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False Positive Error Reduction In Criminal Investigation Essay

False Confessions in America What factors do you see as relative to the increasing number of false confessions in America?

The literature on police investigations is clear on four points: 1) Investigators are overconfident in their abilities to make judgments about suspects; 2) innocent people put themselves in harm's way because of misplaced belief in the interview / investigation aspects of the criminal justice system; 3) the interview behavior of innocent people evokes unnecessarily aggressive interrogation responses from trained investigators; and 4) the interview and interrogation behavior of investigators elicits behavior from suspects that often results in false confessions. The participants in criminal investigations that involve interviews and interrogations seem caught up in a Parisian Apache dance, in which the behavior of either participant brings about an escalation in the behavior of the other…and the battle rages on until the parties arrive at some resolution. In roughly 25% of wrongful convictions "…contained confessions in evidence" (Kassin, 2005, p. 215).

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215). This paradox is less likely to be addressed through more of the same type of training, instead seeming to point to some awareness training that precisely conveys to the training participants how inaccurate their best thinking may actually be. Moreover, solutions to the problem must make crystal clear that the tautological thinking exemplified by this example is not acceptable at any level: When police investigators, "confident of their training-based skills at interviewing and interrogation…" were asked about being "concerned that their persuasive methods of influence might cause innocent people to confess," most often responded: "No, because I do not interrogate innocent…

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Kassin, S.M. (2005). On the psychology of confessions: Does innocence put innocents at risk? American Psychologist, 60 (3), 215-228.
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