The Psychology of Videotaped Interrogations and Confessions (article)

As of April 2001, the Death Penalty Information Center had documented 95 cases in which death-row inmates (from 22 states) were exonerated — some only days prior to their scheduled executions — because of newly discovered evidence. Reacting to these startling figures, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a long-time supporter of the death penalty, recently acknowledged, “If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.” (quoted in The New York Times, July 5, 2001)

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Many mistakes in the judicial process that lead to wrongful convictions occur during the interrogation phase of criminal investigations where coerced or false confessions are sometimes extracted from detained crime suspects. Numerous legal scholars, criminal justice practitioners, political leaders, and social scientists have called for the videotaping of all police interrogations as a “quick fix” for the problem of some innocent people being induced to incriminate themselves when confronted by standard police interrogation tactics. Those who advocate videotaping interrogations argue that the presence of the camera will deter the use of coercive methods to induce confessions and will provide a complete and objective record of the interrogation so that judges and jurors can evaluate thoroughly and accurately the voluntariness and veracity of any confession. I am aware of at least one proponent who is so sure of the soundness of the videotaping procedure, that he has gone as far as to argue that legally required Miranda warnings to suspects concerning their rights to silence and counsel can be dispensed with if interrogations are routinely videotaped.

Under certain circumstances I have no doubt that more accurate assessments of the voluntariness and reliability of confessions can be obtained via the videotape method. Certainly, if interrogators use obviously assaultive coercion, any reasonable observer will recognize the illegitimacy of the confession. However, such third-degree intimidation has been replaced by non-assaultive psychological manipulation that is not always recognized as coercive but, as research has shown, can nonetheless lead to false admissions of guilt.

For example, in the case of Peter Reilly, police interrogators lied about the evidence they possessed that linked the 18-year-old Reilly to the murder of his mother. They followed this up with repeated suggestions to Reilly that he could have committed the crime without remembering it. Finally, they impressed upon the youth that his actions were in fact justifiable given his mother’s constant antagonisms. After 16 hours of interrogation, Reilly formally confessed. His signed statement closely followed the scenario laid out by his interrogators — a scenario Reilly had been manipulated into believing was accurate, yet later was demonstrated to be completely without merit. Although eventually exonerated, Reilly spent two years of his young life as a wrongfully convicted man on account of a police-induced false confession.

In this age of psychologically oriented interrogation approaches, videotaping interrogations and confessions may not be a surefire preventive against convicting the truly innocent. In the United States and in many other countries (such as Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom) videotaped interrogations and confessions are customarily recorded with the camera lens zeroed in on the suspect. One reason for this particular positioning of the camera is likely the belief that a careful examination of not only suspects’ words, but also their less conspicuous actions or expressions, will ultimately reveal the truth of the matter.

The empirical validity of such beliefs aside, I have found in my research that focusing the video camera primarily on the suspect in an interrogation has the effect of impressing upon viewers the notion that his or her statements are more likely freely and intentionally given and not the result of some form of coercion. Moreover, a comparison of judgments derived from suspect-focus videotapes with judgments based on “control” media — transcripts and audiotapes — leads to the conclusion that the greater perception of voluntariness associated with suspect-focus videotapes is an unmistakable bias of the most serious kind — one that runs contrary to the cornerstone of our system of justice, the presumption of innocence. The camera may “never blink,” but that doesn’t mean what it “sees” can be considered an unadulterated view of reality. As the celebrated communications theorist Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media, 1964) maintained, the information being conveyed is not entirely independent of the method of conveyance.

Am I thus recommending that videotaped interrogation and confession evidence not be used at all in courts of law? No, because my data indicate that when the camera perspective allows for the suspect and interrogator to be viewed equally well, there appears to be no discernible bias associated with the videotaping procedure. Interestingly, this very approach to preventing the point-of-view bias in videotaped confessions has already been established in one country. New Zealand made it a national policy that police interrogations be videotaped from an equal-focus perspective based only on the first study conducted in our research program. With the greater wealth of data that we now have on this topic, I do not hesitate to recommend that a similar policy be adopted in the United States as well as in the other aforementioned countries.

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However, those who must make policy decisions regarding the implementation of the videotape method should not rule out the possibility of directing the camera primarily at the interrogator(s) whom a detained suspect must face. This camera perspective would allow those charged with evaluating the voluntary status of a confession the maximum opportunity to spot coercive influences should they be at work. Although most criminal justice practitioners, and even the average person on the street might condemn this approach as cockeyed, its logic is borne out in the psychological literature. Having the opportunity to literally “put yourself in another’s place” enables one to better appreciate the external forces experienced by that person because those forces are now more “exposed” and thus more likely to be detected.

A real-life case that centers on a disputed videotaped confession was recently brought to my attention. A woman involved in an effort to suppress a coerced “confession” given by her son noted that when her son first viewed the videotape (which focused only on him), he remarked that it did not accurately convey the tension in the room or the demeanor of the interrogator. The woman communicated to me that it is her hope that psychological research “will be instrumental in abolishing the suspect-focus videotaping that currently seems to be the standard.” I couldn’t agree more.

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