Thesis (Ph.D.)--Drexel University, 2008. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references.

The current study examined the effects of personality traits, psychopathy, and narcissism in the context of voluntary false confessions. The administration of various self-report measures in a sample of university students (N= 485) to assess personality traits, psychopathy, narcissism, and self-reported likelihood of voluntary falsely confessing enabled quantitative analysis of the interaction among these essential parameters. Narcissism and openness to experience accounted for 14% of the total variance in the likelihood of the voluntary false confessions in the male sample. Whilst narcissism and psychopathy accounted for 11% of the total variance in the female sample. These findings indicate that narcissism, psychopathy, and openness to experience are psychological factors that may have an impact on the likelihood of an individual confessing to a crime they did not commit, outside of the forensic settings.

While confessions are a powerful form of evidence, innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit. Many researchers have studied false confessions through laboratory experiments with university students or by focusing on proven cases of false confession. These approaches have led many researchers to form a conceptual framework that law enforcement interrogative methods are a key cause of false confessions. A gap exists in the literature as few researchers have queried law enforcement about false confessions or consulted with officers who specialize in interrogation. For this study, a qualitative case study approach was used to explore the experiences of 13 federal law enforcement polygraph examiners who specialize in interrogation. Telephone interviews were conducted regarding their approach to criminal interrogation, their experiences with false confessions, and the circumstances when false confessions were elicited. NVivo software was used to organize the data. Common themes in interview responses were identified and reduced to a simplified format that could be understood in the context of the research questions. The themes identified that participants conduct themselves professionally, they treat criminal subjects respectfully, they avoid unethical interrogative practices, and false confessions result from individual subject characteristics and police misconduct. No participants reported eliciting a false confession. These findings suggest that false confession researchers may have a biased view of how law enforcement officers interrogate due to their overreliance on laboratory experimentation and their focus on false confession cases. This study promotes positive social change by increasing truthful confessions, decreasing false confessions, and providing a more accurate view of what occurs during real world criminal interrogations.

False confessions are the most difficult type of confession to detect. Because the Reid interview and interrogation technique is the global gold standard for interviews, interrogations, and confessions, it is used to obtain confessions from suspects. However, the Reid method has been untested in regard to if it can detect false confessions to potentially eliminate wrongful convictions. The purpose of this qualitative study was to perform a content analysis of videos of confessions using several models that make up the Reid interview and interrogation technique. Utilizing attribution theory as a framework, these models were qualitatively assessed for their ability to detect false confessions in comparison with the legal casebook analysis and linguistic analysis. The key research questions addressed how interviewers attribute identification of false confessions through the assessment of the various models and the complete Reid interview and interrogation technique. An additional research question concerned how interviewers identify attribution error in false confessions through the assessment of the various models and the complete Reid interview and interrogation technique. Data were collected from 6 videos and subjected to content analysis, triangulated with discourse analysis and conversation analysis. The results of this study showed that the models applied to the confessions could distinguish between true and false confessions. A social change could occur if some or all of these models are applied to all interrogations to detect false confessions, which would provide law enforcement and the intelligence professions the tools to assess confessions in order to potentially stop wrongful convictions and intelligence failures in interviews and interrogations.

Genom analys av ungdomsutredares narrativ om villkoren för yrket, syn på yrkesroll, de unga lagöverträdarna och falska erkännanden undersöker denna studie hur ungdomsutredare uppfattar sin yrkesroll samt hur de uppfattar förutsättningarna för att hantera misstänkta unga lagöverträdare i förhörssituationen. Semistrukturerade intervjuer med fem ungdomsutredare i Stockholmsregionen visar en dualistisk bild av polisyrket som dels fantastiskt men med usla villkor. Utredarnas narrativ förtäljer om en uppfattning av falska erkännanden som ovanligt i svensk kontext då utredarens uppgift är att utreda vad som hänt oavsett om någon erkänner sig skyldig till brottet. Dock framställs en problematik kring hur de dåliga villkoren påverkar utredaren i sin yrkesroll. Personalpolitik och kunskapsutveckling lyfts fram som något som organisationen behöver förbättra för att stärka utredarens förutsättningar och säkerställa ett rättssäkert förfarande i utredningen. / This study examines how juvenile investigators perceive the preparation for their professional role and how they perceive the requirements and conditions for handling suspected juvenile offenders in the interrogation room. This study is conducted by analyzing the juvenile investigators' narratives about the working conditions of their profession and their approach and attitude toward their professional role, the juvenile offenders, and false confessions. Semi-structured interviews with five juvenile investigators in the Stockholm region reflect a conflicting and dualistic picture of the police profession as being simultaneously both fantastic and yet one of poor working conditions. The narratives of the investigators attest to a perception of false confessions as an unusual phenomenon in the Swedish context due to their professional duty and responsibility to investigate what happened, regardless of whether someone confesses or not. However, poor working conditions seems to have an effect on the investigator: the informants highlight the need for organizational improvement concerning the staff policies, and the investigators’ knowledge development to ensure legal rights in the investigation process.