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‘WHEN the police take you in there they torture you to say something,’
Sean told me. The torture was, he explained, psychological not physical.
But it was still terrifying. Sean is a 17-year-old Belfast boy who has a
record for minor offences – mainly joy riding, criminal damage and once
‘being equipped with a screwdriver’. I met him through an organisation called
Youthlink which tries to rehabilitate young offenders in Belfast. Sean alleged
that the usual pattern when he was arrested was for two policemen to interview
him and press him to ‘clear my conscience’. They were eager for him to admit
additional offences which could ‘be taken into consideration’. Sean claimed:
‘It’s to help clear their books.’ He told me that he has on a number of
occasions confessed to crimes he didn’t commit because he felt he was under
so much stress. A num ber of Youthlink’s other clients make very similar
allegations.

The government has promised that there will be a new Criminal Justice
Bill in this session of parliament. The next few months will see intense
political debate on different aspects of policing. The May Inquiry into
the case of the Guildford Four is also going to start hearing evidence.
That evidence should be scientific as well as legal. Psychological research
over the past 10 years has shown the risks of relying on eyewitness accounts.
The procedures for identification parades had to be carefully redesigned
when it became clear that witnesses were often being led unwittingly into
making false identifications. The law needs now to take into account the
psychology of confessions.

A hundred years ago, the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot
taught the young Sigmund Freud how suggestible patients were. They often
developed the symptoms the doctor expected. Freud warned analysts of that
possibility. In the 1960s, research revealed the methodologically troubling
fact that subjects in an experiment often, quite unconsciously, provide
the result the experimenter is looking for. That led to the wide adoption
of double-blind methods of research. Good psychologists are wary when subjects
come up with ideal results. In a police station, the ideal result the police
usually want is a confession.

When a suspect makes a confession, he or she has also made a decision,
a decision to tell. Experimental psychologists have been interested since
the 1930s in what factors influence the decisions people make, especially
under stress. Classic studies such as those by the American psychologist
Solomon Asch, who showed that people saw a rod as straight or bent depending
on what other people said, proved how hard it is for one individual to stand
out against group pressure. It is important to realise that to a suspect
in a cell, the police seem (and are) very powerful authority figures. It
is a role individual officers often play on.

Even after the release of the Guildford Four, the Home Office argued
that the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, which started to operate in 1986,
provided vulnerable suspects with adequate protection. It recognised the
risk of isolating suspects. Police interviews now have to be tape recorded
– something which the police initially resisted. Suspects can usually have
a solicitor present during interviews. The three groups that could be most
easily influenced – juveniles, the mentally ill and mentally handicapped
– cannot properly be interviewed by the police unless an appropriate adult
is present. Suspects are read their rights.

But such safeguards may not be enough, especially as there is evidence
that police do not always stick to the letter of the act, from studies by
Jock Young at Middlesex Polytechnic and from a survey of solicitors commissioned
by Channel 4’s programme Dispatches. Before the act was brought in, no studies
were undertaken to see if suspects actually understand the document describing
their rights which is read to them when they are brought into a police station.
One small study, now in press, by Gisli Gudjonsson at the Institute of Psychiatry
in London, suggests that as few as 25 per cent of people understand this
notice. It requires an IQ of well over 100 to do so and the average suspect
has an IQ of less than 100. Another study, by Ian Mackenzie of the Department
of Police Studies at the University of Exeter, also suggests that suspects
can often be confused by the different documents they are asked to sign.

A complex combination of factors seems to lead people to make false
confessions. These include their IQ, their personality traits, their medical
condition, their state of mind at the time of the interview and, crucially,
how they interpret the situation they are in.

False confessions are nothing new but, until very recently, it was assumed
that they would usually be provoked only by physical torture or the threat
of it. Joan of Arc denied that the voices she heard were those of saints
when she was confronted by the rack. In the Salem trials of 1693 in Massachusetts,
many women confessed to being witches and to esoteric practices such as
having intercourse with devils. Almost invariably these ‘witches’ were threatened
with brutality and feared for the lives of their families. The great impresario
of false confessions was Josef Stalin. His victims in the show trials of
1938 were nearly always tortured to confess. Stalin relished it and had
a special window built from which he could watch his enemies confess falsely
to plotting against him.

