A Psychological Study On Confessions Of Juvenile Suspects

Confessions have been playing a vital role in the System of Evidence for a long time.Meanwhile,as a kind of evidence,confessions can easily spark controversy.With the development of DNA,more and more false convictions have been discovered.People have rethought the reasons and began to accept conclusions of psychology of confession evident.They have founded that both investigators and jurors have the inclination of the fundamental attribution bias,which means all of them have highlighted the personal responsibility.On the one hand,courts have followed the principle of " totaltity of the circumstance" which has taked into account the entire en potential circumstances and its effect on a given defendant. But as a result,jurors haven’t obtained the definited and desired verdict because courts used these potential circumstances like somewhat of checklist without careful review of any one factor to determine its actual coercive effect on the defendant,such as interrogative techniques and psychological vulnerability On the other hand,most investigators have believed the purpose of interrogation is to get a confession.They seldom doubted the truthfulness unless confessions were extorted by torture.In this context,people have underestimated the strong influence of the psychological-manuplated interrogative techniques.Meanwhile,people have began to pay attention to juvenile deliqunce in addition to interrogative techniques’ psychological manuplation.Under a closed,psychological-manuplated and high pressure interrogation room, the psychological vulnerability of juvenile suspects make them to be at a disadvantage.In this dissertation,juvenile suspects were chosen as research object,research methods in psychology and other social sciences were applied,and three factors which could affect their confessions also were analyzed systematically such as interrogative law system,approaches to interrogation,and psychological vulnerability.There are four conclusions as following:Firstly,juvenile Suspects’ rights are violated during interrogation,and lawyer or other appropriate adult being present system has not yet been fully carried out,which make them in a disadvantageous position;Secondly,investigators begin to use mental or psychological methods to get a suspect to confess to a crime instead of the use of physical force or the threat of force,such as maximization or minimization techniques.Relevant research indicates that the approaches to interrogation,which are of typical psychological Compulsion and deception,could lead to false confession;Thirdly,the study suggests that there is no difference between the approaches to interrogate adult suspects and those to question juvenile suspects in judicial practice.In comparison with minimization techniques,the investigators tend to choose maximization techniques,and believe that there will be little negative influence.However,recent research shows that maximization techniques have significant correlation with negative emotions and behavior tendencies.By contrast,juvenile suspects will buy into the minimizing the crime approach,and this approach has significant correlation with positive influences;Finally,the psychological vulnerability of juvenile suspects can be divided into impulsion,deficiency of risk evaluation and interrogative suggestibility.The research indicates that juvenile is more easily influenced by suggestion.When we talking about free recall scores,specific copyging style and coping strategies,there are significant differences between the juvenile and adult groups.