How to Make False Confessions a Thing of the Past

My brilliant colleagues Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin have an outstanding oped in the Chicago Tribune, explaining how false confessions happen and how to begin ending them. Here is the gist:

On a gut level, there’s an emotional potency to false confession stories that makes for compelling, if disturbing, viewing. Watching an interrogator manipulate someone into giving a confession that turns out to be false is like watching a person get duped into becoming the instrument of his or her own destruction. After seeing such an interrogation unfold, one begins to understand why our constitutional framers were so disturbed by forced self-incrimination that they felt compelled to adopt a constitutional amendment — the Fifth Amendment — to guard against it.

False confession stories also were, historically, relatively novel. Until modern-day DNA technology began proving hundreds of confessions false around the country, few believed that anyone rational would ever falsely confess. We know better now: Hundreds of proven false confession cases have been documented. Indeed, false confessions are the leading cause of wrongful convictions in American homicide cases

Even the ability to glimpse inside the interrogation room is new. Twenty years ago, interrogations were recorded in only two states; today, that number sits at 26. The recording phenomenon is new enough, indeed, that the law has yet to catch up with coercive interrogation tactics that the world has only recently had a chance to see.

You can read the entire piece here.

Laura and Steve are stalwarts of Northwestern's Bluhm Legal Clinic and its Center on Wrongful Convictions. There are now innocence or exoneration projects at many law schools -- mostly housed in clinics -- that have played a tremendous role in changing the way both law and law enforcement approach extracting confessions, especially from juveniles. If the goal of legal scholarship is to advance our understanding of law, the clinic-led innocence movement is one of the legal academy's greatest successes.