It is not surprising that people make false confessions under the threat
of torture. What is surprising is the body of psychiatric and psychological
evidence which suggests that some kinds of individuals will make false confessions
when the threat is much less terrifying. Gudjonsson and James MacKeith,
a forensic psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital in London, argue, in a
recent issue of the journal Medicine, Science and the Law, that there are
basically three main kinds of false confessions.

The first is voluntary confessions. These are offered to the police
without suspects coming under any pressure at all. Individuals do walk into
police stations and admit to crimes they did not commit. One dramatic instance
was when the baby of the aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped. More than
200 people confessed to having done it. The reasons for such confessions
can range from attention-seeking to feeling excessively guilty. It sounds
Kafkaesque, but one reason why the police withhold crucial details from
the press in murder cases is to allow them to weed out those people who
will make totally bizarre confessions.

The second class of false confessions Gudjonsson and MacKeith call coerced
compliance. Imprisonment even for short periods is stressful, as the Police
and Criminal Evidence Act recognises. Even a short spell in a police cell
makes some people feel powerless. Police interrogation is often forceful,
to say the least. Innocent people who have never been in a police station
before often feel disorientated. They are searched and put in a bleak cell
with nothing to read and no one to talk to. Andrew Sanders from the University
of Birmingham has studied how suspects were questioned in 10 police stations.
He told me that ‘the aim of interrogation is to get people to say what they
don’t want to say. The police are very good at understanding suspects’ weak
points and getting them to talk. If I were in a cell, cold, lonely and afraid,
I’d want to talk.’ The police cannot detain someone for more than 36 hours
without bringing them to court, but they rarely tell suspects that time
limit. People feel they are in the cells abandoned forever.

The stress of arrest

This combination of stresses leads some individuals to be acutely distressed.
They desperately want to escape. They do not think about the long-term consequences
of making an admission, true or false. Rather, they want to get out of the
cells, and they often are led to believe that once they make a confession,
they will get bail. One man who was quite unjustly held in connection with
an armed robbery remembers that all he could think about after four days
in the cells was getting out. According to MacKeith, the decisions people
make when they are held in custody are based on short-term considerations.
Cookie Ross, a young woman from Kentish Town with no criminal record who
was arrested on four charges, said she felt she had to give the police what
they wanted in order to get bail. If her solicitor had not been with her,
she is sure she would have incriminated herself, even though she was innocent.
In the end, no case was brought against her. The person who confesses in
such circumstances knows perfectly well that he or she has not done what
he or she is accused of doing. There is distress but no cognitive confusion.

The third class of false confessions is called internalised coerced
confessions. These are rarer than the second class. In some cases people
actually come to believe what is being put to them by the police. They do
not just comply to get out of the cells; they internalise the confession.
Carole Richardson, one of the Guildford Four, told me that there had come
a certain point after a policewoman had slapped her and she had been presented
with the statement of her boyfriend which implicated her. At that point,
she said, ‘you begin to wonder’. The very certainty of the police evidence
makes the accused doubt the truth of what he or she remembers. The man arrested
for armed robbery said he too had begun to question the reality of his own
memory. They become very suggestible.

In theory, skilled interviewers should be able to detect these vulnerable
suspects. But police officers, though they do much interviewing, are not
well trained in it. Senior officers were apparently appalled by the quality
of the interviewing they heard when they reviewed tape recording after it
was introduced. Worse, much police training recommends using stressful strategies
that are exactly the sort to provoke false confessions. The only British
book on police interrogation, written by Superintendent John Walkley, now
computer development officer with the Kent Police, and published in 1987,
describes seven basic interviewing strategies. These include the sweet and
sour strategy, the sustained strategy and the stressful strategy which involves
‘the oral application of pressure’. Walkley argues that false confessions
are very rare and that it is quite legitimate to exploit the natural stresses
of any interviewing situation to get suspects to confess. He describes a
number of psychological ploys for the police, including acting tough and
encouraging people to confess by playing down the adverse consequences –
saying for example, that ‘it’s not like stealing the Crown jewels’. Walkley
vigorously defended his book to me, even though it seemed to me to promote
sharp psychological practices.

