Why do the innocent confess to crimes?
Holes have appeared in John Karr's claim that he killed little JonBenet Ramsey. Experts explain why an innocent man might pretend to be guilty.
By Alex Koppelman
Read more: Politics, News, Alex Koppelman
Photos: Reuters/Sukree Sukplang
John Mark Karr is escorted on Thursday from a news conference in Bangkok.
Aug. 18, 2006 | After 10 years, there is now a confession in the murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, one of the most infamous unsolved criminal cases in American history. John Mark Karr, a schoolteacher living in Thailand, has reportedly told U.S. law enforcement officials that he killed Ramsey by accident, that he'd "loved" the 6-year-old. Cable news outlets have responded with blanket coverage.
But already some doubt has been cast on that confession. Karr's ex-wife has come forward to say that Karr was with her in Alabama on the night Ramsey was killed, not in Ramsey's hometown of Boulder, Colo., and Karr's father has told reporters that as far back as 2001 his son lied and said he was being held in connection with the murder. Additionally, the head of Thailand's immigration police -- who, it should be noted, was not present when Karr was questioned -- says Karr told interrogators he had drugged Ramsey, a statement that appears to contradict the official autopsy report, which says no drugs were present in the girl's system. Karr has also reportedly told police that he picked Ramsey up from school the day of the murder, which would not have been possible, given that she was on Christmas break at the time.
Salon spoke with two experts on confessions: Saul Kassin, a professor of psychology at Williams College, who co-wrote the book "Confessions in the Courtroom," and Richard Ofshe, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley who has worked on many of the country's high-profile cases of false confession. Ofshe is currently involved in the cases of the Central Park jogger and Phoenix temple murders.
What are the signs that a confession could be false?
Ofshe: The classic, of course, is that the person is unable to supply information about the crime that it would be reasonable for the perpetrator to have. That's the classic way of weighing a confession. Police are trained to seek information that corroborates the person's 'I did it' statement of the exactly the sort I'm talking about. Usually when there's a very high-profile crime, if police are smart, what they do is not let all the information out. They withhold significant parts of it, especially anomalous things about it, so that when the disturbed call in and say, 'I did it, I did it,' they can be eliminated, because they don't know what kind of mutilation happened to the body, or this, that or the other thing. So there's a pretty straightforward way of handling what one would ordinarily anticipate would be a not uncommon problem.
[Confessing] 10 years after the fact is a little strange. It's an odd set of characteristics, in the sense that why would someone who committed the crime 10 years later decide to step forward? If he didn't just step forward, what is it that led police to him? Did he just voluntarily give the statement, or did he have to be interrogated? That is, was there resistance to be overcome? These are all things that we would need to know before we could even begin to think about or evaluate any kind of statement.
What about body language, tone of voice, anything like that?
That's bullshit. That's spelled b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t. Bullshit. That's nonsense.
Sure, if you know somebody really well, you can pick up on the fact that something's bothering them. My wife does it with me all the time. Children are usually pretty transparent. But how you tell the difference between an adult who is upset because of reason A and an adult who is upset because of reason B, I don't really know.
Police are forever thinking that during the course of an interrogation somebody looks like they're upset. That of course leads them to think that the person they're interrogating is showing guilt, but they can't tell the difference between someone showing guilt and someone showing distress because of something they didn't do. All the research shows that, if anything, the more training you've got to read body language the worse you are at it. There's a study by a guy named [Paul] Ekman, who's acknowledged as the guy who studies this, and he showed that law enforcement officers who were given training in reading body language were less likely to be accurate than people with no training, people who weren't even law enforcement. It just misleads them. Except for the grossest sort of circumstances where you don't need any training to see that someone's upset, to make fine discriminations, it just can't be done.
Next page: "As far as explaining what causes miscarriages of justice, false confession may be the No. 1 cause"
