False Confessions Often Filled with Details Supplied, Perhaps Unwittingly, by Police
Prosecutors relying on contested confessions often claim that the suspect provided details that only the guilty person would know.
New research by a University of Virginia law professor shows why innocent people who confessed were able to provide detailed accounts of the crime: Police introduced important facts during the interrogations, although it’s not clear whether the contamination was intentional.
Law professor Brandon Garrett examined trial transcripts, recorded confessions and other background materials in his study of 40 people who confessed and were later proven innocent by DNA evidence, the New York Times reports. Twenty-six of the people who falsely confessed were mentally disabled, under 18, or both. He published his study in the Stanford Law Review.
“In the cases studied here, innocent people not only falsely confessed, but they also offered surprisingly rich, detailed, and accurate information,” Garrett wrote. In all but two of the cases, the exonerated suspects confessed to specific details of how the crime occurred, and often the details were information that only the murderer or rapist could have known.
Garrett told the Times that his findings contradict the assumption that someone who falsely confesses will offer a flimsy account of the crime. “Almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable,” he said.
