This Side of the Line

April 3, 2023·58 min·4 clips

A 2005 study found police officers and college students could not distinguish true confessions from false ones better than chance.

1. Bear Brook: This Side of the Line examines what modern research says about false confessions in Jason Carroll's case. 2. Host Jason Moon presents psychologist Fabiana Alceste, a Butler University professor who studies why innocent people confess. 3. The episode asks why people confess to rape or murder when they did not commit those crimes. 4. In 2005, psychologists videotaped incarcerated men confessing to crimes they had committed and crimes they had not committed. 5. About 60 police officers and about 60 college students judged the confession recordings. 6. Both groups believed they could identify deception, but their accuracy was no better than random guessing. 7. Fabiana says shifting, looking away, mumbling, excessive eye contact, and face-touching are not reliable indicators of lying. 8. She describes the Reed Technique as a method that uses maximization to make denial difficult and minimization to make confession easier. 9. The Reed Technique can increase true confessions while also increasing false confessions among innocent suspects. 10. Children, adolescents, people with intellectual disabilities, and suspects subjected to long interrogations face elevated false-confession risks. 11. Hugh Burton recalls being 16 when he found his mother Keziah Burton stabbed in the neck in their Bronx home. 12. Detectives wrongly believed Hugh had been absent from school and used that mistaken attendance information to support their theory. 13. Hugh says detectives promised family court and access to his father if he confessed that his mother's death was an accident. 14. Interrogators supplied details that Hugh incorporated into a detailed account, a process Fabiana calls contamination. 15. Hugh's confession included police-like phrases such as being stimulated on cocaine and proceeding up a road. 16. Hugh spent 20 years and eight months in prison and was exonerated in 2019 after evidence showed the teacher had checked the wrong date. 17. The episode describes confessions as powerful enough to influence juries, fingerprint examiners, medical examiners, and subsequent police work. 18. Fabiana identifies five red flags in Jason Carroll's interrogations, including duration, age, Karen Carroll's involvement, maximization, and contamination. 19. Listeners interested in interrogation science, wrongful convictions, and forensic evidence may value this episode. 20. Listeners seeking a resolved murder narrative may find the research-focused structure less suitable.

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