How many people over the centuries have been executed or spent life in prison on the basis of a false confession? Eddie Joe Lloyd of Detroit, who in 1984 confessed to the gruesome rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl, was freed from prison last week because DNA testing proved that he was innocent. He had spent 17 years behind bars.
The idea that one can confess to a crime one didn't commit seems bizarre. Confession is the most personal of statements. It is supposed to express the intimate truth of the individual, to reveal his lived experience and ''inner dispositions,'' as Rousseau put it in his ''Confessions.'' This truth, these dispositions, are obscure, shifting, illusive; most confessions are laden with unintended meanings.
In a legal context, a confession has for centuries been considered the ''queen of proofs,'' the most probative evidence one can have. And when courts in the United States have a signed confession from a suspect, they rarely question it. It's enough to convict, or to arrange a plea bargain without further ado.
And yet it's clear that people do make false confessions. The use of DNA testing by groups like the Innocence Project has now exonerated 110 convicted felons, a number of whom gave false confessions. Other false confessions have been exposed by vigorous lawyering and the work of psychologists. There is no way to guess how many convictions in the past were based on false confessions.
Eddie Joe Lloyd was in a mental hospital at the time he was interrogated by the police. A number of the false confessions that have been brought to light come from persons with mental disturbances, with low I.Q. levels, or from minors. But it would be wrong to conclude that only those not wholly in command of their faculties make false confessions. The range of normal psychological functioning is broad, and it includes many persons who can be made to confess to things they didn't do. The human psyche is a fragile and still mysterious thing; subject to certain pressures, it can crack.
How can one make a false confession, absent torture or other physical abuse? Perhaps because the falseness of the ''facts'' confessed to has less importance during the interrogation than the need to confess in order to propitiate your interrogators. They have locked you in a room, and they tell you the only key to your release is your confession. They claim to know you are guilty, and want merely to seek confirmation of how you did the crime. They tell you things will go more easily for you if you confess.
Interrogators understand that their main obstacle is a suspect's silence. If they can convince the suspect to talk, once he begins there's a good chance they can shape his story. In most human beings there are more than enough guilty feelings to go around, and pressures to confess those feelings. Confessions speak of guilt, but they don't necessarily name the guilt, the relevant crime. Suspects who confess falsely accept the story told by their interrogators because they have lost confidence in their own recollections or reached such despair that they will say anything to make the questioning stop. As the psychoanalyst Theodore Reik noted in ''The Compulsion to Confess,'' confession is often not an end in itself, but rather the means of an appeal to parents or authority figures for absolution and affection.
Police interrogators are authority figures with a vengeance. They can use the consolatory model of religious confession, implying that absolution will come from making a clean breast of things, leading to a reintegration with the community from which the suspect is now wholly severed. Courts have played along, permitting them to use all sorts of ruses, including outright lies -- claiming ''proof'' of guilt from fabricated polygraph tests, false eyewitness reports, false findings of fingerprints, hair, blood or semen at the crime scene.
Even the Miranda warnings, designed to inform the suspect of the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney, have not prevented false confessions. An estimated three-quarters of suspects waive these rights, thinking they can talk their way out of their jam.
Most suspects are poor, often marginally literate, almost always terrified of the police. Their sense of ''rights'' in the face of authority can be minimal. Some even seem to assume that, one way or another, they will do jail time. At times a false confession may simply look like a way to hasten what seems to be a predetermined end. The impulse to confess is human, and in a state of dependency and abjection, it is not implausible that we might say what we know our listeners want to hear.