Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

The Psychology of False Confession: Case Examples 229
one of the officers had promised during the car journey from the Magistrates’
Court that if he confessed to the murder he would be allowed to go home and
receive medical help; if he did not confess he would go to prison. Mr Z said he
had believed the police officer and decided to confess to the murders to avoid
going to prison. The officer allegedly further suggested that it would be less
embarrassing if he did not confess at the police station in front of his solicitor
and appropriate adult. Mr Z agreed. He was interviewed with his solicitor,
a social worker and the previous appropriate adult watching the interview
through a video-link.
What is important is that taped-recorded interviews themselves did not fully
reveal the amount of pressure that Mr Z was under to confess to the murders.
On the face of it he appeared to have been interviewed carefully and compassionately.
The questions asked were often quite leading, but in spite of this
Mr Z did not agree with nearly all of the suggestions offered to him. He was
not agreeing with everything the officer was suggesting to him, and persistently
denied some of the sexual aspects of the crime put to him (e.g. that he
had had an erection and ejaculated into the girl’s vagina), whilst agreeing with
other matters (e.g. he eventually accepted the officer’s suggestion that he had
put his finger into the girl’s vagina). In spite of confessing to the murders and
rape, Mr Z’s mind was not completely overborne by the detention and questioning.
This suggests that when a suspect makes denials after confessing to
a serious crime this should not be used as an indicator that the confession is
necessarily true.
A detailed psychological testing revealed a significant intellectual impairment
(i.e. a Full Scale IQ score of 64), illiteracy and abnormal acquiescence,
but a normal degree of suggestibility. Mr Z’s older brother, who accompanied
him for the assessment, rated his brother’s compliance as 16 on the GCS, which
falls outside normal limits. Mr Z had obtained a score of 14 on the GCS. The
results suggested that Mr Z was a man of mild learning disability, who was
both acquiescent and compliant, but not particularly suggestible.
In our published article on the case (Gudjonsson & MacKeith, 1994) we
explain in detail Mr Z’s false confession within my Cognitive–Behavioural
Model of confessions (see Chapter 5 for a description of the model). The salient
components of Mr Z’s false confession were his enduring psychological vulnerabilities
(i.e. mild learning disability and high compliance), an abnormal
mental state (i.e. severe emotional distress over being accused of the murders,
a bereavement reaction to the death of his friends, extreme fear at the
prospect of going to prison), complete trust and faith in the police and inducement
made by police. The confession was made for an immediate instrumental
gain: to terminate the interviews, to avoid going to prison, and to be
allowed to go home. Mr Z’s mild learning disability was an important component
in that it impaired his ability to critically evaluate the consequences
of his confession and made him an easy target for psychological manipulation
by the police. The police had discovered that his greatest fear was of going
to prison. They played on this vulnerability in order to get a confession
from him by manipulating Mr Z’s perceptions of likely consequences of his denials
(i.e. going to prison) and admissions (going home and receiving medical