Now there are a few reasons why a person would falsely confess to a crime that they did not commit. One of these reasons could be that they may have been tortured into confessing to the crime. Secondly, they could be protecting someone else who committed the crime but they don’t want them to go to prison for one reason or another such as they are young and about to attend college as well as have a bright future ahead of them. Another reason could be that the false confession was gotten by the interrogator’s use of coercive psychological interrogation techniques. It is said that these techniques are so powerful that they can induce false confessions from the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, juveniles as well as other vulnerable suspects. Unfortunately, these are not the only people in whom this technique can get a false confession from but a person of high intelligence that is in full possession of their mental faculties can also fall victim to this technique and confess to a crime they did not commit (nbcnews.com. n.d.).
Once an
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n.d.). This must happen before they are interrogated in order to preserve the admissibility of the statement or statements they make in connection to a crime. Therefore, once these rights have been read to a person they have a choice whether to say something or not. Furthermore, a person cannot waive these rights unless they knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily are able to do so (psycolegalassessments.com. n.d.). Therefore, if they do confess of a crime after they were read these rights or warning falsely they can be held accountable for their action because they understood their rights but still made a statement and that statement can be used against them in a court of law in order to convict them of the
When a defendant asserts a mental status defense and supports it with evidence, the defendant waives the Fifth Amendment privilege with respect to evidence from a court ordered mental examination used to rebut the defense.
Miranda Vs Arizona was a United States Supreme Court case in 1966. The court “ruled that a criminal suspect must make a knowing, intelligent, and voluntary decision to waive certain constitutional rights prior to questioning” (Ortmeier, 2005, 285). This ruling meant that suspects must be aware of their right to remain silent and that if they choose to speak to the police the conversation can be used against them in a court of law. If they do decide to speak under police it must not be under false promises
``In criminal law, confession evidence is a prosecutor’s most potent weapon’’ (Kassin, 1997)—“the ‘queen of proofs’ in the law” (Brooks, 2000). Regardless of when in the legal process they occur, statements of confession often provide the most incriminating form of evidence and have been shown to significantly increase the rate of conviction. Legal scholars even argue that a defendant’s confession may be the sole piece of evidence considered during a trial and often guides jurors’ perception of the case (McCormick, 1972). The admission of a false confession can be the deciding point between a suspect’s freedom and their death sentence. To this end, research and analysis of the false confessions-filled Norfolk Four case reveals the drastic and controversial measures that the prosecuting team will take to provoke a confession, be it true or false.
This is derived from the rights Americans have to not be forced to testify against themselves in a criminal case. But, the Fifth Amendment also protects against double jeopardy and gives people charged with a felony the right to a grand jury indictment (Bohm & Haley, 2011). Double jeopardy basically states that if a conviction or acquittal was reached in a criminal case, the person can no longer be tried again for the same offense (Bohm & Haley, 2011). The procedural rights for self-incrimination are also applied to any custodial situations the police conduct. To ensure that statements, or confessions a suspect makes are allowed in court there is a two-prong tests that should be followed. First, is the person considered to be in a custodial situation and two, are the police intending to ask incriminating questions. If yes is the answers to both then the suspect must be read his or her rights. This is known as giving someone his or her Miranda rights derived from the famous case
Even those who should have a clear sense of the an interrogation, fail to see the coercion brought upon the suspect that might lead to a false confession, and once a confession has been made, false or true, detectives or police terminates their investigation that could have found potential evidence to exonerate them. Once a confession is obtained, police tend to ‘‘close’’ cases as solved and refuse to investigate other sources of evidence (Leo and Liu) which is why such a high number of innocent people still remain behind bars. Across samples, police-induced false confessions were evident in between 15 and 25% in cases, making it one of the likely leading causes of wrongful conviction (Leo and Liu), but still juries disregard this evidence! Unfortunately, more cases like Rivers are out there. According to the Washington Post, the National Registry ha logged 1,733 exonerating cases of false confession. In one case, a man by the name of Ricky Jackson spent four decades for a crime he did not commit, only to be exonerated by DNA evidence after 40 years. To emphasize, few states, if any at all, courts provides information to the jury regarding how to assess voluntariness, nor do
Friedman, S. (2014, March 10). You have the right to ... not much: Why are there no 'Miranda rights'
The act of interrogation has been around for thousands of years. From the Punic Wars to the war in Iraq, interrogating criminals, prisoners or military officers in order to receive advantageous information has been regularly used. These interrogation techniques can range from physical pain to emotional distress. Hitting an individual with a whip while they hang from a ceiling or excessively questioning them may seem like an ideal way to get them to reveal something, but in reality it is ineffective and . This is because even the most enduring individual can be made to admit anything under excruciating circumstances. In the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights there is a provision (“no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself” ) which reflects a time-honored common principle that no person is bound to betray him or herself or can be forced to give incriminating evidence. This ideology of self-incrimination has been challenged heavily over the past s...
