Saul Kassin
Appearances
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
For a city that was already on edge, this was the breaking point. The papers were just filled with headlines that, you know, we've got to solve this. I understand fully that when this happened and when it was reported and the heinousness of the crime, the city was in a state of outrage. and demanding that we find who did this. Within 72 hours, NYPD solved the case.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
There were a number of kids running through the park that night, wreaking havoc on some bystanders, and police immediately started rounding people up, going into their neighborhoods, bringing others in. They interrogated all sorts of kids and ultimately found five kids who confessed, 14, 15, 16 years old.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
I loved Mrs. Avery. I had a crush, to be honest, on Mrs. Avery. I wanted to impress Mrs. Avery. And so I spent a lot of time on this book report. I just remember being excited to get the grade back. I thought it was a really good paper. I'd spent a lot of time on it. And when she called me up, she would call people and they'd come up and get their paper. This was toward the end of the school day.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
The way New York City worked their confessions in those days, starting in the 1970s, 1980s, was the detectives interrogated off-camera. They brought their suspect to a point where they were ready to confess, and then they delivered them to an assistant district attorney who stepped in with a camera on and took the confession.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
They described the jogger as she was running. They described her location. They described dragging her down through the grass. There were clear tread marks. And they gave a description of a woman who had been beaten in the head with a hard object, clothes pulled off, and left for dead.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Did you try to hide her so she wouldn't get found? You cannot look past those statements on video. They got some of the facts right. They're basically telling the same story. There are some annoying disparities and contradictions between them, but they get enough facts right.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
He said he was involved in the rape. He was present and he played a minimal role. I believe he said he had held her legs while someone else pulled her pants down.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
When you hear a statement like that, he not only describes what happened, but then describes his own expression of remorse. I'm sorry I did this, he basically said. This is my first rape. It's going to be my last.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Here's a confession that's not just communicating an admission of guilt and some narrative details that are accurate in relation to the crime facts, but now he's reflecting on his own motivation and remorse and acceptance of responsibility. How does a judge and a jury look past that statement?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And when you have four of them, even though they don't align with each other perfectly, how can a jury look past those four statements
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And I just remember her glaring at me in such a way that I looked at the grade and there was, with a circle around it, a big red F. I said, I don't understand. And she says, well, you plagiarized it.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And so they sent me two big Xerox-type boxes. And I spent the next couple of weeks probably doing terrible teaching at Williams because I was completely distracted by this case. And when I was done, I was horrified. There was no evidence of their guilt. The confessions were contradictory.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Yes. And I think that's what everyone was thinking. I didn't know this in 1989, but I learned in 2002. that detectives showed Corey Wise pictures of the victim. So he was able to describe her. He was taken to the crime scene. He gave a vivid description of the crime scene. They all did. Turns out two of them were taken to the crime scene. Now, that's contaminating their memories.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Now, this is not their statement. You've motivated and incentivized them because they think it's in their best interest to cooperate, and you've spoon-fed them information to provide a compelling, accurate confession. But you're right. Nobody expected a full alignment of all the facts.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And that's why I think the judges and juries, they were convicted at two different trials, were able to look past those discrepancies.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
There were several semen samples taken, sent to the FBI lab. That summer, the results came back. First, all of those samples taken traced back to one person. They all match each other. That person was not one of those five confessors. The judge knew it. The juries knew it. We have two juries in which they are told that they confessed on the one hand, but they're excluded by the DNA on the other.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And as one of the jurors said in an interview years later, they had a confession, and if there's a confession, what else do you need to know?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
In December of 2002, their convictions were overturned. The DA's office filed a motion to overturn the convictions, and the judge agreed with that motion, and so their convictions were overturned.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Well, we know what the kids say happened. The kids were in the interrogation rooms for a range of 14 to 30 hours. The kids say they were threatened, that promises were made. They believed that by minimizing their involvement, each one I mentioned, nobody confessed to the rape. Each one said I played a subsidiary minor role. Each one, upon confession, was arrested and each one was surprised.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
