Policies to protect individuals from false confessions during interrogations

This paper will make the argument that different and updated policy changes are needed in the police interrogation room to combat internalized coerced false-confessions. A criminal suspect under intense psychological pressure can be falsely convinced he or she committed a crime and confess fully to the crime. This is what is known as an internalized false-confession. This type of false-confession has occurred in many instances to a suspect later indisputably exonerated. Police interrogators have had different techniques over the years to extract a confession from suspects. Such techniques used to include legal torture and violence. Court decisions and policy changes have made these draconian techniques invalid and illegal in many cases. An interrogation is a guilt-presumptive process, therefore an interrogator's goal is solely to extract a confession. The Reid technique is an interrogation technique used by modern interrogation personnel to foster cooperation with criminal suspects thereby extracting a confession without physical or mental coercion. Reid was borne out of the need to extract confessions without the physical coercion. However, Reid has brought forth different types of problems such as false-confessions. There are sectors of the population more at-risk of succumbing to a false-confession such as juvenile, developmentally disabled, and people with mental illness. The policies in place to protect all suspects from these interrogation techniques are deficient. This paper will examine ideas for policy changes through legislation, revisiting court precedence and educating the public at large why these changes are needed. Such changes include in-depth training for interrogators, protections for the vulnerable classes of people and videotaping all interrogation of suspects.