How to Confess an Innocent
Criminal cases abound in cases where an innocent man confesses to a crime he never committed. Worse, scientists are discovering that it is possible to confess just about anything to anyone without any physical threat.
It’s a rainy day. You are sitting in a rather uncomfortable chair, facing a professionally dressed woman, in what looks like an office. She has just accused you of having committed a crime and claims that you assaulted someone with a weapon and that you were caught and then arrested by the police.
Where is the True?
The woman claims that it happened in your city, that you were there that day with your best friend, and that it’s been four years now. Then she asks you to tell her everything you can remember about this event, in its entirety, including the mundane details. The only problem is that you don’t remember anything at all — which is understandable since it never actually happened. But what do you think this woman would need to convince you otherwise? Probably much less than you think.
Since this could lead to you being charged if you were in a police interrogation, this is problematic. And it’s not hard to imagine the multiple situations where we could make false confessions. Contexts of torture, for example, or threats against loved ones, which can lead a suspect to say anything to get out of an awful situation.
But not only. Think of people intoxicated (alcohol, drugs) or sleep-deprived, unable to distinguish reality from the imaginary because of impaired mental capacities. And even people with reduced intelligence, or the mentally handicapped, easily influenced and docile to the interrogators’ requests — ready to tell them whatever they want to hear. All this comes to mind when we talk about false confessions, but it is far from giving us a complete vision.
A mysterious murder
To understand the subtlety of cases where false confessions are produced, examining real situations is very useful. As on this morning in September 1994, when the police are called to the home of the young Michelle Murphy, 17 years old. There she finds the lifeless body of her three-and-a-half-month-old son, Travis, slaughtered and bathed in his blood. Stabbed to death.
Later that day, Michelle confesses. After hours of questioning, she says she fought with another woman, a tussle in which she grabbed a knife and accidentally stabbed her son. The young mother will explain, during her trial, that she made these confessions only because the interrogator insisted that she had killed her son, and that he had promised her that she could leave the locals to find his daughter unharmed, on the sole condition of recognizing everything.
Despite her attempts to reverse her confession, Michelle was convicted of premeditated murder by a jury and sentenced to life imprisonment. Her daughter was put up for adoption. The matter would have ended there if Susan, one of Michelle’s teachers, had not been convinced of his innocence. It was she who, by dint of recourse and after 15 years of research, finally convinced two lawyers to reopen the file.
The lawyers then discovered that the blood found at the crime scene, a key element of the investigation, was of a blood group incompatible with that of Michelle. Following this case, the Innocence Project, an organization to combat miscarriages of justice, filed a request in 2014 to have the DNA of blood taken at the crime scene analyzed. This turned out to be that of an unknown man, not that of Michelle. After spending almost 20 years in prison, she was finally declared innocent of the charges against her, and she found her daughter.
The pitfalls of education
This case highlights several crucial aspects of how false confessions are often obtained and processed by the justice system. First, it clearly demonstrates their existence and the fact that they can lead to the incarceration of innocent suspects like Michelle. Such situations may seem exceptional, but decades of research suggest that false confessions are more common than one would think at first glance, in all countries and all justice systems. Innocent people can be sentenced to spend their lives in prison for having confessed a crime they never committed. Arresting the wrong person is not only cruel to the innocent but leaves the field open to the culprit who can repeat his crimes.
This case also shows that false confessions can be obtained from the mouths of many people, not just those whose vulnerability is obvious. At the age of 17, Michelle was relatively young and had to face major stress related to the death of her child. But she was a healthy young woman and, to our knowledge, she did not suffer from any mental illness or any lack of intelligence. She had not used any toxic substances and, although the false promise to let her see her child was undoubted pressure, she was not tortured. However, she was led by common police practices, in a relatively short period of time, to confess to a particularly horrific crime.
Michelle’s case also supports the adage that hell is paved with good intentions. The police probably thought they were holding the real culprit and wanted a quick confession to finish the case. The forensic team was almost certainly aware of his confession and probably only had to confirm what already looked like a resolved case. The jury took note of these indications and delivered the expected verdict, all obviously focusing on the confessions.
