Mentally Disordered Suspects in the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

The risk of wrongful conviction is particularly acute for suspects suffering from mental disorder. Because mentally disordered people sometimes behave in a way which attracts attention, they become suspects. Once they are suspects, their demeanour may lead investigating officers to believe that they are being evasive or telling lies. They may be vulnerable in that they may make false admissions, whether because they have the type of personality that is anxious to please investigating officers or because they are compulsive confessors. Drawing strongly on the work of Gudjonsson, who has pioneered much forensic psychological work on suggestibility, the Runciman Commission refers to the substantial body of research showing four different categories of false confession: (i) people may make confessions voluntarily as a result of a morbid desire for publicity or notoriety; or to relieve feelings of guilt about a real or imagined previous transgression; or because they cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy; (ii) a suspect may confess from a desire to protect someone else from interrogation and prosecution; (iii) people may see a prospect of immediate advantage from confessing (e.g. an end to questioning or release from custody) even though the long term consequences are far worse (termed coerced compliant confessions); and (iv) people may be persuaded temporarily by the interrogators that they really have done the act in question (coerced-internalised).'