Duped

Duped by Saul Kassin

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I came to this book because of watching the opening installment of “Mind over Murder” on HBO. That documentary tells the crazy story of how five people confessed to being together at a murder they were not at. Many of the individuals created memories to correspond to their confessions. Only one of the six accused and convicted murderers refused to confess and he got the death penalty for a crime that DNA evidence showed that he could not have committed.

This is crazy stuff. Prior to the documentary and this book, I also would have gone along with the idea that if someone confessed to a crime they must have done it. Fortunately, after the advent of DNA evidence in the 1990s, we now have a kind of check on confessions in some cases.

“Duped” does a great job of laying out the sociological research to explain how false confessions are made to happen and what effect they have on the system. They happen to immature and/or low IQ people, generally, although people who trust authority must also be swept up in the system. They happen because the police are very good at generating and staging confessions, and generally are not much better than the average citizen in picking out liars, although they have a great deal of confidence in the truth detection abilities. The author explains that the method many police are trained in incentives the police to pick out the likely suspect and then use various techniques, such as isolation, lengthy interrogations, feeding information about the crime to the suspect, until some suspects begin feeding the information back to the police. Another technique is simply lying. The law permits the police to lie to suspects, although most people don't know this, and trusting individuals confronted with a police officer telling them falsely that their fingerprints are on the murder weapon will accept the premise and begin doubting their own recollection.

Some suspects simply want an interrogation to end and confess to end, thinking that trial will show they are innocent. Unfortunately, as “Duped” points out, once a confession is in the bag, there is a tendency for experts and witnesses who learn of the confession to find or discover evidence that corroborates the confession.

The worst thing about false confessions is that real killers go free. The author provides several examples of false confessions ending investigations that subsequently were linked to the real killer through DNA evidence.

The author makes several sensible suggestions, such as recording the entirety of the interrogation and stopping the police from lying.

This was an interesting book, which, frankly, has shaken a lot of my faith in the criminal justice system.