absent of coercion

Briefly covering the sensational false confession in JonBenet's case in 2006, Dr. Christian Messiner and team's research was published in a chapter of criminal profiling expert Richard N. Kocsis's 2009 release of Applied criminal psychology: A guide to forensic behavioral --


FALSE CONFESSIONS
by Christian A. Meissner, Allyson J. Horgan, Justin S. Albrechtsen
University of Texas at El Paso

"...Analysis of the variety of false confessions observed in the real world led Kassin and Wrightsman (1985) to delineate three types of false confessions: voluntary, coerced-compliant,
and coerced-internalized.

First, a voluntary false confession is one in which a person falsely confesses to a crime absent any pressure or coercion from police investigators. Gudjonsson (2003) discusses a number of reasons why someone might provide a voluntary false confession, including the desire to protect someone else, a desire for notoriety or attention, or an inability to distinguish reality from fantasy.

Research indicates that the desire to protect someone else is likely to be the most common motivation behind a voluntary false confession (cf. Sigurdsson & Gudjonsson, 1996). A recent example of a voluntary false confession was that of John Mark Karr who confessed to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey in 2006. Karr had become obsessed with the Ramsey murder and ultimately made statements implicating his involvement in her death. Ultimately, DNA evidence from the Ramsey murder failed to match Karr’s samples andtestimony from relatives was provided to conclude that he was elsewhere when the incident occurred..."