False Confessions Case Study

One such case is, that of Engin Raghip of the so-called ‘Tottenham three’ will be discussed in the context of admissibility of psychological evidence in order to demonstrate how the judiciary has increasingly come to accept the psychological notion that most people, under certain circumstances, are susceptible to making false confessions. In order to better understand why people confess to crimes they have not committed, Kassin and Wrightman (1985) proposed a conceptual framework that divides false confessions in two main categories, voluntary or coerced. Voluntary false confessions are offered without any external pressure and coerced false confessions are elicited by the police. According to the framework, voluntary false confessions result from one of the following: a morbid desire for notoriety, which is probably due to a personality disorder; inability to distinguish facts from fantasy, which is probably due to distorted thinking such as in schizophrenia; need for punishment, which is probably associated with depressive illness; hope

For example, a desire to protect the real perpetrator is not necessarily always voluntary – the false confessor might be pressured by other people to ‘take the blame’. Kassin (1998) suggested a modification of the model by adding the source of coercion. Whether internal, custodial or non-custodial. This typology categorizes different types of false confessions (voluntary, coerced-compliant and coerced-internalized) and distinguishes between the source of coercion (internal, custodial and non-custodial). Gudjonsson (2006) suggested replacing the word coerced with the word pressure and not to use it when there is no sign of pressure. For example, the confession of a man who walks into a police station and confesses to a high profile murder which he did not commit would be classified as voluntary and internally