Category Archives: False confessions

Michigan professor Samuel Gross has posted the above-titled article on SSRN.  Downloand here.  The abstract states:

A criminal defendant in the United States faces a stark choice: accept the conviction and punishment the prosecutor offers as a plea bargain, or go to trial and risk much worse. In most cases the defendant has an overwhelming incentive to plead guilty; that’s why very few criminal cases go to trial. Unfortunately that incentive is similar for defendants who are in fact guilty and for those who are not. As a result, some innocent defendants plead guilty. We know it happens – some innocent defendants who plead guilty are later proven innocent and exonerated – but we have no idea how often.

In this article I consider an alternative structure. We could offer defendants a different sort of pretrial option: not to plead guilty in return for reduced punishment, but to waive major procedural rights at trial in return for important procedural advantages on post-conviction review if they are convicted. In theory, this pretrial choice should be sufficiently more attractive to innocent defendants than to guilty ones that it will separate the two groups more effectively than our current practice. Along the way, if this option became regular practice, it might also reduce our reliance on plea bargaining, regain some lost ground for criminal trials, and improve the accuracy of fact finding in criminal cases.

Is this plan is practical? Is there a chance that it might be adopted somewhere? I wonder. I offer it as a thought experiment: an attempt to think through an alternative procedural universe in order to better understand the one we live in – which might lead to something useful.

Rinat Kitai-Sangero has posted the above-titled article on SSRN.  Download here.  Abstract states:

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is also a story about confessions. Raskolnikov, who committed a double murder, and Nikolay, an innocent suspect, each confesses to the same crime. An analysis of Raskolnikov’s and Nikolay’s confession demonstrates the complexity of motives that drive the guilty and the innocent alike to confess and points to the distinction between true and false confessions. Finally this novel supports the conclusion that the accused should be required to provide significant details of the crime as a requirement for relying on his or her confession.

Professor Lucian E. Dervan

Lucian E. Dervan of the Southern Illinois University School of Law, and Vanessa Edkins of the Florida Institute of Technology have posted the above-titled article on SSRN.  Download full article here here.  Abstract states:

In 1989, Ada JoAnn Taylor was accused of murder and presented with stark options. If she pleaded guilty, she would be rewarded with a sentence of ten to forty years in prison. If, however, she proceeded to trial and was convicted, she would likely spend the rest of her life behind bars. Over a thousand miles away in Florida and more than twenty years later, a college student was accused of cheating and presented with her own incentives to admit wrongdoing and save the university the time and expense of proceeding before a disciplinary review board. Both women decided the incentives were enticing and pleaded guilty.

That Taylor and the college student both pleaded guilty is not the only similarity between the cases. Both were also innocent of the offenses for which they had been accused. After serving nineteen years in prison, Taylor was exonerated after DNA testing proved that neither she nor any of the other five defendants who pleaded guilty in her case were involved in the murder. As for the college student, her innocence is assured by the fact that, unbeknownst to her, she was actually part of an innovative new study into plea bargaining and innocence. The study, conducted by the authors, involving dozens of college students, and taking place over several months, not only recreated the innocent defendant’s dilemma experienced by Taylor, but revealed that plea bargaining’s innocence problem is not isolated to an obscure and rare set of cases.

Strikingly, the authors’ study found that over half of the participants were willing to falsely admit guilt in return for a perceived benefit. This finding not only brings finality to the long-standing debate regarding the possible extent of plea bargaining’s innocence problem, but also ignites a fundamental constitutional question regarding an institution the Supreme Court reluctantly approved of in 1970 in return for an assurance it would not be used to induce innocent defendants to falsely admit guilt.