Voluntary false confession: An act of altruism?

Potential for False Confession

Recently, an alarmingly high incidence of wrongful convictions has been documented in the United States, in large part because of "Innocence Projects" that use DNA analyses from crime scenes to exonerate innocent persons. The best-known Innocence Project, administered through the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, has helped to free 138 people who had been wrongfully incarcerated. A...

Evolutionary psychology and false confession.

rankings/about/03human_meth.htm National Opinion Research Center. (1997). A review of the methodology for the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of undergraduate colleges and universities. Retrieved January 15, 2003, from the Washington Monthly Web site: www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/ 2000/norc.html Thompson, N. (2000, September). Playing with numbers: How U.S. News mismeasures higher edu...

The (In)Admissibility of False Confession Expert Testimony

Interrogated with Intellectual Disabilities: The Risks of False Confession.

False confessions happen. At least 245 people have been exonerated from convictions in cases featuring confessions that were simply not true. Confessions offer a narrative that allows law enforcement, and society in general, to neatly resolve cases with apparent clarity and closure. And yet the pressures officers place on suspects to provide that closure weigh disproportionately on the vulnerab...

Admissibility of false-confession testimony: know thy standard.

The reliability of confessions is subject to a variety of factors, some of which give rise to expert testimony. To the degree that prosecutors construe the determination of reliability as an objective standard, they may attempt to bar testimony. Moreover, when the testimony is theoretical rather than clinical, there are additional challenges. Depending on jurisdiction, the admissibility of expe...