A
fascinating story in the current issue of Scientific American Mind details the problem of false confessions. Several of the most common conditions under which false confessions are elicited are discussed, and they could easily apply to the polygraph session.
Here's an overview from the
Scientific American Mind website:
Quote: True Crimes, False Confessions; June 2005; by Saul M. Kassin and Gisli H. Gudjonsson; 8 page(s)
In 1989 a female jogger was beaten senseless, raped and left for dead in New York City's Central Park. Her skull had multiple fractures, her eye socket was crushed, and she lost three quarters of her blood. She survived, but she cannot remember anything about the incident. Within 48 hours of the attack, solely on the basis of confessions obtained by police, five African- and Hispanic-American boys, 14 to 16 years old, were arrested. The crime scene had shown a horrific act but carried no physical traces at all of the defendants. Yet it was easy to understand why detectives, under the glare of a national media spotlight, aggressively interrogated the teenagers, at least some of whom were "wilding" in the park that night.
Four of the confessions were videotaped and later presented at trial. The tapes were compelling, with each of the defendants describing in vivid--though, in many ways, erroneous--detail how the jogger was attacked and what role he had played. One boy reenacted the way he pulled off her running pants. Another said he felt pressured by the others to participate in his "first rape"; he expressed remorse and promised that it would not happen again. After their arrest, the youths recanted these confessions, because they had believed that making a confession would have enabled them to go home. Regardless of the denials, the tapes collectively persuaded police, prosecutors, two trial juries, a city and a nation; the teenagers were convicted and sentenced to prison.
The entire article is a good read (you can either order the article electronically, or buy the issue on newsstands now).
Several of the most fascinating points made are:
1) Trained interrogators are more confident that non-trained interrogators that they can detect lies, but are no better at actually doing so.
2) Interrogators form an opinion about a subject's innocence or guilt, and if they believe the subject is guilty, move on to interrogation and usually are very resistant to accepting any new information that points towards innocence, including anything the subject says.
3) Interrogators make extensive use of dishonesty and misleading tactics to elicit confessions, including pretending that transgressions are understandable and confessions will produce leniency. Interrogations that include outright false evidence, among other factors, tend to produce false confessions.
4) Far more people than one would think can be tricked, cajoled or worn down into making false confessions, even inventing false memories to back them up.
There's lots more. I personally think this information points out the exceptional danger of using polygraphs to extract information: since scientific research would indicate the polygraph is not reliable and therefore produces false evidence that is then used against a subject, it stands to reason that false confessions are common during polygraph tests.
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Scientific American Reports on False Confessions (Read 1605 times)
