Abstract
Drawing on a body of confession scholarship, “Ghostly Collaboration” defines “coercive ghostwriting,” an authorship-inspired term for collaborative practices enacted between custodial criminal suspects and professional police interrogators resulting in coerced, potentially false confession. Within the United States, still-prominent notions of a Romantically-influenced autonomous Author problematically intersect with public perception of collaborative texts; the coercive ghostwriting label is intended to draw explicit attention to co-authorship via coercive collaboration, hopefully contributing to the ongoing efforts of researchers working to challenge inaccurate views of false confessions.
Highlights
Contributor Bio: Mary Laughlin is a PhD Candidate at North Dakota State University
As a researcher interested in the intersections between public perceptions of authorship and collaborative textual productions, those situated in classrooms, courtrooms, and other hierarchically-organized institutional locales, I focus here on an arena where individualized views of writing and intellectual ownership may, in tandem with other factors, critically problematize the evaluation of collaboratively authored texts: the genre of false criminal confession
The view of confession as a narrative of legitimate guilt is a component of the American zeitgeist, and research suggests we have trouble understanding false confession as a phenomenon (Kassin; Leo; Appleby, Hasel, and Kassin)
Summary
The degree to which coercive ghostwriting constitutes textual authorship is a complex issue to consider. Confession evidence takes different forms depending on context, including multimodal combinations: a signed statement and oral investigator testimony, for example. Of the forty cases of false confession: 23 involved partially recorded interrogations (fourteen audio, nine video) [32]. As Garrett’s data indicates, the term “confession” does not refer to a universally consistent form, and confessions are not composed via a universally consistent process—an impossible prospect, given the many factors involved. I will briefly review here several possible components of confessions in an effort to illustrate the possibility that triers of fact may compress the multiple elements contained within coercive ghostwriting into one oversimplified construct. Inbau et al recommend language for a statement indicating willingness and truthfulness at the end of a confession document, ideally to be handwritten by the suspect and followed with a signature [317]
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