Why do false confessions happen more in high-profile felony cases than other cases?
A. Confessions are more important in a case where there aren’t witnesses. There are very few confessions in rape cases because typically a victim can say, “that’s the person who assaulted me.” It may be that police lost track of what happened during a complicated interrogation. At trial, police might say that this person was not told these details about the crime. What’s crucial is how the narrative unfolds during the conversation [between police and a suspect]. We’ve had cases where in jurisdictions that do videotape them, police realize that they contaminated the confession only after they saw videotape. Those cases did not turn into false confessions because of the safeguard of the videotape. Q. Did any of your findings surprise you? A. I was surprised at other aspects of trial, such as how much of the time the forensic analyst on stand by the prosecution misstated the science even in areas where scientific principles had been validated and long established. Many of the forensic tec
