Confession

Confessing is often considered to be the act of “coming clean” and telling the truth. But confessions offered to national intelligence personnel, law enforcement officers, and corporate security can be deceptive. This deception is sometimes the [Page 193]result of confessors' motives to deceive (to gain notoriety, or protect others), but often it is the result of coercive and deceptive tactics by interrogators. These confessions may be wholly false, implicating the confessors in events in which they had no role at all. Or, they may recount true events, but contain many false details. Even if wholly false, confessions taken by skilled interrogators can be deceptively compelling, convincing those who judge the truth of the confessor's story, and virtually assuring the confessor's conviction. But how do these deceptive confessions come about?

Sometimes, confessions are voluntarily offered, with little to no influence from interrogators. Confessors may contact law enforcement specifically to confess, or may offer their confessions to others, such as friends, snitches, or undercover agents, without intention or awareness that they may be used against the confessor. These voluntary confessions may be true, or may be attempts to protect others, brag, take credit for a notorious crime, gain attention, or even be returned to jail. Voluntary false statements to intelligence officers may be offered to strategically mislead.

Most confessions are taken by national intelligence, law enforcement, corporate interrogators, or civilian interrogators from firms specializing in interrogation. Interrogation techniques used in these contexts have ranged from outright torture, to deceptive tactics designed to trick the target into confessing, to more honest counseling techniques designed to encourage confession. Widespread debate has surrounded issues such as ethics of coercive or deceptive techniques, their relative effectiveness, and the estimation and valuation of relative risks that each technique might elicit false information versus failure to elicit true information.

Physical and psychological coercion of prospective confessors is outlawed by U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions for treatment of prisoners of war, though these prohibitions have been violated. Public awareness of torture among national intelligence interrogators is widespread, increasing in recent years as a result of controversy surrounding their use and sanctioning by the U.S. government during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Proponents argue that torture is sometimes necessary to elicit required information (particularly if needed quickly to save lives), and that these goals justify its use. Opponents consider torture unethical and ineffective, in that the target may disclose information to terminate the torture, but this information will often be false.

Though torture is still used for intelligence-gathering in some parts of the world, it is now rarely used for criminal interrogations. Though once prevalent in criminal interrogations, such techniques were implicated in the elicitation of many notorious false confessions, provoking changes in the law to discourage their use. Military and civilian courts in the United States and other countries now prohibit the introduction of confessions obtained through physical coercion, threats, or promises of leniency contingent on confessions as evidence against criminal defendants. Modern interrogation techniques have evolved to minimize the risks that a confession will be false, or that it will be regarded as involuntary (i.e., inadmissible) by the courts.

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