Why Would an Innocent Person Confess to a Crime They Did Not Commit?

by Stefanie Collins, Editor at Large
For many observers, the very idea of a false confession is bizarre. Such a confession is both "counterintuitive and self-destructive"; it suggests that an innocent person would willingly submit to punishment. But even if conventional thinking holds that a truly innocent person would not willingly admit to a crime of which he is wrongly accused, research shows that factors ranging from coercion, to fear of increased punishment, to a suspect's mental state,
Consider Christopher Ochoa, who after confessing to a Texas murder, served 12 years in prison before being exonerated.
Ochoa's conviction was overturned because of DNA evidence. However, he also claims that his confession was improperly coerced. According to Ochoa, he was threatened with the death penalty, and only after this did he start falsely admitting to being involved in the murder, fabricating his confession from information police interrogators gave him. In exchange for a better sentence, he testified against another innocent man.

A similarly false confession may exist in the case of Howard Paul Guidry. Guidry was convicted of capital murder in Harris County (Houston), Texas and sentenced to death. Since he arrived on death row, Guidry has fought to get his conviction overturned and to win a new trial. He wants his confession excluded from the body of evidence against him. He claims that the confession, the vital piece of evidence on which the prosecution's case relied, is a false one given involuntarily to Harris County Sheriff's deputies. Federal District Judge Vanessa Gilmore of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Texas, Houston division, has ordered him a new trial.
In reaching this decision, the court held that the behavior of the deputies during Guidry's interrogation violated his constitutional rights to legal representation. According to the court, the deputies repeatedly refused to allow him to see his attorney, even after Guidry invoked his Miranda right to representation. Guidry also asked to see his mother who would be able to contact his court-appointed attorney, who represented him at the time on other charges Guidry faced, but the deputies refused that as well.
According to Guidry, deputies imposed physical and psychological stress during his interrogation to elicit his false confession. Records show that Guidry endured several hours of interrogation during which the deputies repeatedly used racial slurs against him, and told him that they "knew he committed the murder of Farah Fratta". They told him that his only hope of "getting a break" would be to admit to the crime. Guidry claims the deputies told him they would make sure he ended up on death row if he did not confess to the murder. They even went to the trouble of explaining to him how lethal injections work and how he would die, pointing to a place on his arm where the needle would be inserted during his execution.
Guidry's lawyer during his habeas corpus petition, Kenneth Williams, recounts Guidry's confession. He recalls how the deputies interrogating Guidry left near the end of the interrogation after he asked again to see his attorney. They came back several minutes later with a piece of paper. The deputies placed the paper in front of Guidry and told him that they had spoken to his attorney and the attorney had told the deputies that it was alright if Guidry talked to them and that he should take whatever plea the deputies offered him. Under the impression that the attorney thought the best possible option Guidry could hope for was getting less than a death sentence, Guidry then signed the piece of paper they had given him. It was a confession in which Guidry admitted to being hired for $1000 to assist in killing Fratta.
Njeri Shakur of the Houston-based Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement has maintained a relationship with Guidry for the past ten years. In a recent interview, she was asked about Guidry. She explained what led to Guidry's confession to a murder of which, Shakur believes, he is innocent:

The deputies interrogating Guidry exhausted him, holding him in a room for eight hours, and intimidated him. They brandished their revolvers and screamed racial slurs at him. Then, after all that, Howard, they told him that his lawyer, who they never spoke to, had given him 'permission' to confess. They told Howard that he might as well sign the document that they provided him so that he could get a deal and only do 25 years in prison. Instead of taking his chances with a jury and possibly getting the death penalty, Howard, scared, tired, and hopeless, signed the paper he was given. He wanted the interrogation, and the entire ordeal, to be over. An 18 year old boy, scared he would be sentenced to death by a Texas jury, thought the best he could do for a crime he knew nothing about was agree to 25 years in prison.

In Texas, the death penalty hangs over the heads of those accused of murder. In both Guidry's and Ochoa's situations, their confessions followed threats of the death penalty made by police and, according to the men, were given specifically to avoid landing a spot on Texas' death row.
Professor Saul Kassin, a professor of psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts argues that the possibility of escaping death and getting a "lighter" sentence, presented during an interrogation, could understandably reduce, as it did Christopher Ochoa, an innocent man to confessing to a crime in order to receive the lightest punishment possible under the circumstances. Kassin believes that "false confession is an escape hatch. It becomes rational under the circumstances."
And false confessions are not unique to Texas. The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, a blue-ribbon commission formed to study California's criminal justice system and headed by former California Attorney General John K. Van de Camp, released a study on July 25, 2006 which stated that false confession is the second most frequent cause of wrongful convictions.
The commission's research also found that false confessions are many times "extracted from the most vulnerable suspects" such as juveniles and those will mental retardation and illness. However, it also clearly stated that even competent and rational suspects might give false confessions under pressure of coercive interrogation tactics.
The commission recommended that all confessions made to law enforcement officials during "jailhouse" interrogations be audio or video taped. If an audio tape of the confession was not made or cannot be produced at the time of trial, then the jury is instructed to view the confession with caution.
The numbers of exonerations of those who actually confessed to a crime they did not commit may lead to a shift in the common wisdom surrounding confessions. In Christopher Ochoa's case, physical evidence found at the crime scene proved his testimony was false. There are other cases, such as Guidry's, in which the confession is the only piece of evidence tying the accused to the crime. To ensure these confessions are reliable, major non-profit groups working on this issue, such as The Innocence Project at Benjamin N. Cordozo School of Law, advocate mandatory videotaping of all confessions in order to reduce and expose police misconduct.
Those accused of crimes may falsely confess for a wide variety of reasons, such as police coercion and pressure as in the case of Christopher Ochoa, or even to satisfy delusions of self-importance as with acquitted JonBenet Ramsey suspect John Mark Karr. These confessions contradict the common wisdom that assumes that those who confess would not do so unless they were guilty.