Some psychologists, such as Erik Sheperd of the City Polytechnic in
London, claim that there are now two schools of police interview training:
the strategists like Walkley and an ‘ethical’ school of which the prime
example is Merseyside Police Training School. The head of the Merseyside
school’s interview development section, Detective Inspector Frank Kite,
acknowledges ‘that you can stress people into saying anything’ but that
this can be very counterproductive. Walkley denies that his approach is
unethical and claims most suspects are ‘confident, cunning’ practitioners
of crime who need professional, structured interviewing.

Psychologists in blue

In the past few years, police forces all over the country have developed
an interest in psychology. There has been interest, for instance, in teaching
police officers to be sensitive to the nuances of ‘body language’ which
can suggest that a person is lying, or at least is nervous. Police trainers
should know that suspects often feel helpless in police cells and so can
be very suggestible. All too often, however, the tendency is for the police
to exploit, rather than explore, such frailties.

Until now, there has not been any good method of quantifying suggestibility,
but that is changing. Gudjonsson has developed a test of suggestibility
which marks an important advance in our knowledge of this field. In his
test, people listen to a story. They are then given additional information
and asked to recall various items from the original story. The amount of
additional suggested information which subjects incorporate in their recall
makes it possible to judge experimentally how suggestible they are compared
with the rest of the population. Gudjonsson has also used a test of compliance
which examines how likely people are to agree with propositions put forward
by a powerful individual.

The results of these tests on a number of convicted people have been
put forward in court as evidence to suggest their confessions might be unreliable.
Engin Raghip is one of three people convicted for the murder of PC Blakelock
at Broadwater Farm. Raghip signed a confession which said he had been part
of the crowd throwing stones at PC Blakelock. That confession was the only
evidence against him and it was obtained when Raghip was interviewed without
a solicitor being present. The confession was used to obtain the murder
conviction. As part of Raghip’s appeal, his psychological profile was drawn
up by Gudjonsson. He found that Raghip has a low IQ of 73 to 74. He scored
high on both suggestibility (at the 99.7th percentile for normal subjects)
and compliance (at the 95th percentile). That meant that he was likely to
give the police the evidence he believed they wanted, not what was true.
But the Court of Appeal refused to listen to this evidence. It did not show
mental handicap – that is, an IQ of below 70 – and it did not show mental
illness and these were the only factors of interest to the court.

Gudjonsson and MacKeith both stress that false confessions usually occur
when there are a number of factors involved: a vulnerable person, the way
they are treated, his or her medical and psychological state at the time
of interview and even the pressure the police are under at the time. There
is no simple equation. Each case is individual. Anyone can crack if the
pressure feels extreme enough. The way suspects perceive what is happening
to them is critical. Someone may actually be quite safe and yet feel threatened.
It is their perception of the situation that matters.

No one is sure how many false confessions there are in a year and how
many result in periods in jail. But the number is not negligible. The organisation
Justice has claimed there are perhaps 200 wrong convictions a year, many
of them based on false confessions. Gudjonsson told me that he had seen
more than 150 alleged cases of false confessions. The week after the release
of the Guildford Four, the Court of Appeal freed Ramon Canale who had then
been accused of armed robbery. He was not an obviously vulnerable personality,
as a veteran of the Parachute Regiment. Yet the stresses led him to talk.

Not all psychologists accept that many people are vulnerable. Barry
Irving of the Police Foundation claims that suspects are not perhaps as
vulnerable as Gudjonsson and MacKeith claim. Irving suggests that even very
vulnerable individuals ‘perk up and begin to defend themselves’ when they
realise they might land up in prison. Ian Mackenzie, who was a Superintendent
in the Metropolitan Police, does not accept the MacKeith-Gudjonsson model
entirely, but he claims that the manipulations he has seen in interrogation
rooms can make people crack and are ‘dangerous’.

As the May Inquiry sits, it needs to examine these psychological factors
in detail. False confessions damage those who made them and also they damage
the law as a whole. Innocent people go wrongly convicted while the guilty
may remain at large to repeat their crimes. Psychology clearly has a part
to play in explaining how false confessions happen and how they could be
prevented. It would be a pity if its findings are ignored.

Dr David Cohen is a writer and broadcaster and is the editor of Psychology
News in London. Further reading: G. H. Gudjonsson and James MacKeith, ‘Retracted
confession,’ Medicine, Science and the Law, vol 28, p 187. John Walkley,
Police Interrogation: A Handbook for Investigators, The Police Review Publishing
Co Ltd, 14 St Cross St, London EC₁N 8FE.