The passage- Figuring out whether someone is guilty of a crime isn’t a straightforward task. Juries are often asked to reach a verdict in the face of unreliable eyewitness testimony and contradicting evidence. That ambiguity can lead to a shocking number of wrongful convictions, as dissections of high- profile trials in the NPR podcast Serial and the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer reveal.
But when someone confesses, a guilty verdict
seems justified. No suspect would ever admit to a
crime they didn't commit... right? Guess again.
Studies have shown that false confessions
contribute to as much as a quarter of known
wrongful convictions. Now, the latest work
suggests that a good amount of those false confessions may be due to a common interrogation technique: sleep deprivation.
Interrogators sometimes resort to extreme, morally questionable measures to extract criminal confessions, including deafening noise, intense emotional manipulations and withholding food, water and rest.
“Many of these interrogations involve these extreme techniques,” says study coauthor Elizabeth Loftus, a psychology and social behavior professor at the University of California, Irvine. “Given that many people are often interrogated when they are sleepy after long periods of staying up, there is a worry that investigators may be getting bad information from innocent people.”
[5] Around 17 percent of interrogations happen between the normal sleeping hours of midnight and 8:00 a. m. According to previous work, the majority of false confessions pop up after interrogations lasting longer than 12 hours, with many exceeding 24 hours. That suggests plenty of suspects are sleep deprived while they are being questioned.
In the new study, 88 participants were asked to complete a series of trivial computer tasks over the course of three sessions. At the beginning of each session, they were repeatedly warned not to press the "escape" key on the computer keyboard, or all the experimental data would be lost.