Everyone was only doing what they thought was best at the time. Each decision, however, was based only on the mistaken assumption of Michelle’s guilt, which led to a cascade of errors, and, ultimately, her unjust imprisonment. This case ultimately reveals how tenacious our feelings of guilt can be. Even after his acquittal, the prosecutor persisted in believing Michelle guilty. Despite an overwhelming body of evidence that made her innocent, he was unable to change his judgment.
The tunnel vision
Such a phenomenon is qualified by psychologist tunnel vision. This term indicates a general tendency, once our opinion has been established, to give too much importance to all that confirms it. In the case we are describing here, those convicted of Michelle’s guilt gave too much importance to her confession, and not enough to the absence of DNA traces. This is one of the main reasons why prosecutors and victims find it extremely difficult to change their beliefs when a suspect they believe guilty is finally found innocent. Confessions are very strong evidence, whatever their truth value. They leave a lasting imprint that can trick our best analytical skills.
From there, what would you think if I told you that some people not only confess to crimes they did not commit, but feel that they have committed them?
“Internalized” false confessions
It is this question that I explore in my research. Rather than being interested in all the occasions when we forget real facts, I focus on the opposite phenomenon: situations where we remember things that did not happen. These are called “false memories,” and these can help us understand a particularly twisted category of false confessions: internalized false confessions. namely, those delivered by an individual who actually believes he has committed a crime when this is not the case.
Internalized false confessions are the product of completely normal memory mechanisms, the same ones that make our memory malleable. Like plasticine, our memories can be formed and transformed, distorted, and reformed. They are constantly changing for all kinds of reasons. You may have told a story countless times, so much so that over the course of these repeated narrations, that story has been improved by incorporating embellished versions of our original memories — which we only notice the day that another person presents, at that time, signals it to us. Or, we integrate other people’s memories into our memory, appropriating the reminiscence of events that we have never experienced for ourselves. We then speak about “confusion of sources”, a phenomenon that occurs when we forget the original information. As our memory tends to forget its sources, memories take on new ones by simple confusion, accident, or reconnection. It’s like when you forget the author of a joke that you really liked. By mistake, you believe this quote is from another author, a friend — and even, in some cases, yourself.
It is, therefore, all of these “normal” memory errors that can lead to internalized false confessions; in laboratory environments, researchers have been able to show that we may be led to believe all kinds of things that never happened.
Handling experts
Considering all that has just been said, let us return to our initial question: what does the lady in professional attire need to push you to make false internalized confessions? since this scenario is exactly the situation you would find yourself in if you had participated in the research of Jula Show,which consisted of implementing false memories. Her success rate for implanting false detailed memories of non-existent (but indeed remembered) crimes is 70%. The majority of the remaining 30% also deliver false confessions made up of general memories, but they do not meet the demanding criteria to be perfectly internalized false confessions.
Most of the participants in this research are convinced that they stole, attacked someone, or committed an assault with an armed force. And to convince them, she only needs three short interviews spread over three weeks. she just talked to them using techniques known to encourage false memories. It is disconcerting with ease.
One of the main techniques for implanting false memories is guided imagery — you ask the participant to close their eyes and visualize how the event could have taken place. This exercise in imagination can easily lead to mechanisms called attribution error: the individual believes that what he imagines is a real memory and not a false memory. It goes from the question: “How can such a crime be committed?” To: “How could I have committed it?” And, finally, to: “How did I commit it?”
To imagine is to remember
her discoveries are almost the same as other research with the same message: most people may be led to believe they remember doing things that never happened. And these memories are usually multisensory. The test subjects feel, see, and perceive their environment. Everything happens as if these memories become part of their intimate reality, at least until it was revealed to them that they participated in an experience and that these memories are completely invented.
False memories look like real ones. In two of Shaw studies, outside observers who watched videos of participants telling their false memories were unable to differentiate them from true memories. This underlines the need for prevention efforts because once false memories exist, we can no longer disentangle them from the real ones.
And finally, even if certain personality characteristics such as docility, suggestibility and the power of imagination were associated with increased risks of false confessions, in the samples of volunteers that I had to treat, no personality trait does not seem to protect an individual from the formation of internalized false memories. Most people can confess to crimes they never committed. Including me, and maybe you too.
