The impact of fatigue on defendants and their statements can be consequential. The most well-known examples come from false confession cases, where suspects (subsequently exonerated) were convicted based on fabricated statements provided under extreme fatigue and duress. Zlatan Križan and Richard A. Leo discuss sleep deprivation and its effects, and they analyze how sleep deprivation and fatigue can undermine the voluntariness and reliability of statements and confessions.

This month Lisa J. Steele reviews Duped: Why Innocent People Confess – and Why We Believe Their Confessions by Saul Kassin.

Although voluntariness is a mainstay of the U.S. legal system, voluntariness and its flip side, coercion, are ill-defined. Likely because of this ambiguity, admissibility decisions for contested confessions have been inconsistent. Some modern-day, often-used interrogation techniques (e.g., investigators feigning friendship) are coercive, even if they appear innocuous and non-adversarial.

Wrongful convictions stemming from false confessions and a growing field of false confession research have paved the way for greater public understanding of factors that lead to false confessions. The authors explore the underlying causes of false confessions and the importance of state-level reform.

Friend of the Court Lisa Kemler

In the latest editions of its interrogation manual, Reid and Associates adopted several positions that align with the views of its critics. In a nutshell, Reid and Associates directly or indirectly endorsed many measures that could help prevent false confessions. Defense attorneys seeking to suppress confessions can strengthen their arguments by noting when law enforcement officers ignore any of the recommendations in the Reid manual.

The mere act of recording an interrogation does not prevent someone from confessing to a crime he did not commit. To truly protect against false confessions, it is necessary to transform police interrogation methods so that they keep up with science and best-known practices. This article presents a framework to reduce police-induced false confessions.

Police interrogation, with its connotations of coercion and a confession-oriented approach, is a controversial part of policing in the United States. In the United Kingdom, however, coerced false confessions have become consigned to history. How did the UK do it?

Wrongful convictions stemming from false confessions and a growing field of false confession research have paved the way for greater public understanding of factors that lead to false confessions. The authors explore the underlying causes of false confessions and the importance of state-level reform.

Twenty-six states and the District of Columbia have statutory, judicial, or self-imposed requirements that police questioning of arrested persons held in custody must be electronically recorded.

While the Miranda decision is an important part of our legal structure that in many instances serves to enforce the mandate of the Fifth Amendment, it has not been effective in greatly diminishing the number of involuntary confessions.

The enactment of 18 U.S.C. § 3501 was an attempt to replace the strict dictates of Miranda with the congressional version of a “totality of the circumstances” test. In Dickerson v. United States, however, the Supreme Court made it clear that the Miranda advisement is constitutionally based and thus not subject to modification by statute.

How effective are the Miranda warnings in protecting Miranda rights? Do arrestees understand the words and sentences? Richard Rogers and Eric Drogin discuss core misconceptions potentially compromising intelligent Miranda waivers.

Miranda has done little to reduce the risk of wrongful conviction resulting from false confessions. To successfully mount a false confession defense, attorneys must fashion persuasive answers to two questions: Why did the client falsely confess? How do we know it is a false confession?

Over the past 30 years, NACDL and California Attorneys for Criminal Justice (CACJ) helped shed light on the implications of police training on interrogation practices that were intended to circumvent Miranda to permit police to either initiate or continue questioning. Police training and interrogation practices received additional attention in 2004 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Missouri v. Seibert.