Innocent Adults Are Easy To Convince They Committed a Serious Crime

binarstu (720435) writes "Research recently published [link is to abstract only; full text requires subscription] in Psychological Science quantifies how easy it is to convince innocent, "normal" adults that they committed a crime. The Association for Psychological Science (APS) has posted a nice summary of the research. From the APS summary: "Evidence from some wrongful-conviction cases suggests that suspects can be questioned in ways that lead them to falsely believe in and confess to committing crimes they didn't actually commit. New research provides lab-based evidence for this phenomenon, showing that innocent adult participants can be convinced, over the course of a few hours, that they had perpetrated crimes as serious as assault with a weapon in their teenage years."

Comments

The average human being

[Anonymous Coward]

Is a gullible idiot.

Re:The average human being

[blackbeak]

Confessions should not be admissible as evidence in court unless the jurors are given a full, uncut tape of the interrogation that led up to that confession. Along with that, jurors should be allowed to directly question attorneys and witnesses.

And informed of the jury nullification option.

Re:The average human being

[nbauman]

Those kids really screwed the public over with their lies. We wasted over a million dollars and well over two man-years because they decided to lie and take credit for something they didn't do. I was shocked when I was in NYC in 2002 when they were released. There was no talk of charging for their crimes. They kept the police from pursuing the real rapist which allowed him to hurt other women. They are responsible.

The kids weren't responsible for those lies. They told the truth at first. They were coerced, manipulated and told to lie by the cops, who used methods like the Reid Technique which have been proven to produce false confessions. The cops were responsible for those lies, for wasting over a million dollars and for not convicting the real rapist. And that's what the courts decided when they awarded the kids millions in damages.

You might as well prosecute the defendants in the Stalin purge trials for lying.

Re:Wouldn't work on me

[FirephoxRising]

Doesn't work on everybody, but experiments show that most people will even electrocute people when told it's the right thing to do by the "authorities". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Reid Technique

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. It's called the Reid technique and the police in the US have been deliberately exploiting it for years to obtain false convictions.

They know they are exploiting a psychological weakness. They do not care that innocent people are sent to prison. They simply want convictions.

Re:Here's an interesting follow-up idea

[Carewolf]

What would be interesting would be to see what a polygraph says about their false memories. Can it distinguish between an event that occurred and one that was from a false memory? If not, that would be the final nail in the coffin.

What coffin? Polygraphs are a hoax intended to scare stupid criminals into confessing. It does even work on real memories, why would it work on false ones?

The (in)justice system

[fyngyrz]

And along with that, "plea bargains" should be absolutely forbidden. What they do is provide the prosecution tools to coerce and frighten victims of the system into admitting guilt for things they didn't do, at the same time as they take the determination of the individual's guilt out of the hands of a jury.

Re:The (in)justice system

[Opportunist]

I never quite got why plea bargains are permissible in the first place. Either someone is guilty or he is not. It's one of the few things that are quite black and white, either someone committed a crime or he did not. Where does a plea bargain come in? Let's haggle over whether I did it partly or whether you want to punish me a little bit?

What's that, a court of law or the Turkish bazaar?

Re:The (in)justice system

[Kaenneth]

Plea Bargains save everyone time and money; as long a prosecutorial discretion exists, plea bargains will be possible. The alternative is the prosecutors office being required to pursue every single case. 5-17 year old took a nude picture of herself? Child Porn charges. kill in clear self defense? Murder charges. transpose two digits on your tax return? Tax Fraud charges.

There wouldn't be enough people to serve on the juries for the people that missed jury duty!

Re:The (in)justice system

[SlaveToTheGrind]

"plea bargains" should be absolutely forbidden.

You're assuming infinite resources. As it is, would you prefer a system where (1) your taxes now have to cover a 20-30-fold increase in state and federal courts (and prosecutors) needed to take all cases to trial; (2) on the other side of the bar, an even higher percentage of the population becomes criminal defense lawyers; and (3) you yourself end up on jury duty multiple times a year?

Or, would you rather a world where the prosecutors just pursue the most egregious criminals given the limited resources they have, and put everyone else right back out on the streets with no deterrent whatsoever?

I'm not suggesting the current plea-bargain system is optimal or that incremental changes aren't possible. What I am suggesting that you can't just throw out such a fundamental piece without stepping back and redesigning the entire system.

Re:The (in)justice system

[mrchaotica]

The alternative is the prosecutors office being required to pursue every single case. 5-17 year old took a nude picture of herself? Child Porn charges. kill in clear self defense? Murder charges. transpose two digits on your tax return? Tax Fraud charges. There wouldn't be enough people to serve on the juries for the people that missed jury duty! There wouldn't be enough people to serve on the juries for the people that missed jury duty!

GOOD! Then we might finally get some of these arbitrary, capricious, unconstitutional, bullshit laws off the books!

Re:The (in)justice system

[mrchaotica]

Or, would you rather a world where the prosecutors just pursue the most egregious criminals given the limited resources they have, and put everyone else right back out on the streets with no deterrent whatsoever?

YES, GODDAMNIT!

That's EXACTLY what we want and what you should want -- unless you're a fucking totalitarian sociopathic boot-licker -- because we're living in a goddamn police state that contains 25% of the WORLD's prison population even though we only have 5% of the world's population overall. Damn right we need to only pursue the "egregious criminals," because in every civilized country on the planet, what you call the "egregious criminals" are the only criminals!

Re:The (in)justice system

[sjames]

Even more extreme (but not unknown), you face 40 years but if you plead guilty tomorrow, you'll be home with time served by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, you can't afford a real lawyer and your public defender can't even remember your name or what you were charged with. Naturally, that means bail is right out, so even if you are found not guilty, you'll spend a fair bit more time in the slammer if you plead not-guilty.

So there it is, plead guilty and go home where you might be able to put your life back together or spend another 6 months to 40 years imprisoned and either way, you will lose what little you have.

Re:The (in)justice system

[Headw1nd]

But the thing is plea bargaining is not a fundamental piece, it has only gained prominence in the last 100 years, and was popularized to handle the enormous amount of "crime" that prohibition created. We now recognize that the underlying cause of much of this crime - Prohibition - was bad law, so why are we clinging to plea bargaining? Probably because we are still clinging to prohibition, just in a different fashion.

The (in)justice system is primarily about power.

[fyngyrz]

cops don't care who really did it

Neither do the prosecutors -- or the judges. For them, it's all about notches on the handle of their figurative pistol.

Our justice system attracts some of the worst human beings among us. The very last thing you can expect from it, and from them, is "justice."