Our Gemara on Amud Aleph records a situation where the sage Abaye suspected through circumstantial evidence that he was being presented with a fraudulent contract. It states that he exerted some form of pressure and coercion in order to induce a confession, and indeed the person did confess.

This brings up an interesting point of the reliability of forced confessions. As a result of DNA testing and the Innocence Project there have been numerous situations where convictions were overturned and discovered to be incontrovertibly false. Many of these landmark cases involved detailed confessions by the accused, despite the fact that they ultimately became exonerated with DNA evidence which showed an entirely different person had committed the crime and was ultimately convicted. This has caused soul searching and ethical turmoil because confessions have been a mainstay of the criminal justice system. Furthermore, what possible psychological explanations can account for a defendant, not only confessing, but providing many details to a crime that never existed?

According to researcher Mark Godsey, (“Reliability Lost, False Confessions Discovered”, Chapman Law Review, Vol. 10:623):

The DNA exonerations to date have revealed something particularly remarkable for those who study confessions. In 25% of the cases of wrongful conviction, the innocent person falsely confessed. Before DNA, there were few avenues to verify a false confession. Simply put, the inmate would claim that he had confessed falsely, but most people, including in many cases his lawyer, would not believe him. Now, scores of case studies involving actual false confessions exist, and they raise troubling questions.

The 2012 film The Central Park Five tells the story of five African and Hispanic-American boys, 14 to 16 years old, who in 1989 confessed to the brutal assault and rape of a female jogger in New York City’s Central Park. Solely on the basis of these confessions, four of which were videotaped, the boys were convicted and sentenced to prison. The tapes themselves were compelling, as every one of the defendants described in vivid—though often erroneous—detail how the jogger was attacked. Thirteen years later, Matias Reyes, in prison for three rapes and a murder committed subsequent to the jogger attack, stepped forward to claim that he was the Central Park jogger rapist and that he acted alone. Reinvestigating the case, the Manhattan district attorney’s office questioned Reyes and discovered that he had accurate and independently corroborated guilty knowledge—and that the DNA samples originally recovered from the victim’s body belonged to him. In 2002, the defendants’ convictions were vacated. The Central Park jogger case now stands as a shocking demonstration of five false confessions resulting from a single investigation (for an overview of this case, see Burns, 2011).

According to Saul Kassin, et. al. (APA Handbook of Forensic Psychology: Vol. 2. Criminal Investigation, Adjudication, and Sentencing Outcomes, B. L. Cutler and P. A. Zapf (Editors-in-Chief) CHAPTER 9, CONFESSIONS. There are a variety of reasons that contribute to false confessions.  There is a certain methodology of police interrogation that can cause people to doubt their own truth, or impulsively confess in the belief of an overall better outcome.  

This is accomplished via a psychological approach to interrogation designed to increase the anxiety associated with denial and to decrease the anxiety associated with confession to make it easier for a suspect to confess as a means of coping with the interrogation. In the Reid technique, as described in Inbau et al.’s (2013) Criminal Interrogation and Confessions, this objective is achieved by isolating the suspect in a small, bare, soundproof room to create a non supportive environment, and then engaging in a nine-step process that combines the use of positive and negative incentives referred to broadly as maximization and minimization

Maximization involves a cluster of tactics designed to convey the interrogator’s strong and certain belief that the suspect is guilty and that all denials will fail. Such tactics include making an accusation, interrupting denials, overriding objections, and citing evidence, real or manufactured, to shift the suspect’s mental state from confident to hopeless. At the same time, minimization tactics are designed to provide the suspect with moral justification and face-saving excuses for having committed the crime in question. Using this approach, the interrogator offers sympathy and understanding; normalizes and minimizes the crime, often suggesting that he or she would have behaved similarly; and offers the suspect a choice of alternative explanations—for example, suggesting to the suspect that the murder was spontaneous, provoked, peer-pressured, or accidental rather than the premeditated work of a cold-blooded killer. As we will see later, research has shown that this tactic communicates by implication that the crime was justifiable and that leniency in punish- ment is forthcoming upon confession. The process as a whole is designed to lead suspects to see confession as their most expedient means of “escape.” Once the suspect is persuaded to admit guilt, the trained interrogator seeks to convert that admission into a narrative confession, on tape or in writing.

He further states:

A second interrogation tactic that can induce confessions from innocent people is the presentation of false evidence. In the process of confronting suspects and refusing to accept their denials, U.S. police will sometimes present supposedly incontrovertible evidence of guilt (e.g., a fingerprint, blood or hair sample, eyewitness identification, or failed polygraph)—even if that evidence does not exist—as a way to convince suspects that resistance is futile and that confession is their best option. In the United States, it is permissible for police to outright lie to suspects about the evidence (Frazier v. Cupp, 1969). Empirical research, however, warns clearly of the risk.

One final factor that contributes to false confessions, is amazingly counterintuitive. Ironically, genuine innocence can be a risk factor for a false confession:

On the basis of anecdotal evidence indicating that innocent people think and behave differently from guilty suspects in the interrogation room, Kassin (2005) proposed that innocence itself could be a risk factor for confession. Noting that innocent people believe that the truth— and their innocence—will prevail, Kassin and Norwick (2004) found, in a mock crime experiment, that innocent suspects are more likely to waive their Miranda rights to silence and to counsel even when in the presence of an officer who appears guilt presumptive, hostile, and closed-minded (Kassin & Norwick, 2004; also see Moore & Gagnier, 2008). Still other research shows that innocent people do not use self-presentation “strategies” in their narratives when talking to police (Hartwig et al., 2005); they offer up alibis freely, without regard for the fact that police would view minor inaccuracies with suspicion (Olson & Charman, 2012); and they become less physiologically aroused in response to the stress of interrogation (Guyll et al., 2012). 

The sense of reassurance that accompanies innocence may reflect a generalized and perhaps motivated belief in a just outcome, making them ironically naive about the adversarial nature of prosecution. Of course young people and those of compromised intellectual or mental faculties are far more susceptible to all the above tactics.

These ideas about psychology, truth and coercion are not just important in terms of society, but even for parents and educators who sometimes are in the position of having to discipline by extracting a confession.

This is why though Beis Yosef (Choshen Mishpat 99) technically agrees with our Gemara, and states that a judge should rely on his intuition and browbeat or threaten when something feels fishy, such coercive practices should only be performed by a Beis Din of great stature. The rabbis should be renowned for their wisdom and personal piety. He says that in our times that there has been a proliferation of unqualified judges, and there is great danger that boundaries can be crossed and innocent people prosecuted unjustly. 

Translations Courtesy of Sefaria, except when, sometimes, I disagree with the translation

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