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False Confession Day highlights that just because someone confesses to a crime doesn't mean they did it. Additionally, it took a constitutional amendment in the US and a Supreme Court ruling to ensure all Americans would not be subjected to coercion, torture, or threat of bodily harm during police interrogation. This is not the case in many parts of the world, and the US is often the exception.
The landmark case of Brown v. Mississippi, [297 US 278, (1936)], argued before the United States Supreme Court, found that a defendant's involuntary confession, when obtained by police violence, cannot be seen as evidence. The act of doing this, the judges determined, violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
According to Saul M. Kassin, a professor of Psychology at Williams College and one of the leading researchers into the phenomenon of false confessions, there are three basic types of false confessions: voluntary false confessions, compliant false confessions, and internalized false confessions.
Voluntary false confessions are given absent outside influences. There are various reasons a person may do this, from psychological to protection.
Compliant and Internalized false confessions generally occur due to coercion. Safeguards have been added to the US legal system to attempt to detect these in advance.
The Innocence Project, a US non-profit that re-presents cases of those convicted of serious crimes, recently determined that 25% of those they've found innocent confess to their crimes.
It's unknown if this date came about due to a specific court case or anniversary. November 21 is not the anniversary of the aforementioned legal rulings or the ratification of the 14th Amendment. However, it still is an excellent day to explore the psychology of false confessions and what we can do to prevent the non-guilty from ending up in jail or worse.
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