According to Rob Warden, of 70 wrongful convictions in Cook County, Illinois, between 1986 and 2011, a false confession was involved in more than half, including both those who falsely confessed to a crime they did not commit and those implicated by another person’s false confession. Warden should know. Co-founder and executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law, he’s an award-winning legal affairs journalist, whose efforts to expose official misconduct—physical abuse in interrogations in Illinois—resulted in a more complete understanding of the phenomenon of false confession.
Warden’s 11-minute TEDx video (here) is a primer on why false confessions occur and how the criminal justice system can reduce them.
Warden notes that physical torture does not account for the majority of false confessions today. Most are the result of psychological pressures that could prompt many reading this article to confess to a crime not committed. Continue reading
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