YOU might think it could never happen to you. Believe me, it could. Almost anyone, given the right circumstances, can be persuaded to confess to a crime they did not commit.
The “right circumstances” can be anything from long periods of questioning or days of confinement to severe psychological pressure and intimidation. Intelligence officers in search of information can easily make detention and questioning so intolerable that their subjects will say anything for a way out.
Despite this, many American and some British police and military interrogators actively play on people’s vulnerabilities when they are trying to force a confession, apparently in the belief that no innocent person will ever confess. They argue that because most criminal suspects are reluctant to spill the beans – perhaps because they are ashamed of what they have done, or fear the legal consequences – some pressure, deception, persuasion and manipulation is needed to get the truth.
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The leading American interrogation manual, Criminal Interrogation and Confessions by Fred Inbau, John Reid and Joseph Buckley, advocates breaking down a suspect’s resistance using trickery, deceit and psychological manipulation. It suggests exaggerating the evidence against the suspect and offering various scenarios aimed at either minimising the moral implications of the alleged crime or giving the suspect “moral excuses” that would save them face, making it easier for them to confess. If this fails, the manual advises the interrogator to pressure the suspect into choosing one of two incriminating alternatives – for example, by suggesting that the offence was an accident rather than a malicious and intentional act, an option that suspects are often tempted to accept.
Coercive techniques like this can be particularly dangerous with subjects who are unduly suggestible or compliant, or with those who are of below average intelligence – which in police work means most suspects (the average IQ of people detained at police stations in the UK is about 85, compared with 100 for the general population). For example, in one English case in the early 1990s, a suspect with a mild learning disability (an IQ score of 65) falsely confessed during a video-recorded police interview to a double murder after interrogators had recognised his fear of prison and played on it by presenting him with two alternatives: “Confess and you will go to hospital, deny it and you will go to prison.” The suspect was released from custody only after DNA found at the crime scene identified the real culprit.
Other vulnerabilities are just as easily exploited. Drug addicts are prone to giving unreliable confessions in custody, since their decision-making is governed by their need to get out of the police station as quickly as possible to get their next fix. Their inability to cope with the prospect of being detained for some time makes them likely to confess quickly, and sometimes falsely.
Another coercive approach is to play on any weak points in a suspect’s sexuality, such as lack of sexual experience, doubts over their sexual orientation, their use of pornography or their masturbation habits. For young men especially, this can be highly distressing, and it has led to false confessions in a number of criminal cases. For example, in the late 1980s, a 17-year-old English youth of average intelligence and with no history of mental health problems confessed falsely to the murders of two elderly women during tape-recorded police interviews after a senior police officer confronted him about pornographic magazines found in his bedroom, and his apparent lack of success with women. The following day he fully retracted the confession in the presence of a solicitor, and while he was awaiting trial police caught the real culprit.
“Once it seemed the police were in control and there was no point resisting, she confessed to ease the pressure”
Two cases shine out as examples of just how badly wrong interrogations can go. The trials in 1975 of the so-called Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six, in which a total of nine Irish men and one English woman were convicted of terrorist offences and sentenced to life imprisonment after the bombing of pubs in Guildford and Birmingham, were probably the worst miscarriages of justice to take place in England during the 20th century. During interrogation, 8 of the 10 accused made self-incriminating statements, which they subsequently retracted. All of them claimed they were innocent, and more than a decade later their convictions were quashed by the Court of Appeal.
I was a psychologist on the defence team in both these cases. To me the most interesting of the false confessions, and the one that did most to persuade the British Home Secretary to reopen the Guildford case, was given by the English woman, Carol Richardson. She was a drug addict at the time and suffered withdrawal symptoms in custody, and she told us that she falsely confessed to being involved in the Guildford bombings after her incarceration and the intense police interrogation made her situation intolerable. What bothered her was not so much the interrogators’ questions as their attitude and apparent confidence that she was guilty. Once it appeared the police were in full control and there was no point in resisting, she confessed to ease the pressure. After several days in custody she even began to believe that she had planted the bomb and was blocking it out from her memory.
No police or military interrogation is completely free of coercion, nor will it ever be. A certain amount of persuasion is often necessary. But interrogators should be aware how easily suspects can be manipulated to confess falsely. Moreover, a confession obtained by unreasonable means will often be ruled inadmissible in court, whether it is true or not. The bottom line is this: fair interrogations can lead to useful information that might save lives; coercive interrogations can certainly ruin them.
