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 anĀ 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.