False Confessions During Interrogations

Consequently, when interrogators go into interviews believing the suspect is guilty, it brings on intense amounts of stress, putting suspects at a higher risk to crack under pressure. E. This increased pressure brought on by misclassified interrogations cause innocent suspects to feel so much stress they confess to a crime they did not commit. F. Misclassified errors are just one way suspects feel their only option is to give a false confession in order escape the pressure in the interrogation room. II. Other psychological tactics, such as coercion, are used in the interrogation room to attempt to get a confession out of someone interrogators believe are guilty.

People often confess to crimes they did not commit and this can be attributed to a number of reasons. Psychologists believe because people are responsive to reinforcements and thus are subject to principles of conditioning. In addition, people are social beings and vulnerable to the influences from other people. Modern day police interrogations use these biological responses to their advantage to elicit conformity, compliance, obedience, and persuasion in suspects. Furthermore, the use of trickery and deceit is not uncommon, with the widespread use of DNA evidence, many once guilty victims have been exonerated of their crimes and set free.

Thesis statement: Police should wear body cameras because playing body cameras could improve the public’s view of police by showing the human side, help to provide evidence when a person may not be able to, and it protects the officers and public both. Cameras Imagine there is a huge case going on where a police officer is coming under question on if dealt with a potential suspect in the correct way. Now think about the money being used to provide lawyers, a judge, a jury, etc., to handle the high profile case. Now there is two possible outcomes, there was police misconduct and abuse of power, or the police officer did everything correctly and by the book. Either way there needs to be something that can protect the public from police misconduct and also protect law enforcement from dealing with false accusations that can tarnish their reputation.

However, I believe that police officers should wear body cameras because it prevents excessive force and discrimination, allows to harness the technology, and is a tool for evidence gathering. First of all, some police officers think that body cameras could affect police moral and recruitment. However, it prevents excessive force and racial discrimination. When police officers are using body cameras they have on mind the recording, so they will be conscious to behave; as a result, the excessive force and discrimination could decrease. As the author mentions that Researchers “found that officers who wore cameras used force less often…” (3).

The first step of the Reid Technique, a similar coercive technique to the one Inbau devised, was to watch the suspect and determine whether or not he or she is lying during the interrogation based on behavioral analysis; which is severely flawed and does not actually help us determine if someone is lying. The police then determine if the suspect is guilty and continuously interrogate, accuse, and even threaten the suspect for hours until they confess, whether they are guilty or not. On many occasions the people who are coerced into false confessions are have severe mental impairments that prevent them from functioning as a normal person with out the impairments would.

When they say there confession in their own language it can be misinterpreted by lawyers and police to make it say what they want to hear which leaves the victim at a disadvantage. False confessions are miscommunicated by detectives and police because the victim speaks a different language. An example of this happening is with the case of Angel Gonzalez. Angel Gonzalez is a Hispanic man who was convicted of kidnap and rape in 1995. When Angel was arrested for this crime and taken in by police he knew little English.

This was later carried out through twenty-six other states, including the U.S., which created a precedent against the execution of the mentally ill in 1986. Even though the mentally ill cannot be executed, if the person who claimed mental illness is no longer mentally ill he or she can be executed. While the insanity plea proves that some criminals are mentally unstable, it should be used with caution because many convicted criminals abuse it during court cases, imitate being mentally ill during an examination, and are able to avoid the death penalty. Despite that the insanity plea can potentially help someone in defense for a mental illness case, many people can also take advantage of these precedents to alleviate their trials. The public in most insanity plea cases, do not typically agree with the rulings because most criminals use the

Entrapment is used by officers to persuade and lure suspicious civilians to commit a crime that they have not been proven guilty of. This article talks about entrapment and explains positives and negatives of they system. The article focuses on the holes and unclear frame work in the entrapment tactic. Entrapment is a useful tactic in catching suspicious criminals before they commit a crime that could possible hurt someone. This is a good and efficient tactic for officers, it keeps the innocent safe.

DANIEL COLON CJA 301 MODULE 2 CASE TRIDENT UNIVERSITY The Miranda rights have been established to provide suspected criminals their rights upon being arrested. By being read these rights, the criminals know what they are entitled to, such as the right to remain silent and to obtaining an attorney (Prentzas, 2005). However, in recent years many terrorist suspects have not been read these rights and it has come to the point that many people, lawmakers and officials believe that they should not be entitled to the rights that are drawn out in the Miranda warnings. As these terrorist suspects are innocent until proven guilty, are no different than any other criminals, and have the Fifth and Sixth Amendments backing them up, they should be guaranteed the rights given by the Miranda warnings. The Miranda rights are essentially police warnings given to criminal suspects in custody and at times, before arrest, in the United States of America.

They noticed that the criminals would use the “insights” gained in therapy groups as further justifications for their behavior. Rather than providing the criminal offenders with valuable pieces of the puzzle, the Doctors were giving them further rationalizations for their crimes. The criminals were gaining a whole new vocabulary with which to excuse their conduct and manipulate others. The Doctors eventually concluded that the approaches that worked well with non-criminals were inapplicable to this difficult