On the Psychology of ConfessionsDoes Innocence Put Innocents at Risk?Saul M. KassinWilliams CollegeThe Central Park jogger case and other recent exonera-tions highlight the problem of wrongful convictions, 15% to25% of which have contained confessions in evidence.Recent research suggests that actual innocence does notprotect people across a sequence of pivotal decisions: (a)In preinterrogation interviews, investigators commit false-positive errors, presuming innocent suspects guilty; (b)naively believing in the transparency of their innocence,innocent suspects waive their rights; (c) despite or becauseof their denials, innocent suspects elicit highly confronta-tional interrogations; (d) certain commonly used tech-niques lead suspects to confess to crimes they did notcommit; and (e) police and others cannot distinguish be-tween uncorroborated true and false confessions. It ap-pears that innocence puts innocents at risk, that consider-ation should be given to reforming current practices, andthat a policy of videotaping interrogations is a necessarymeans of protection.In 1989, a female jogger was beaten senseless, raped,and left for dead in New York City’s Central Park. Herskull had multiple fractures, her eye socket wascrushed, and she lost three quarters of her blood. Shemanaged to survive, but she was and still is completelyamnesic regarding the incident (Meili, 2003). Soon there-after, on the basis of police-induced confessions takenwithin 48 hours, five African and Hispanic American boys,14 to 16 years old, were convicted of the attack andsentenced to prison. The crime scene betrayed a bloody,horrific act for which there were no physical traces of thedefendants. Yet it was easy to understand why detectivesaggressively interrogated the boys, at least some of whomwere “wilding” in the park that night. It was also easy tounderstand why the boys were prosecuted and convicted.Four of the confessions were videotaped and presented attrial. The tapes were compelling, as every one of thedefendants described in vivid—though often erroneous—detail how the jogger was attacked, when, where, and bywhom, and the role that he played. One boy stood up andreenacted the way he allegedly pulled off the jogger’srunning pants. A second said he felt pressured by peers totake part in his “first rape,” expressing remorse and prom-ising that it would not happen again. Together, the tapedconfessions persuaded police, prosecutors, two trial juries,a city, and a nation (for details, see Sullivan, 1992).Thirteen years later, Matias Reyes, in prison for threerapes and a murder committed subsequent to the joggerattack, stepped forward with a voluntary confession. Heclaimed that he was the Central Park jogger rapist and thathe had acted alone. Reinvestigating the case, the Manhattandistrict attorney’s office questioned Reyes and discoveredthat he had accurate, privileged, and independently corrob-orated knowledge of the crime and crime scene. DNAtesting further revealed that the semen samples originallyrecovered from the victim’s body and socks—which hadconclusively excluded the boys as donors— belonged toReyes (prosecutors had argued that just because police didnot capture all the perpetrators in the alleged gang rape didnot mean they did not get some of them). In December2002, the defendants’ convictions were vacated. The Cen-tral Park jogger case now stands as a shocking tale of fivefalse confessions resulting from a single investigation(Kassin, 2002; New York v. Wise et al., 2002; Saulny,2002).Despite its historic symbolic value and notoriety, thejogger case is not unique. Notwithstanding debates anddisputes over prevalence numbers (e.g., Bedau & Radelet,1987; Cassell, 1999; Leo & Ofshe, 2001; Markman &Cassell, 1988), the incidence of false confessions is un-known. Still, there are a disturbing number of known casesin which defendants confess and retract the confessions butare convicted at trial and sometimes sentenced to death—only later to be exonerated (Drizin & Leo, 2004; Gross,Jacoby, Matheson, Montgomery, & Patel, 2004; Gudjon-sson, 1992, 2003; Kassin, 1997; Kassin & Wrightsman,1985; Leo & Ofshe, 1998; Scheck, Neufeld, & Dwyer,2000). As the number of exonerations accumulates, re-vealing the mere tip of an iceberg in miscarriages of jus-tice (Gross et al., 2004), the Innocence Project (www.innocenceproject.org) and other researchers have come torealize the valuable role that psychological science can playin the study and prevention of wrongful convictions. Firstand foremost, it is clear that eyewitness misidentifications,found in nearly three quarters of these cases, are the mostcommon source of error and that eyewitness psychologistshave had an enormous impact identifying the problems andproposing reforms to minimize error (see Loftus, 1979;Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Saul M.Kassin, Department of Psychology, Bronfman Science Center, WilliamsCollege, Williamstown, MA 01267. E-mail: [email protected] 2005●American PsychologistCopyright 2005 by the American Psychological Association 0003-066X/05/$12.00Vol. 60, No. 3, 215–228 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.60.3.215Wells et al., 2000). Although other problems involve lim-itations and flaws in various forensic sciences (see Faig-man, Kaye, Saks, & Sanders, 2002), the focus of this articleis on a second psychologically based problem that hasreared its ugly head: that 15% to 25% of DNA-exoneratedinnocent defendants had confessed prior to their trials (seewww.innocenceproject.org).The problem of false confessions is complex andmultifaceted, and it indicates that there may be holes in thevarious “safety nets” built into the criminal justice system.This article is designed with three objectives in mind. Inlight of the high-profile wrongful convictions, many dis-covered via newly available DNA tests, a wealth of newempirical research, post-9/11 interest in military and ter-rorist interrogations, and developments in law on the ad-missibility of scientific and psychological forensic testi-mony, the first objective is to update an earlier review inthis journal on the psychology of confession evidence(Kassin, 1997). Inspired by the tragic tales from prison toldin Scheck, Neufeld, and Dwyer’s (2000) Actual Innocence,the second objective is to isolate and amplify a surprisingsignal that has emerged in several recent empirical studies:that innocence may put innocent people at risk during
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