False Confession

A false confession is an admission of guilt for a crime that the confessing individual did not actually commit; although such confessions seem counterintuitive, they can occur voluntarily, for instance to protect a third party, or they can be induced through coercive interrogation techniques. When some degree of coercion is involved, studies have found that people with low intelligence or with mental disorders are more likely to give a false confession, and young people are especially vulnerable, particularly when they are stressed, tired or traumatized, showing a significantly higher rate of false confessions than adults. Hundreds of innocent people have been convicted, imprisoned and in some cases sentenced to death after falsely confessing to crimes they did not commit, only to be exonerated years later, and it was not until several shocking false-confession cases were publicized in the late 1980s, together with the introduction of DNA evidence, that the true extent of these wrongful convictions and the role false confessions played in them began to emerge. While coerced confessions have long been regarded as too unreliable to support a valid conviction, researchers note that more sophisticated psychological interrogation methods, not only crude coercion, can also produce a false confession.