False confession

A false confession is an admission of guilt for a crime for which the confessor is not responsible. False confessions can be induced through coercion or by the mental disorder or incompetency of the accused. Research demonstrates that false confessions occur on a regular basis in case law, which is one reason why jurisprudence has established a series of rules—called "confession rules"—to detect, and subsequently reject, false confessions. Plea agreements typically require the defendant to stipulate to a set of facts establishing that he/she is guilty of the offense; in the United States federal system, before entering judgment on a guilty plea, the court must determine that there is a factual basis for the plea.

False confessions can be categorized into three general types, as outlined by Saul M. Kassin in an article for Current Directions in Psychological Science:

According to the Innocence Project, approximately 25% of convicted criminals ultimately exonerated had, in fact, confessed to the crime. In Canada, courts of law have recognized as valid confessions that were acquired, even though the interrogators lied by suggesting they had substantial evidence against a given suspect when in fact they did not, something known as the "bluff" technique. The high pressure generated may push innocent individuals to produce a confession.

A 2010 study from CUNY's John Jay College of Criminal Justice used laboratory experiments that test how the bluff technique correlates with confessions gained from innocent parties. Subjects were instructed to complete a task on a computer, then were falsely accused of a transgression such as crashing the computer or collaborating with a colleague to improve their task performance. Bluff evidence, false evidence, and unreliable witnesses were used to test their effect. In the first test, 60% of the subjects confessed to the experimenter to pressing a computer key they had been instructed to avoid when, in fact, they had not; an additional 10% admitted to pressing the key to a study observer. A second group that tested subject reactions to charges of cheating produced nearly identical percentages of false confessions. The authors note, "innocent people who stand accused believe that their innocence will become apparent to others ... which leads them to waive their Miranda right to silence and to an attorney."

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