The speech is broken down to many rights. You have the right to remain silent, so you can stop answering questions at anytime. Anything you say or do can be used against you in the court of law means that anything that you admit or alibi that you use will if wanted to be used in the court. You have the right to a attorney if you can not afford one, one will be appointed.
Depending on what study is read, the incidence of false confession is less than 35 per year, up to 600 per year. That is a significant variance in range, but no matter how it is evaluated or what numbers are calculated, the fact remains that false confessions are a reality. Why would an innocent person confess to a crime that she did not commit? Are personal factors, such as age, education, and mental state, the primary reason for a suspect to confess? Are law enforcement officers and their interrogation techniques to blame for eliciting false confessions? Regardless of the stimuli that lead to false confessions, society and the justice system need to find a solution to prevent the subsequent aftermath.
Garrett, B. L. (n.d.). The Substance of False Confessions. Criminal Justice Collection. Retrieved November 23, 2010, from find.galegroup.com.uproxy.library.dc-uoit.ca/gtx/retrieve.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&qrySerId=Locale%28en%2C%2C%29%3AFQE%3D%28su%2CNone%2C28%29%22Wrongful+Convictions+%28Law%29%22%3AAnd%3ALQE%3D%28RE%2CNone%2C3%29ref%24&sgHitCo
Ofshe, Richard J., and Richard A. Leo. The Social Psychology of Police Interrogation: The Theory and Classification of True and False Confessions (1997). Web. 28 Nov. 2011.
Among various arrests, people who are put in jail or prison due to their confession must make them a proven criminal, right? Unfortunately, not everybody who confesses to a crime is in fact guilty. A false confession is an act of confessing to a crime that the confessor didn’t commit. That creates a conflict involving the individual being accused and the trust towards police interrogation. For instance, after nearly eight years in prison, Nicole Harris sued eight Chicago police detectives, alleging that they coerced her confession (Meiser Para.2) The police detectives incorrectly informed Harris in failing “the polygraph test” indicating that she lied about not committing the murder of her son, Jaquari Dancy (Meiser). She felt that there was
...expert testimony in assessing the reliability of disputed confessions. The reason people make false confessions is typically due to a combination of factors such as psychological vulnerabilities, nature of the custodial confinement and the police interviewing tactics. Standardized psychological tests have been devised in order to assess personality factors such as suggestibility and compliance that render some people more vulnerable than others but these should never bee looked at in isolation. Studies indicate that reported cases are only the ‘tip of the iceberg’. It appears that young people are particularly vulnerable and often make false confessions in order to protect others. It is not only people with learning disability or major mental illness´ that are susceptible to make false confessions; depending on the context, anybody can.
This decision requires that unless a suspect in custody has been informed of his constitutional rights before questioning anything he says may not be introduced in a court of law.
Some people say that this is not a moral thing to do, and the evidence the police obtain from acts of deception should not be allowed to be used in court. But this should not be the case. If a person is not guilty then they would not have anything to confess to in the first place, regardless of what the police do during the interrogation. For example, in the case article, a woman was asked to write down something that she had previously said in the interrogation. After she does this the officer tells her that there is powder on the pen that detects gunpowder from a person’s hand. The officer then asks the women if she was okay with the technician looking at the pen. She said yes and once the technician looked at the pen he lied and told the women that the powder had detected gun residue, even though there was nothing on the pen in the first place. This was done to make it seem like the police had evidence on the women for the crime, even though they did not. She ended up confessing to the crime once she believed that the police could use this “evidence” to incriminate her for the crime. If the police could not have done this deception, they may never have found evidence for the crime. The girl could have just pleaded the fifth and if the police had nothing on her, they would have had to let her go. This is just one example of how police deception is a really effective way of getting evidence on a crime. Even though the officers are lying about having evidence, it is for a greater cause. If the girl had really not done anything wrong, she should not have been afraid when the technician said that the pen tested positive for the residue. She would have just told them that that was impossible because she was not guilty and not involved in the crime what so ever. But some people may say that deception should not be used because it messes with people’s heads. A person may plead guilty