FALSE CONFESSIONS 

 Why would anybody falsely confess, I am frequently asked? The reasons are varied and complex and I can list them out very logically, but here are a few questions that I can ponder myself, as I tried to understand the reasons on a more personal level.

Brandon L. Garrett, professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law, studies criminal procedure, civil rights, and wrongful convictions. For his book, Convicting the Innocent, he found that 16 percent of the first 250 DNA exonerations, or 40 of the 250 cases,  innocent defendants confessed to crimes they did not commit. He also noted, “that additional DNA exonerees did not deliver confessions in custody, but they made incriminating statements or pleaded guilty to crimes they did not commit.”

 Did I  ever buy something from a salesperson that I later regretted like a car or a vacation timeshare? When I woke up on the next morning, did I regret making that big purchase?  The salesperson sold me on the decision to buy.  If you ever experienced buyer’s remorse, he or she moved you from not buying to buying? How did that happen?

 Thinking back, I know I could have left the car dealership or free resort weekend any time I wanted, whereas the innocent person doesn’t usually feel like they can leave the police station until they satisfy the authorities. I realize that a used-car salesman doesn’t carry the same weight as someone that wears a  badge, a lethal weapon and a set of handcuffs. I can walk away from a sale; however, interrogators are trained to get in your personal space and the door out of the small cramped room may as well be locked.  

I may have gotten a finely-tuned sales pitch or even high-pressure tactics that induced me to buy where the false confessor may be fed lies, deceit and trickery.

You see, the detectives are trying to sell a believable theme of how that innocent person did the crime. In this analogy then, “I can see you tooling down the highway in that baby” is not really all that different from, “What if we told you that we found your fingerprints at the scene.”   

Both the salesperson and the detective are taught to overcome objections.  At some point, the salesperson may stop without making the sale, but some police “interviews”  turn into interrogations and may last for hours and the pressure can be relentless. Fatigue and hopelessness are factors in many false confessions.   

I can now see why someone who buys worthless Florida swampland is not all that much different from why someone would falsely confess to a murder, it boils down to who is the seller, what they are selling and the tactics they use. 

Lastly, Steve Drizin, in his Huff Post: False Confessions: A Review of 2013 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-drizin/false-confessions-2013_b_4529134.html offered up some really dismal examples of justice delayed in false confession cases, but did give credit where credit was due in one example.

“After FBI agents obtain a confession from Patrick Dubois to the murder of his two children in his home at a North Dakota Indian reservation, they continued to investigate and ultimately cleared Dubois, linking Valentino Bagola to the crime through DNA evidence and then later obtaining Bagola’s confession.”

 I would be interested in hearing more stories of how and why detectives kept looking after securing a false confession to find the real culprit.