misclassified, coerced and contaminated

In his paper on false confessions published earlier this year, USF's Dr. Richard Leo discusses why some people are driven to confess to high profile crimes like JonBenets, their underlying manifestations and the three sequential interrogation errors that foster wrongful convictions in the US judicial system--

False Confessions: Causes, Consequences and Implications
by Richard A. Leo, Ph.D., J.D.
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
Phone: (415) 422-6513
E-mail: rleo@usfca.edu


"...Most voluntary false confessions appear to result from an underlying psychological disturbance or psychiatric disorder. As Kassin and Wrightsman point out, individuals volunteer false confessions in the absence of police questioning for a variety of reasons: a desire for notoriety or fame, the need to expiate guilt over imagined or real acts, an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, or a pathological need for acceptance or self-punishment.But voluntary false confessions need not be rooted in psychological maladies. A person may, for example, provide a voluntary false confession out of a desire to aid and protect the real criminal, to provide an alibi for a different crime or norm violation, or to get revenge on another person.

High-profile crimes—such as the Lindbergh kidnapping in the 1930s, the Black Dahlia murder in the 1940s, and the JonBenet Ramsey and Nicole Brown Simpson murders in the 1990s—tend to attract large numbers of voluntary false confessions. Detectives tend to be far more skeptical and less accepting of voluntary false confessions than of police-induced false confessions. Put differently, police more readily recognize and discount voluntary false confessions than those they elicit.