Chapter 4 False Admissions: Interrogations and Confessions
| Jurisdiction | United States |
After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
• Distinguish voluntary, compliant, and internalized false confessions.
• Discuss the three-step pathway to police-induced false confessions.
• List and discuss the situational and dispositional factors related to false confessions.
• Appreciate the influence of confessions on decision-making in the criminal process.
• Discuss U.S. Supreme Court doctrine governing confessions.
• Discuss the benefits to both law enforcement and defendants of recording custodial interrogations.
• Compare and contrast confrontational interrogation with investigative interviewing.
In April 2003, Frances Choy, a 17-year-old high school senior, reported a fire at her family's Massachusetts home. Firefighters rescued Choy and her 16-year-old nephew, Kenneth, from the blaze. Her mother was pronounced dead at the scene, and her father was taken to the hospital.
Police initially questioned Choy at the hospital while she was being treated with oxygen. They questioned her again later that morning when she returned to her home. Her father was transferred to a different hospital, and two officers questioned her as they drove her there so she could see him. Following her arrival at the hospital, Choy authorized removal of her father's life support, and he passed away.
That evening, Choy was told to meet an officer at the house where the fire had occurred. The police then transported her to the police station to view items that had been taken from the scene. At the station, police officers questioned Choy for more than three hours. They repeatedly asked her how gasoline had gotten on her sweatpants, even though the crime lab's tests on the pants had not yet been conducted. The interrogation was not recorded, and the interrogators destroyed their notes after preparing a report.
In the meantime, police found notes under Kenneth's bed that set forth plans to burn the house with gasoline. Kenneth initially denied any knowledge of the crime, but later changed his story. He said he did not intend to kill anyone, and when police suggested that he had not acted alone, he blamed the idea on Choy. He claimed that on the night of the fire, he saw Choy preparing the gasoline, but he refused to help and returned to his room. Kenneth claimed "he heard a 'fooh' sound — the sound of a fire starting" (Possley, 2020). Police brought Kenneth to confront Choy, and although she initially denied any involvement, she eventually said, "Fine, I did it," after police said they would take her to booking (Possley, 2020). A detective claimed that while awaiting booking, Choy made more admissions, but she immediately recanted them. Choy moved to suppress her statements in 2005, but the motion was denied.
Choy went to trial in 2008, charged with two counts of murder and one count of arson. The prosecution claimed that she felt burdened by her parents and wanted the $100,000 payout from their life insurance policy. The crux of the commonwealth's case was the testimony of investigators who claimed that Choy had admitted involvement in setting the fire. They said she had shown little emotion and had no explanation for the gasoline on her pants. Other witnesses for the commonwealth, including a state trooper who claimed that he and his K-9 were "certified" in detecting accelerants, testified regarding the presence of gasoline. Another state trooper testified about the starting point of the fire — a mattress in the basement—but said no gasoline was found there, on the couch, or on the wooden stairs leading from the living room to the second floor. This witness did note that there was a towel near Kenneth's bedroom door, potentially placed there to block the smoke.
When Choy's jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict, a mistrial was declared. In a separate trial, Kenneth was acquitted of murder. Choy's motion to bar a retrial was denied, and she was again brought to trial in January 2011. Kenneth testified for the prosecution after being granted immunity. The jury again failed to reach a unanimous verdict, and a second mistrial was declared. Choy was tried a third time in May 2011. Kenneth had since departed for China so he did not appear at the trial, but his statements from the second trial were read to the jury. This time, the jury convicted Choy of all three counts, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.
