Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

404 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
The subjects’ interviews with the police were video-recorded and analysed for
accuracy and details of information.
Tully and Cahill analysed the interview material in terms of the number
of accurate and erroneous recollections given by the subjects. The authors did
not correlate these with suggestibility as measured by the GSS 1, but as all
the necessary raw scores are available in their book, such an analysis is possible.
I have worked out these correlations. Suggestibility correlated negatively
(−0.63, p < 0.001) with the number of items of accurate information provided
by the subjects and positively with the amount of erroneous information given
(0.39, p < 0.01). These results suggest that the more suggestible the subjects
were, the less accurate information they gave, and the more errors they made
when interviewed as witnesses by the police one week later. This indicates that
interrogative suggestibility, as measured by the GSS 1, can to a certain extent
predict the reliability of information given by witnesses when interviewed by
the police.
The police officers who interviewed the subjects in this study had been asked
to elicit ‘accurate’ information from the subjects and they knew that most of the
subjects were learning disabled. In addition, they were aware that their interviews
were being video-recorded. This means that they would probably have
been trying not to lead or mislead their ‘witnesses’, although it is inevitable
that they had to ask some specific questions in order to direct the focus of their
questioning to the type of information they had been requested to obtain by the
researchers.
Unfortunately, Tully and Cahill give no information about the police officers’
interviewing techniques or the extent to which they may have been leading
or misleading in their questioning. This is a major weakness in the study, especially
since the authors had the data from the video-recorded interviews to
study the effects of police interviewing styles on the reliability of the information
obtained.
RESISTERS AND ALLEGED FALSE CONFESSORS
In 1988 my colleague Dr MacKeith and I reviewed the legal, psychological,
and psychiatric aspects of alleged false confessions (Gudjonsson & MacKeith,
1988). We concluded that the two most relevant enduring psychological characteristics
in the assessment of such cases were interrogative suggestibility and
compliance. We further discussed the importance of these two psychological
characteristics with reference to a proven case of false confession (Gudjonsson &
MacKeith, 1990).
Three studies have compared the suggestibility scores of alleged false confessors
and resisters in criminal trials. In 1984 I compared the GSS 1 scores
of 12 alleged false confessors and eight resisters (Gudjonsson, 1984b). The resisters
comprised a group of defendants who had all persistently denied any
involvement in the crime they had been charged with in spite of forensic evidence
against them. The alleged false confessors consisted of defendants who
had retracted confessions they had previously made during police interrogation.