They thought they were going home. It means they were led to believe that we think the role you played is no big deal, so cooperate with us and everything will be okay. And hence, they were surprised that they were put under arrest. I don't know what happened. I know that they claimed they felt physically threatened. They claimed threats and promises were made. Detectives deny it.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
I didn't want to break out into tears in front of my classmates and in front of her, so I held it together. I got home, flicked open the door, there was my mother, and I burst out crying. Mrs. Avery accused me of cheating. She didn't ask me if I plagiarized. She told me that I did.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
I have no idea what happened behind the scenes, but I do know that their confessions were false and that each one minimized their role in a way that would make some sense. That's not unique to the Jogger case. You see it all over the place.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Yes. It was difficult to me. I didn't know what I was seeing the first time I saw it. There was a case in the 1970s in which a 17-year-old boy named Peter Riley in Connecticut came home and found his mother in a pool of blood having been beaten to death. and stabbed. And Riley's confession was fascinating because, first of all, he adamantly denied having anything to do with this.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
He had no history, no background, no conflict with his mother. He wasn't a violent person. But he confessed. And why did he confess? Because after hours and hours and hours of interrogation, the detective offered him a polygraph exam, a lie detector test. Peter, you say you didn't do this. We think otherwise. We have evidence. Are you willing to take a lie detector test?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Trusting in the lie detector test and trusting in his own innocence, Peter said, yes, I would. At which point they administered a test and lied about the results. They said, Peter, you failed the test. And he said, that's not possible. And they said, well, it is possible. You failed the test. It shows deception.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And sometimes the test tells us things about you or a person that even they don't know about themselves. So it looks like you killed your mother, even if you don't remember it. Now, Peter's in this quandary.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
On the one hand, they're claiming to have unimpeachable medical, sometimes the polygraph is referred to as medical evidence, sometimes it's referred to as scientific evidence, but it's objective. And it can tell us things about you and your behavior that even you don't recall. So Peter, on the one hand, has this unimpeachable evidence presented to him. Now he's 17.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And I just will never forget the helplessness that I felt at having been accused of something I didn't do and not really knowing how to respond in a way to defend myself.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And God knows what his mental and emotional state is at this time. His mother is his only surviving relative. And he grows up trusting police. And like most Americans, doesn't know that they're allowed to lie about evidence. So Peter is trying to reconcile, on the one hand, they say that I failed the lie detector test. And on the other hand, I don't remember it that way.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And they presented him with some options. You know, sometimes that happens. People block unpleasant memories or people lose consciousness. And they gave him a way to bridge this gap between their unimpeachable evidence and his lack of memory. And so they convinced him that he must have done it. He transitions from this state of denial to, well, it looks like I did it.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
When you hear these cases, often the first utterances are things like, I must have done it. It looks like I did it. It appears that I did it. They're not saying, oh yeah, now I remember. They're concluding, they're inferring that they must have done it because after all, you have this evidence.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And then he transitions from that tentative, hypothetical language of inference into a full-blown, oh my God, I killed my mother. I pulled out a knife and I stabbed her. And that was his confession. He was immediately arrested and he was convicted.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And a year and a half or so later, a new DA came into the office, looked through the case files, realized that Riley was elsewhere at the time of death, it couldn't have been him, and vacated his conviction and he was never retried again. That's the first time I'd seen, and I didn't know how to define it at the time, what turned out to be what we called internalization.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
I couldn't tell how momentary it was, how long it lasted, but it was clear that at some point, for some period of time, he came to believe in his own guilt.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
In this case, they did nothing. They did not pursue these alternative suspects. There was good reason to believe that they had other suspects, not saying they were the perpetrators, but certainly people worthy of investigation. And that did not happen.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
I've gotten to know Peter and a number of other exonerees who are frustrated that police didn't go back and reinvestigate the case and find out who killed their mother, their father, or both.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Not only has the not killer been brought to justice, but here's what the statistics show. In the Innocence Project cases where DNA excludes the wrongfully convicted, and sometimes that DNA hits on a perpetrator. Many of those cases, that perpetrator went on to commit one or more multiple violent offenses, including homicides and sexual assaults.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
When you get a confession from an innocent person and close that case, you're not doing a whole lot of good for public safety.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Bottom line was the average accuracy rate was 54%. Truth and lie detection studies give us on average, when you meta-analyze all of the studies, they give us an average accuracy rate of 54%. It's exactly what we found.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
