False Confession

A false confession is an admission of guilt for a crime the confessor did not commit. Psychologist Saul Kassin's widely used typology divides them into three kinds: a voluntary false confession, offered with no external pressure; a coerced-compliant confession, given to escape a stressful interrogation or gain a promised benefit while the confessor knows it is untrue; and a coerced-internalized confession, in which sustained pressure leads an innocent, often vulnerable suspect to genuinely doubt their own memory and come to believe they committed the crime. False confessions are a documented driver of wrongful conviction: the Innocence Project reports that of 375 offenders it had exonerated by DNA evidence since 1989, twenty-nine percent had confessed to the crime for which they were later exonerated. The Reid technique, an interrogation method introduced in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s by former police officer John Reid, is the interrogation approach most associated with the risk; researcher Richard Leo has written that psychological coercion is the primary cause of police-induced false confessions.