Exploring the usefulness of interrogations to obtain confessions Criminology essay
Criminological Theories Biological Theory of Crime The biological or biophysiological theory of crime views human behavior in general and deviance and crime in particular as primarily the result of internal states Schmalleger, 2009. More specifically, the biological perspective, as it was In their research, adults eligible for a jury could not imagine making a false confession, 15 and condoned various forms of police deception during interrogations. thought that law enforcement interrogators are better than ordinary people at identifying lies, believed that they could distinguish real ones from fake ones. Interrogations and confessions are an integral part of the investigative process. Through the interrogation process, law enforcement obtains their confession. However, there are claims that placing more emphasis on obtaining a confession overlooks the truth of the matter. This has led, among other things, to the creation of a narrative account of the crime. Make questions short and concise. Formulate questions in such a way that the suspect can initially give short answers. Avoiding legal or descriptive terminology. Follow the guidelines below when obtaining supporting information from the suspect after he has admitted to committing the crime. In fact, Drizin and Leo 2004 found that while normal confessions were typically obtained after less than two hours of interrogation, interrogations typically resulted in a false confession. Three factors should be considered when determining whether an interviewer's questions would be coercive. The first factor is minimization. Here an interviewer minimizes the suspect's guilt. A good example of this would be if an interviewer tells a suspect that the offense he committed was not serious. This common but incorrect view ignores the risks posed by additional factors that can influence the nature of an interrogation and lead to a false confession, including investigator bias, cultural attitudes about race and crime, the powerful effects of deception by the police on suspects, and characteristics of the suspect and to this end the organizers identified twenty-one of the leading researchers and practitioners in the fields of social psychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology and criminology. In the 1930s, John E. Reid, a polygraph expert and former police officer, and Fred E. Inbau, a lawyer and criminologist, devised an elaborate method of psychological interrogation called.