We found that our student observers were more accurate than our police observers, in part because the police observers kept over-believing the false confessions. And we found that the police observers were a whole lot more confident than our student observers. They were not accurate and they were confident, not a good combination. Wrongful convictions archives are filled with those mistakes.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
He was a police officer in Iceland. eventually left the force and got a degree in clinical psychology. He had taken, much to his dismay, a false confession in a case and became interested in suggestibility effects.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And then he would say, I'm going to ask you a series of questions. And he would ask questions, many of which were leading and suggestive of information that was not in the story. And he measured how many of those questions do people then insert into their memory?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
He would say, nope, that's not right. You got to do this again. Eventually, he became interested in both types of suggestibility. Can we cause people to change their memory by presenting misinformation embedded in questions? And then can we cause people to change their memory by giving them negative feedback?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And he found that people obeyed that order at high levels. This arbitrary order from a stranger when they were wearing a uniform at high levels. And it just goes to show something about blind obedience.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Yes, it is. The opening predicate of a police interrogation is to isolate the subject, bring them in and put them in a room alone in our station and no friends, no family members, no phones, preferably in a soundproof room where they can't hear voices and phones out there so that they're feeling isolated and alone.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
My God, social psychologists, health psychologists know that people need people and that that need to belong and that need to affiliate especially is true under stress. And that when people have social support present, they're able to tolerate more pain. Physiologically, they show levels of relaxation while under stress. It's important for people to have that.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And yet, when you look at what happens in the interrogation room, the first thing is you are isolated and you are away from the people you know. The other thing they don't get, in an interrogation, police are characterizing the crime. They're characterizing the evidence. They may be lying about the evidence. If you're alone in the room, you have no external checks on that reality.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
You can't turn to someone else and say, is that true? Do you know if that's true? And so you're not getting additional information. So you're lacking both the support that comes with people and the additional information that comes with people.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
The average interrogation lasts about an hour or two. Pretty much captures 90-some percent of interrogations. When you look at the archives of wrongful convictions where time records are kept, and I emphasize that because often time records are not kept. The length of interrogation is six hours, eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, an average of 16 hours, sometimes up to 24 and more.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
False confessions happen over time. Partly that is a function of sleep deprivation and deprivation of other needs states. But there are no time limits set on an interrogation in the United States. And what happens over time is a person becomes deprived of food, sleep, sometimes bathroom breaks.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Certainly they are deprived of social support, as we talked about earlier, which is in some ways as fundamental a need as anything else. And so what you find is that one proxy for a false confession, if you show me a confession that lasted, the interrogation that lasted 16 hours, right away I say that person was at some level of risk for that alone.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Then the experimenter turns and says, turns to the subject. Before you start typing, I should warn you. There's a problem with the hardware in this computer. Whatever you do, don't hit the alt key. If you hit the alt key, we may lose all our data. The computer will crash. So whatever you do, don't hit the alt key. Subject says, I get it.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
About a minute or two in, the experimenter erupts and says, oh my God, what just happened? looks across the table at the subject and says, did you hit the Alt key? Subject says, no, I never touched it.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
a couple of cases came back that elicited no variability. As far as everybody was concerned, everybody was guilty. Fortunately, we also asked subjects in those studies to explain their verdict. What was the basis for your verdict? And in the cases that I recall, everybody cited a confession.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
So what happened was that in the presence of false evidence, when the Confederates said, I saw him or her hit that key, we got a substantial increase in the number of people who then falsely confessed and agreed to sign the paper to hitting the alt key. Some sub-number of them also then internalized the belief.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Was she here the whole time? Ninety-some percent of the time they said, yeah, she was here the whole time. I would have seen her, heard her go out. You know, we were chatting away.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Are you sure she was here the whole time? And the subject now drops from being absolutely certain that this other person never left the room to I'm not so sure anymore. Now more than 50% of them cannot vouch for her presence in the room with them, even though she was there breathing at the other side of this wall.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
