false confessions

Defendants who confess to crimes rarely can go back into a courtroom and then say that their confession was coerced. This is especially true when the police have stopped looking for other suspects. Children are especially easy to get to confess to things they did not do because they just want the anxiety caused by the questioning to stop. Police will pressure them with more anxiety if they do not say what they want to hear and offer them incentives for confession, regardless of whether or not it is the truth. In this case, a teen confessed to shooting a clerk directly in the face during an armed robbery. He was plied with McDonald’s into the confession.

While juries will not listen to individuals who say they falsely confessed to the crimes, the courts will, especially children, and especially in a place like Chicago where there is a long history of police convicting suspects using torture and extortion.

In this case, the police told the teen that they would give him some McDonald’s if he told them he was there. The teen complied, ate the McDonalds, and was promptly charged with attempted murder, armed robbery, and enough felonies to put him behind bars for two lifetimes. Meanwhile, the teen was later able to prove that he was at a basketball game at the time of the shooting. It goes to show you just how useless police interrogations are at producing the truth and just how narrowly this boy dodged a bullet.

For years, the practice of forced confessions was used to offer some sort of relief to cases that appeared to be complex in nature. The justice systems in quite a significant number of states conspired with law enforcement to convict suspects who were deemed defenseless or who did not invoke their rights. With the advancement of human rights legislation and conventional justice systems, the practice of forced confessions is gradually being brought under regulation.

All things taken into consideration, forced confessions in many justice systems assume a common practice where the victim is either tortured or forced to give false confession under some form of pressure. A recent report from the Chicago Sun Times illustrates why coerced confessions can be costly not only on the victims but also detrimental to the legal system.

The illegal detention of Gabriel Solache and Arturo DeLeon-Reyes for almost two decades in prison without sound evidence from the prosecutor, for example, demonstrates how the justice system can impact innocent victims. More importantly, lessons from this case have also exposed loopholes in the legal system.

Articles Tagged with false confessions

Police Get Teen to Confess to a Murder He Did Not Commit

Forced Confessions in Chicago