psyc 610

POLICE INTERROGATION TACTICS 5

Police Interrogation Tactics

Lana Eliot

Psychology 610

Professor Unger

September 21,2017

Introduction

The issue of police interrogation techniques will remain to be debatable as long as criminal activities still prevail in the society. Acts of Terrorism, murder and treason are among the crimes that deserve a lot of attention when it comes to interrogations. Obviously, this implies that there will always be suspects and victims of such acts. Eventually, justice must be served to the victims and the guilty convicted. This achievement will be subject to the effectiveness of the police investigation tactics applied. In most instances, the debate surrounding police interrogation techniques revolve around their legality, ethics, modality, confidentiality and involvement of psychologists. Basically, this research will focus on the psychological notion that most people have a high tendency to concentrate on immediate or distal consequences while giving a little attention to proximal consequences (Muraski, 2016). This paper will review the literature relating to the police interrogation tactics by attempting to answer the following research questions:

· Do police interrogation techniques produce false confessions?

· Do police interrogation methods have an influence on the probability of a criminal suspect making a confession?

· Do criminal suspects confess to crimes in exchange for short term gains?

Criminal suspects display short-sightedness that increases their probability for false confession.

This research uses two experiments in addition to a control group as the research methodology to answer the research questions and the above hypothesis. In this methodology, the researcher uses the immediate and long-term consequences as the dependent variables while the confession decisions are treated as the independent variable. The first experiment involves participants (81) answering repetitive queries pertaining to their past criminal misconduct while the second experiment involves participants (144) answering routine queries before a police officer after a few weeks. In these experiments, denying or admitting the crime are the confession decisions while answering repetitive queries and meeting a law enforcement officer after a few weeks are the immediate and long-term or delayed consequences respectively. The control group will involve 45 participants. The experiments will be conducted in a lab environment that gives a simulation of a typical police interrogation. The two experiments will be subjected to different conditions influencing the response of the participants; however, the conditions will not be changed in the case of the control group. The findings of these experiments will be compared and presented during the testing of the hypothesis and answering of the research questions.

Literature Review

A lot of scholars, researchers and media have written about police interrogation techniques and how they have influenced the confession decisions of the suspects. Some of the major techniques that have been used previously during interrogations include: the third degree where the suspect was deprived of sleep and meals, beaten up, threatened and intimidated resulting to falsely confessing leading to wrong convictions (Bull &Soukara, 2011; Kassin, 2005). Another one is the Reid technique which assumes that a suspect is guilty unless proven guilty implying that the burden of proof of innocence lies with the suspect. The presumption of guilt makes the interrogators to use specific observations related to the crime where the suspect eventually succumbs to pressure and falsely confess. PEACE method mostly used in the UK seeks a confession by avoiding false witnesses and by allowing the suspect to give his explanation uninterrupted with an assumption that a liar will eventually contradict himself after piling false explanations.

In the murder of Stephanie where her brother- Michael Crowe aged 14 years is questioned by police as their main suspect in absence of his parents and an attorney where he later falsely confesses to killing his sister after an intense six hours of interrogation presents an epitome of false confessions. In their interrogations, the police deceived Michael that they had enough physical evidence linking him to the murder in addition to failing a truth verification test. In this incident, the police also question Joshua Treadway a friend of Michael’s claiming that a knife was missing in Joshua’s parents’ house which they believed was the murder weapon (Heuer & Sivasubramaniam, 2012 Inbau et al, 2010). After a ten-hour interrogation, Joshua falsely confesses to killing Stephanie with his two other friends. Both Michael and Joshua are arrested and charged with murder after which they are released after learning that Richard Tuite was Stephanie’s real killer who is tried and convicted. The two boys later on repudiated their statements where they claimed that they were coerced. The boys argued that the interrogating officers recommended leniency, therefore, prompting them to falsely confess. Here, confession because of a promise of leniency shows the propensity of suspects focusing on immediate rather than long-term consequences (Heuer & Sivasubramaniam, 2012).

After Kent Heitholt is murdered in a parking lot in Missouri, police arrest and interrogate Chuck Erickson and Ryan Ferguson who falsely confess to killing Kent after they succumb to intense pressure from police due to coercion. They later receive a sentence of 25 and 40 years respectively. Later on, in 2012, Jerry Trump claims that he was coerced by the prosecutors into giving their names linking them to the murder. Erickson was a drug abuser and suffered from mental illness probably making him falsely confess (Bull &Soukara, 2011; Kassin, 2005; Lassiter, 2004).