They could no longer vouch for her presence because they heard that she had confessed. And they didn't even get to see or read a compelling confession. They were simply given a secondhand account of the fact that she confessed. And that's what we've seen in actual cases. Once a false confession is out of the bag, it corrupts everything around it. It corrupts eyewitnesses. It corrupts alibis.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
It corrupts informants. It corrupts, believe it or not, forensic examiners, forensic science examiners. When you look at wrongful convictions in the Innocence Project involving confessions, almost 80% of them contained one or more other errors in evidence, and almost invariably those other errors came after the confession.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
He worked for AutoZone. He'd been there for a year. He was aspiring to become a manager. And one of the tasks he had was he would take money from the store, and when the bank truck came, he would deliver the money to the truck. And one day, $820 showed up missing. And the AutoZone had a loss prevention manager.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Loss prevention managers are folks in charge of a retail outfit, whether it's Macy's or Walmart or AutoZone. And they're empowered to try and recover the loss from theft of money and merchandise. So in the middle of his workday, he was called in by the loss prevention manager and interrogated. He said, you know what, $820 is missing. It looks like you did it. It looks like you took the money.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And Robles looked at the choices and he said, well, I don't really want to involve police. What do I have to do? And he wrote a confession dictated to him in which he said, I took the $820. We had family debts to clear. I'm sorry. And he signs his name. And then he signs a promissory note in which he's agreeing to have that money deducted from his paychecks to compensate AutoZone.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
He signs it, the money is deducted, and he is promptly terminated. A couple of weeks later, it turns out that the $820 was not lost. It was a clerical error, and no money was stolen. But it was too late. He had already been terminated. His reputation had been tarnished. When Robles was asked, why did you agree to sign the confession and give the money?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
He said, quite simply, it was worth $820 to keep my job. He figured it was going to keep a job. And so he signed the confession.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Well, for starters, those sessions should be fully recorded. so that you and I, a prosecutor and a judge and a jury, can watch it later and understand for ourselves how that came about. Two, it's not a question of the pressure that is felt. Some of the most benign interrogators, investigative interviewers in Europe, for example, they apply pressure to suspects. But here's the important part.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
My first response was, well, that's interesting. It looks like we'll have to remove confessions from evidence in order to use cases.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
They ask open-ended questions. They don't communicate information about the crime. You know, when I get a confession to look at, I'd like to know that all of the facts in that confession originated with the confessor. And then I can evaluate, were those facts accurate? Were those facts not accurate? These are evidence-based techniques. And that's the goal right now.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
It became a nuisance variable. So right away, we tossed out cases involving confessions because confessions were a nuisance.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
I got the casebook, I did all the reading, and there was a footnote in that casebook in which they referenced an interrogation manual, the most popular interrogation manual. So I thought, wow, how interesting to see what they're doing to interrogate. And so I went to the library and pulled out that edition of that manual, and I read the book.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Well, for starters, the opening salvo of an interrogation was to bring in a suspect and declare an accusation of guilt.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
We know you did this. Don't lie. In fact, I believe in that first manual, they advised the interrogator to come in with a folder full of materials and toss it on the table and said, we've got a lot of evidence against you. And they suggested doing that even if you didn't have a whole lot of evidence. So right out of the gate, I'm looking and I'm saying, OK, wow, these are powerful tactics.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
You must continue. The experiment requires that you continue. And the prods are designed to get a subject to first administer a 15-volt shock and then a 30-volt shock. And in 15-volt increments to bring that subject up to the point where they would be asked to administer a 450-volt shock which on Milgram's shock machine was listed as XXX severe shock.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
When you look at this paradigm, you go, nobody's going to do that.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
65% of subjects go all the way up the shock scale to 450 volts. That's Milgram. Now I look at the interrogation manual. You bring them in. isolated, no friends or family members or lawyers present. There is, instead of an experimenter as an authority figure, a police detective who has real authority.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And that police detective aims to accuse you of something and get you to make an admission of guilt. And through a process of gradual escalation and a series of prods that are listed, the detective's goal is to get you to make a small confession or an admission of, I was there. And then a slightly greater admission, I saw what happened.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
We understand as a matter of common sense and intuition that people behave in ways that favor their self-interest. How in God's name does that favor your self-interest?