Through a lengthy legal battle conducted with the assistance of the Boston College Law School's Innocence Program, Choy's defense lawyers uncovered evidence of anti-Asian racism and sexually demeaning comments made by prosecutors in the case. In addition, review of the original trial testimony by a chemist suggested that there was not a credible scientific basis for the conclusion that Choy's sweatpants contained gasoline. The defense additionally discovered a witness who stated that Kenneth admitted to planning and carrying out the crime. The prosecution also had failed to disclose the fact that other fires occurred at the Choy home after Frances was arrested, that Kenneth had other drug charges that had been dismissed, and that Kenneth's mother, to whom he had returned in China, was mad at the Choy family because they repeatedly asked for money. A variety of other issues, including the discovery of an interrogator's original notes, which had allegedly been destroyed and which contained information inconsistent with his testimony, led to a motion for a new trial, which was granted. On September 29, 2020, the district attorney's office dismissed the charges, and Frances Choy was exonerated. As is generally the case, multiple factors contributed to Frances Choy's wrongful convictions. Yet the false confession she made during her interrogation, "Fine, I did it," and subsequent incriminating admissions — all of which she promptly retracted — represented some of the most damning evidence leading to her wrongful convictions for arson and murder.
False admissions encompass two related but distinct issues: confessions and guilty pleas. Although they are among the most widely researched factors that contribute to wrongful convictions, they remain counterintuitive; after all, why would anyone admit to a crime they did not commit?
For many people, both in the general public and within the criminal justice system, moving beyond this obvious question is difficult. Indeed, a number of officials have made comments suggesting that anyone who is innocent simply would not admit to something they did not do. At the heart of this belief is the assumption that people do not act in self-destructive ways (Leo, 2008). However, the Innocence Movement and DNA exonerations have shown definitively that people do sometimes admit to crimes even though they are entirely innocent.
Although interrogations and plea bargaining occur at different points in the criminal justice process, they are closely related in some important ways. The logic behind both is "remarkably similar" (Leo, 2008, p. 31). At their core, each is designed to encourage a person to admit being guilty of a crime. During an interrogation, police seek to obtain a confession from a suspect, which will be used as evidence against them going forward. During plea bargaining, the prosecution offers defendants a break on their charge and/or sentence in exchange for an admission of guilt, thereby avoiding a contested trial.
Both interrogations and plea bargaining are guilt-presumptive. That is, police often will not interrogate someone unless they believe the person to be guilty. The goal of the interrogation thus is to secure a confession, rather than simply to collect information (Kassin et al., 2010). Similarly, the state's push to secure a guilty plea is based on the prosecutor's belief in the defendant's guilt. Importantly, the prosecutor's view of the crime and of the defendant is likely to be heavily shaped by the information provided by the police. Interrogations and plea bargaining consequently may be "closely linked in practice, in that the former can strongly influence the latter" (Norris & Redlich, 2014, p. 1013). For these reasons, interrogations have been referred to as "plea bargaining without defense counsel" (Kamisar, 1980, p. 40) and "pre-plea bargaining" (Leo, 2008, p. 32). In effect, both guilt-presumptive interrogations and plea negotiations serve to increase the efficiency of the criminal justice process, but may be at odds with the search for truth that is so vital to the American adversarial system.
Despite their substantial overlap, interrogations and plea bargaining are distinct practices. In this chapter, we focus on the former: police interrogations and false confessions. In the next chapter, we will explore wrongful convictions that occur as a result of guilty pleas.
False confessions are not new to justice systems. For example, the case discussed in chapter 1 of Stephen and Jesse Boorn, who were convicted in 1819 and who were among the first known wrongfully convicted individuals in the United States, involved false confessions. As noted earlier, patterns found in modern exonerations suggest that false confessions occur with some regularity. Of the first 325 DNA exonerations reported by the Innocence Project, 88 (27.1%) involved some type of false confession (West & Meterko, 2016). Further, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, 337 of the first 2,754 exonerations (12.2%) involved a false confession. Interestingly, among known exonerations, false confessions appear to be especially prevalent in homicide cases, as 246 of the 1,108 murder and manslaughter cases (22.2%) in the NRE database involved a false confession.
It is important to note that the above figures do not represent the rate, prevalence, or incidence of false confessions; that is, they are not...
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