The Gary Gauger case also exhibits how police interrogation techniques could lead to false confessions. In this case, Morris and Ruth Gauger are murdered in Illinois where Gary, their son finds their bodies and notifies the police. He is then taken in by the police as their main suspect and interrogated for 18 hours where they lied to him that he did not pass the polygraph examination and that some murder weapon and bloody clothes were traced in his bedroom. He later falsely confesses to killing his parents and he is sentenced to life imprisonment (Bull & Soukara, 2011). Later on, he withdrew his confession claiming he was forced to do so after he got extremely exhausted; a move that backed by the court which later confirmed that the confession was obtained illegally. Gary received pardon after the real killers, Miller and Schneider were convicted. (Heuer & Sivasubramaniam, 2012 Inbau et al, 2001; Kassin, 2005).

In 2008, Andrian Thomas was charged with causing a head injury to his son leading to his murder where he was interrogated for ten hours after which he succumbed to pressure and confessed to the murder. During the trial, his lawyers claimed that he was psychologically manipulated through the Reid Technique into admitting the crime. The interrogators lied to him that he would save his son’s life and his wife would be convicted if he did not confess. He was later acquitted in 2014 after evidence showed that the death was caused by a blood infection. After he was interviewed by the media following his release he claimed that his decision to confess was as a result extreme stress but not the threats of his wife being charged for murder. This is case study somewhat goes against the hypothesis that suspects mostly focus on immediate consequences rather than long-term ones (Costanzo & Leo, 2007; Davis & Leo, 2006; Fulero, 2004; Quintieri & Weiss, 2005).

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In all these cases, it can be concluded that police interrogation techniques play a huge role in forcing suspects into making false confessions. The interrogators mostly use guilt-presumptive techniques which make them very subjective, therefore, prompting suspects into falsely admitting wrong doings in favor of short-term rather than long-term consequences of their confession decisions.

References

Costanzo, M., & Leo, R. A. (2007). Research and expert testimony on interrogations and confessions. In M. Costanzo, D. Krauss, & K. Pezdek Expert psychological testimony for the courts. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Bull, R., &Soukara, S. (2011). Four studies of what really happens in police interviews. Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association

Davis, D., & Leo, R. (2006). Strategies for preventing false confessions and their consequences: Practical psychology for forensic investigations and prosecutions. Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons.

Drizin, S. A., & Leo, R. A. (2004). The problem of false confessions in the post-DNA world. North Carolina Law Review, 82, 891-1008.

Fulero, S. M. (2004). Expert psychological testimony on the psychology of interrogations and confessions. Interrogations, confessions, and entrapment. New York: Kluwer Academic.

Gross, S. R., Jacoby, K., Matheson, D. J., Montgomery, N., & Patil, S. (2005). Exonerations in the United States 1989 through 2003. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 95, 523-560.

Hershberger, Lindsay. (2005). Are deceptive interrogation tactics by police ethical? Ashford University

Inbau, F. E., Reid, J. E., Buckley, J. P., & Jayne, B.C. (2001). Criminal interrogation and confessions. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen Publishers, Inc.

Kassin, S. M., & Fong, C. T. (1999). I’m innocent! Effects of training on judgments of truth and deception in the interrogation room. Law and Human Behavior, 27, 499-516.

Kassin, S. M., Meissner, C. A., & Norwick, R. J. (2005). I’d know a false confession if I saw one: A comparative study of college students and police investigators. Law and Human Behavior, 29, 211-227.

Quintieri, P. & Weiss, K. J. (2005). Admissibility of false-confession testimony: Know thy standard. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 33, 535-538.

Lassiter, G. D. (2004) Interrogations, confessions, and entrapment. New York: Kluwer Academic.

Meissner, C. A., & Kassin, S. M. (2004). “You’re guilty, so just confess!” Cognitive and behavioral confirmation biases in the interrogation room. Interrogations, confessions, and entrapment. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

Muraski, T., (2016). How the Police Generate False Confessions: An Inside Look at the Interrogation Room, 141(19), 100-100.