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And then a slightly greater admission, I was minimally involved. And eventually, 15 volts at a time, the goal is to get that person to make a full admission of guilt coupled by a full narrative confession that explains the chronology and the story.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
The authority figure in Milgram's obedience experiment is a psychology experimenter wearing a white lab coat who has no real authority and no real power over those subjects. If an authority figure like a psych experimenter can produce that level of obedience, Can you imagine what a detective who has power over your fate and future might be able to produce? And that's what unnerved me.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
I kept thinking, geez, if they bring innocent people into this situation, they're going to get some Milgram-like results.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Munsterberg has a chapter titled Untrue Confessions, and in it he describes this case out of Chicago, the murder of Bessie Hollister. What was interesting and what I think made him skeptical about the confession was, first of all, The suspect, whom confessed, had limited cognitive abilities and was a vulnerable person to issue as a suspect.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
He then realized that they then brought him in for hours of interrogation, in which it was described that he embellished a story from one telling to another. Turns out he provided some details in that story. And it turns out that some of those details were false. And so we have a situation where he was interrogated for long periods of time. He was a vulnerable suspect.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And the confession he gave was not particularly accurate in relation to the case facts. And yet the prosecutor pushed forward. And within, I kid you not, one week, he was convicted. And shortly thereafter, he was hung.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Charles Lindbergh was at the time an American hero, and his infant son was kidnapped. And it was big news, as you can imagine. And 200 people volunteered confessions to that kidnapping. And ultimately, police did not charge any of them. Ultimately, none of them had anything to do with it.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
It's interesting, to some extent ironic, that when someone volunteers a confession, police are inherently suspicious and they look for proof of guilt to corroborate that voluntary confession. So they might ask, for example, for facts. Okay, you say you committed this crime. Tell me about the case facts. Describe the crime scene to me or lead me to the weapon or lead me to the victim.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
And invariably, innocent voluntary false confessors can't do it. Voluntary false confessions are cases in which innocent people, without any external pressure from police, step forward and confess to crimes they didn't commit. Sometimes they're protecting somebody else. It might be a child covering for a parent or a parent covering for a child.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
So sometimes it's a sort of a rational reason like that. And sometimes it's a reason that reeks of pathology and somebody needing to gain attention. The motives may vary, but it is my sense that voluntary false confessions don't present much of a problem for the criminal justice system.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
Yeah, the Salem Witch Trials are a great example. Compliant false confessions, these are cases where somebody is under great amounts of stress. They are motivated to put an end to that stress. They want out of that bad situation. They're not even thinking about long-term consequences. They may have come to believe it's in their better interest to confess than to deny involvement.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
They know they're innocent. but they confess anyway as a way to get out of a bad situation. Those types of cases go back throughout history.
Hidden Brain
Did I Really Do That?
You know, I was teaching at Williams College. It's a liberal arts college in Massachusetts. It was 2002. And I was preparing for classes in the fall, and this producer called and said, I wonder if you can look at some confessions for us. I said, OK, what's the case? And she said, will you promise not to mention this to anyone? I said, sure, it's confidential.