Abstract
Previous studies have addressed many different kinds of confessions in police investigations – real, false, coerced, fabricated – and highlighted both psychological and social mechanisms that underlie them. Here, we focus on inadvertent confessions and admissions, which occur when a suspect appears to be confessing without being fully aware of doing so, or when police officers believe they have a confession or admission of guilt when in fact this is not the case. The goal of the study is to explain when, how and why these confessions and admissions occur as well as how they are dealt with in two different jurisdictions, the United States and the United Kingdom. We use a discourse analysis approach because inadvertent confessions and admissions of guilt are the product of miscommunication – they happen because the speaker’s meaning and the hearer’s meaning are misaligned. The data consist of 50 interviews from the United Kingdom and 50 interrogations from the United States with both English-speaking and non-English speaking suspects. Our results demonstrate that inadvertent confessions can occur in both locales due to reliance on inference, which is inevitable since inference is the backbone of any human communication, as well as due to additional factors such as linguistic, cultural and procedural issues. We found that these phenomena are more frequent and less well controlled for in the United States context due to (a) no systematic checking of understanding, (b) adversarial questioning techniques and an absence of legal representation, and (c) lack of professional, high-quality interpreting. We discuss the implications of our findings for current efforts to improve access to justice, custodial procedures and language services, and we make recommendations for the implementation of our research in professional practice.
Highlights
How do you confess to something? The most obvious answer is by saying “I confess to X.” this happens rarely in police questioning of suspects
Our exploratory investigation was risky, but highly successful – it has enabled us to detect and define this novel type of confession/admission as well as to identify and exemplify three general factors that are conducive to inadvertent confessions and admissions of guilt, which are: (i) general psycholinguistic processes of deriving meaning via inferencing, (ii) linguistic and cultural barriers that, if not overcome, can result in unresolved or exploited misunderstandings, and (iii) procedural features, such as an adversarial questioning method, lack of legal representation and absence of professional interpreting
We have shown that inadvertent confessions and admissions occur in both jurisdictions, the United States and the United Kingdom, and that ZEP/LEP speakers are more likely to incriminate themselves inadvertently, without being aware of doing so, than monolingual speakers of the majority language, in this case English
Summary
How do you confess to something? The most obvious answer is by saying “I confess to X.” this happens rarely in police questioning of suspects. Who makes false confessions was shown to vary depending on many factors, such as personality, culture, mental state, sobriety and age. Eagerness to please or to conform in social situations is another factor, and so is mental illness or limited intellectual capability (Gudjonsson, 2003; Kassin and Gudjonsson, 2004) Another problematic type of confession involves fabricated confessions in which the alleged confessions of the perpetrators did not reflect their actual statements (either at all or to a considerable degree) but were rather based on the formulations made by the police officers who were questioning them (Eades, 1994, 2004, 2008; Coulthard, 2002)
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