read that these are mainly caused by police interrogation strategies. The policemen would rather get a confession out of the subject and feel victorious, rather than fully investigating the situation for the truth.

Any kind of confession feels like progress, however, some strategies police use such as promising a lesser sentence or a “deal” would make the person feel like they would rather give a false confession in hopes for something in return instead of continuing to tell their truth.

My issue brief would be a policy intervention by construing the problems about false confessions that I research in order to write out a possible solution to lower the amount of false confessions. The reason behind these false confessions confuses social scientists and some of these reasons can never be constructed. I will look to find a course of action that can be applied to these interrogation scenarios in order to point out these false confessions before they essentially lead to a false conviction.

As a rough draft, this course of action will include thorough DNA testing, analysis of the confession (possibly confessing to crimes that never happened, ex. the murder of someone who is still alive) and also examining body language and how well the person can keep up with their story over time (if they forgot key details or not).

I will address the exigence and the rhetorical situation by giving statistics from the Innocence Project about how many false confessions are given yearly as well as the amount of false convictions/exonerees in a given time period. I read in many of my current sources that the NY Central Park Jogger case in which a female jogger was brutally beaten and raped. Five young black men were forced into giving confessions by the police, which then led to five false convictions.

However, none of the DNA testing matched them and their testimonies contradicted each other. They were exonerated after five to twelve years, after DNA matched a serial rapist in NYC. This case would be good to mention in the beginning, as it is the most popular, but I will also mention a more recent case as this one happened thirty-three years ago. This case is infamous for the intense interrogation that the police held which resulted in five false confessions and convictions.

The “cause” of false confessions would definitely be inadvertent, as “if a problem has an inadvertent cause, that means that a person, group, or institution brought it about through mistakes, unawareness, or a lack of caution” (“Causes”) which is definitely true because false confessions could be coerced by police and once they get the confession, they feel like that could be the main truth of the investigation and feel proud of themselves that they got a confession out of the subject.

The continuation into false convictions is made by a lack of caution, as they do not investigate much further once they get the false confession. Like the NY Central Park Jogger case, the DNA did not match and their confessions contradicted, but they still convicted the five young men simply because they confessed to the case after intense coercion from the police.

The mistakes referred to in the inadvertent cause definition can be classified as the three mistakes made in police interrogation which lead to false confessions: misclassification error, coercion error, contamination error. In my issue brief, I will elaborate on these three errors are they are main causes that lead to false confessions being made.

I believe I will use the “Mandate” policy instrument in order to punish the police officers and investigators that coerce a false confession and then run with it as evidence. It will punish those who make the three errors I mentioned above, and it will cause investigators to have more of an incentive to find the truth. If the false confession is the sole reason why the person is incarcerated, there should be measures to prevent that in the mandate-type policy.

Overall, I thought that this deliberation project brought upon many good conversations about the issues we face in the world, and I definitely enjoyed this project. It ended up being a lot less stressful than I thought it would be, as sitting in a circle having a regular conversation creates much less social anxiety than doing an official presentation standing up in front of the class. Unfortunately, I was not in class for the standardized testing deliberation, but I was present for everything else.

I’ll be using Gastil’s Deliberative Criteria to analyze both my experience facilitating a deliberation as well as being a participant.

Picking from the analytic process of Gastil’s criteria, my group did a good job “creating a solid information base” as we took an uncommon topic and explained the situation as best as we could to our audience. Before this project, I had no idea what Cancer Alley was until Katie proposed it as a possible topic for our deliberation. I searched up articles about this area and was very surprised that this has not been covered on the news as much as it should have. We wrote in our overview and introduction with key details about the area and the pollutants in order for everyone in the room to grasp a basic understanding of the problem in Louisiana.

Another criteria we instinctively used as a part of Gastil’s criteria is that we “prioritized the key values at stake” as we realize that we value having the right to clean air and minimal toxic pollutants in the air. Our values were agreed upon with the others in the deliberation, and we all reflected on these key values of keeping the air clean. While it is difficult to decide to terminate the factories due to economic loss, it is evident that the lives of the residents are more important as they are at a much greater risk to get cancer and have a shorter life-span.

The last criteria we used in our facilitated deliberation would be that we “weighed the pros, cons, and trade-offs among solutions” as we created clear advantages and disadvantages for each solution we proposed. We knew that each of our solutions had a big drawback to them, for example, some of our solutions would have been to terminate production of the factories or relocate the people. We realized that these were major drawbacks to our solutions and we made it clear that we needed to assess which solution would have less of a harmful impact. One would impact the economy or the other would affect the already negatively impacted lives of those who live there.

Switching to analyzing the deliberations I participated in through Gastil’s Deliberative Criteria, I would say that the “Justice in the Court” deliberation was most successful in using the “ensure mutual comprehension” criteria. Specifically, Leigh was very clear when she was speaking about her approach and she was very open to any possible confusion. She clarified things very well and I enjoyed the freedom and clarity to express confusion within their topic.

Another criteria that was used was “adequately distribute speaking opportunities” which I would believe was best done in the “Homelessness on Skid Row” deliberation as they had a clear timer when the allocated time was up and the moderation worked very smoothly. I feel like this criteria could have been worked on better in our group, as I was trying to stop people from going overtime but it was very difficult on Zoom since I felt awkward unmuting to interrupt.

Lastly, the most important criteria would be to “respect other participants” which I believed all deliberation groups did very well. They all respected everyone’s views when they spoke, and they acknowledged their viewpoints with respect. Every group had some people disagreeing, and the facilitating group handled it very well as they realize that everyone has different life experiences and this deliberation is not a debate, but rather a discussion.