False Confessions

A confession is a written or oral formal statement where a suspect admits that they are guilty of a crime, a false confession is admitting to a criminal act that one did not commit. False confessions are usually brought on by coercion, contamination or misclassification. There are three types of false confession; voluntary, persuaded, or compliant. Voluntary confessions are given usually under little police pressure, these confessions are brought on by the persons desire to be noticed(fame), mental disorder, protecting the actual perpetrator, or they may be experiencing guilt from something else they might’ve done. Persuaded false confessions usually stem from this persons own self-doubt, where they feel as if their memory has failed them and they might’ve actually committed the crime, they …show more content…
which is one of the three errors that an interrogator can make which will then end a false confession. Another error is when police create the crime scene with different facts that the suspect would not actually know, and by pushing the suspect to answer their question in a certain manner, and that is called the contamination error, and a misclassification error would be when police accidental believe that said innocent person is guilty. An example of a false confession is the story of Sundhe Moses who was convicted in 1997 after he confessed to a shooting that led to the death of a four year girl, but he testified in court that he was actually beaten, threatened, and forced to strip naked by the officers that were interrogating him causing him to falsely testify, that falls under the coercion