{"id":5702,"date":"2016-05-25T14:10:30","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T18:10:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5702"},"modified":"2016-05-25T14:10:30","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T18:10:30","slug":"think-the-truth-protects-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=5702","title":{"rendered":"Think the Truth Protects You?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Texas,

(photo: C. Holmes, CC license)<\/p><\/div>\n

Douglas Starr in the December 9, 2013, \u00a0New Yorker<\/em><\/a>, describes how the most commonly used confrontational interrogation technique<\/a> used in the United States leads to false confessions. The method relies on detectives\u2019 observing non-verbal behavior, looking for (or creating) anxiety, never giving the suspect a chance to voice a denial, minimizing the crime and trying every trick to make it easier for the suspect to admit it, even claiming to have evidence they don\u2019t have, with their right to lie to suspects in many circumstances protected by a 1969 Supreme Court decision<\/a>. The goal is simply to get a confession.<\/p>\n

Psychologists became suspicious about the issue of false confessions several decades ago and began studies on it. And experienced detectives have begun to doubt it, as they\u2019ve seen suspects mold their statements to fit the information the detectives have fed them.<\/p>\n

In Britain, police don\u2019t try for confessions, they go for information<\/a>. They focus on the content of what is said, not nonverbal behavior or anxiety (proved to be not correlated with lying). Instead, they look for inconsistencies: \u201cFor the suspect, lying creates a cognitive load\u2014it takes energy to juggle the details of a fake story.\u201d It\u2019s hard to keep it up. Nor are the police allowed to lie about what evidence they have.<\/p>\n

In the United States, out of 311 people exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing, more than a quarter had given false confessions\u2014perhaps most notoriously, the Central Park Five<\/a>. (Ken and Sarah Burns film on the case<\/a>). Why do they confess? Worn down by the interrogation, an innocent suspect \u201cfabricates a story to satisfy his questioners.\u201d \u00a0This is most likely what led to the false statement made by Amanda Knox<\/a>, which, although she recanted, has been used against her ever since.<\/p>\n

This post originally appeared February 3, 2014.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Douglas Starr in the December 9, 2013, \u00a0New Yorker, describes how the most commonly used confrontational interrogation technique used in the United States leads to false confessions. The method relies on detectives\u2019 observing non-verbal behavior, looking for (or creating) anxiety, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Think the Truth Protects You?","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,54,104],"tags":[517,416],"class_list":["post-5702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-the-morgue","tag-police-procedure","tag-real-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1tY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5703,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5702\/revisions\/5703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}