Legal Commentary

When the Innocent Confess

By Jonathan H. Adler

Do innocent suspects ever confess to crimes?  Yes, and sometimes with extensive detail about the crime.  How could this happen, short of police coercion?  The NYT reports on research by UVa law professor Brandon Garrett on the question.

New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim that only the defendant could have committed the crime.

An article by Professor Garrett draws on trial transcripts, recorded confessions and other background materials to show how incriminating facts got into those confessions ? by police introducing important facts about the case, whether intentionally or unintentionally, during the interrogation. . . .

Professor Garrett said he was surprised by the complexity of the confessions he studied. ?I expected, and think people intuitively think, that a false confession would look flimsy,? like someone saying simply, ?I did it,? he said.

Instead, he said, ?almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable,? rich in telling detail that almost inevitably had to come from the police. ?I had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred,? he said, using a term in police circles for introducing facts into the interrogation process. ?I didn?t expect to see that almost all of them had been contaminated.?

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on September 14, 2010 (boomark / email).