Potential for False Confession
نویسنده
چکیده
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. Approximately 25 percent of these cases involved false confessions arising from inappropriate police interrogations. Among these false confession cases, persons with mental impairment appear to be disproportionately represented. The Innocence Project's Web site notes, "Truly startling is the number of false confession cases involving the mentally impaired and the mentally ill. Police interrogation in the [false confession] cases reveals a lack of training and a disregard for mental disabilities" (1).
منابع مشابه
Commentary: ethics-related implications and neurobiological correlates of false confessions in juveniles.
Forensic psychiatrists typically have no role in the process of obtaining confessions. They may believe, as do others, that a confession removes any doubt about guilt, but false confessions are not rare. Like the police, forensic psychiatrists can inadvertently elicit or solidify a false confession through the evaluation process by presuming guilt and forgetting that they are ethically obligate...
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