The Pros And Cons Of False Confessions

After spending nearly 24 hours searching for his missing daughter, Jerry Hobbs was arrested and interrogated for an additional 20 hours, while processing the grief associated with learning his daughter and her friend had been brutally raped and murdered. After hours of endless interrogation, coupled with harsh police interrogation tactics that are standard in American law enforcement, Hobbs confessed to the rapes and murder, crimes he didn’t commit, and then proceeded to the next two years in prison before DNA evidence surfaced. Prosecutors then cited the confession as a defense, and used bizarre alternative justifications for why the DNA test had cleared him. Subsequently, Hobbs spent an additional three years behind bars, all for crimes he didn’t commit. Unfortunately, Jerry Hobbs is among the thousands of people wrongly convicted because they confessed to a crime they didn’t commit. Even though the idea of falsely confessing is seemingly ludicrous, it happens way more than society would like to admit. The Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal team committed to exonerating the wrongly convicted, proclaims that “false confessions have played a role in at least 25% of DNA exoneration cases”, leading people to wonder and analyze exactly what brings an innocent person to …show more content…
According to Steven Drizen of the center of Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, “juveniles are particularly vulnerable, they tend to be impulsive, they tend to be more focused on short-term gratification like “If I confess, can I go home?” (False Confessions 1). Research is also showing that teens may be more vulnerable to producing internalized false confessions, a confession in which the suspect actually comes to believe they committed the crime, even if they don’t remember, as illustrated in the case of Michael