In a somewhat recent diary about our police, focusing on "good cops", I canceled and didn't post a comment to the effect that "Good Cops" are the ones sitting beside the "Bad Cops" in the interrogation room trying to coerce, con, manipulate and/or trick confessions out of people regardless of the truth of the matter. I thought it might be seen to be a tad bit too harsh. Heh.

We have seen a lot of convictions overturned by DNA evidence thanks to the tireless efforts of groups like the Innocence Project. In roughly 30% of these cases the victim of the false conviction had confessed, leading to the question of why somebody who was innocent would confess. In some of these cases, the person who had made the confession is described as "mentally ill", whatever that means, but not always.

It turns out that extracting false confessions and implanting false memories in ordinary people is remarkably easy, and our police interrogation techniques are remarkably, even admirably well suited for doing just that.

The Toronto Star published an article titled
Planting false memories fairly easy, psychologists find

on February 8, 2015 that is short enough to be treated as a must read for those interested in things like truth and justice within the so-called Criminal Justice System.

The article begins with some quoted dialogue wherein somebody is confessing to something and tells us that:

The person being interviewed is confessing on videotape to a serious crime -- throwing a rock so hard at a girl's head that it left her bleeding and unconscious.

But the assault in this story never happened. The interviewee was the unknowing subject of an experiment showing that innocent people can be led to falsely remember having committed crimes as severe as assault with a weapon.

The new study proves for the first time what psychologists have long suspected: that manipulative questioning tactics used by police can induce false memories -- and produce false confessions.

The article is about a study conducted by Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire (in Britain) and Stephen Porter, a forensic psychologist at the University of British Columbia. The study was published in the Journal Psychological Science this January.

They were able to manipulate over 70 percent of the study subjects into believing that they had committed a serious crime in only 3 short sessions of about 40 minutes each. In some cases they had difficulty convincing the subjects that the memories were bogus and the crimes never happened.

There is a false and antiquated belief that memory is indelible and infallible that supports a US questioning technique known as the Reid questioning model, described in the article as

an often aggressive technique meant to confirm suspects' guilt rather than uncover the facts. The American technique, which allows interviewers to lie to suspects, has become standard around the world, including in Canada.

They point to this technique as being used in the recent case on Texan Chris Ochoa, freed by DNA evidence after 12 years in prison.

Do yourself a favor. Read and understand the article, and then begin to figure out how we can work togethe to reform our severely broken criminal justice system with respect to the use of confessions and these coercive mind games used to extract false ones. While you're at it, consider supporting the Innocence Project.

Thanks.