Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

The Psychology of False Confession: Case Examples 243
There appear to be different critical factors operating in several of the
cases reviewed. Specific vulnerabilities, such as low intelligence, mental illness,
proneness to anxiety, high suggestibility, strong tendency to comply with people
in authority, eagerness to please, may all contribute in varying degrees to the
way the accused copes with his or her predicament. However, the cases discussed
clearly illustrate that false confessions are not confined to the learning
disabled or the mentally ill. The view that apparently normal individuals
would never seriously incriminate themselves when interrogated by the police
is wrong and this should be recognized by the judiciary.
It is clear from the cases discussed that innocent suspects do sometimes give
information to the police that, on the face of it, seems to have originated from
the accused, whereas the information was probably unwittingly communicated
to them by the police in the first place. Such apparently ‘guilty knowledge’,
which often makes the confession look credible, is then used to substantiate
the validity of the confession given. The lesson to be learned is that unless the
information obtained was unknown to the police, or it actually results in evidence
to corroborate it (e.g. the discovery of a body or murder weapon), then
great caution should be exercised in the inferences that can be drawn from it
about the accused’s guilt. Police officers will undoubtedly find it difficult to believe
that they could inadvertently communicate salient information to suspects
in this way. They may gain some comfort from the fact that the possibility of unconscious
transmission of evidence, even by qualified psychologists, alerted the
British Society of Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis to recommend that psychologists
called in by the police to hypnotize witnesses should be kept ignorant
of all details of the crime in order not to transmit such knowledge unwittingly
during hypnotic interrogation.