August 18, 2025 • 42 mins
Today we’re sharing a podcast episode with all of you that we think you’ll love: it’s called “False Confessions: How to Break the Mind" from Amanda Knox’s podcast “Hard Knox”.
For years, Amanda Knox blamed herself for the false confession she gave to Italian police during the muder investigation of her roommate. Now, nearly 20 years later, exonerated and living safely in the US, she’s conducting her own kind of interrogation: into the surprisingly routine police conduct that leads innocent people to confess to crimes.
Content note: This episode contains mentions of murder and sexual violence, including brief but graphic descriptions.
Listen to Maya’s two Slight Change of Plans interviews with Amanda Knox:
“Is Amanda Knox Finally Free?”
“Amanda Knox Knows What You’re Thinking”
For more episodes of “Hard Knox,” visit https://www.amandaknox.com/hardknox, or search for it wherever you listen to podcasts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin hay Slight Changers. It's Maya. You may have listened
to our recent episodes with Amanda Knox. If you didn't,
here's a quick recap. Amanda was just twenty years old
when she was found guilty of a murder she did
not commit. She spent four years in an Italian prison
(00:36):
before being exonerated. She details that experience in her latest
memoir and on her podcast, Hard Knocks. On her show,
she takes some of the most painful lessons she's learned
from her experience with a criminal justice system and explores
them with other exonarees, psychologists, and justice experts. It's gripping
and often heartbreaking, a necessary listen for people interested in
(00:58):
these issues. Today, I'm sharing an episode with you of
Hard Knocks formerly known as Labyrinths. The episode is called
False Confessions How to Break the Mind. It's about how
ordinary people, often vulnerable or scared, can be convinced to
say things that simply aren't true, and how these moments
can lead to wrongful imprisonment. It's a fascinating listen and
(01:21):
got me thinking about the conditions that can make someone
doubt their own truth. And a quick note. This episode
includes mentions of murder and sexual violence, including some brief
but graphic descriptions, so please take care while listening.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I did start to lose my grip on understanding what
reality was, like what was really going on, because not
only had they been showing me these horrible pictures and
showing me that I had two people making statements against me,
but then they also started saying, well, we found evidence
in your vehicle and this and that, which in my
brain I'm like, well, I know that's not true because
(01:58):
I didn't do anything. But they're saying they found evidence, Like, how,
what the fuck is going on? Am I being framed?
Am I in some weird dream or something?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Like?
Speaker 4 (02:07):
What the fuck is happening?
Speaker 5 (02:10):
Feeling lost?
Speaker 6 (02:11):
Then you're in the right place.
Speaker 5 (02:13):
I'm Amanda Knox and I'm Christopher Robinson and this is
false Confessions a Labyrinth miniseries.
Speaker 6 (02:26):
That was Jason Strong and in nineteen ninety nine, at
the age of twenty four, he was brought into an
interrogation room for questioning regarding the murder of an unidentified
woman found in a forest preserve near North Chicago. Jason
confessed to the police that he had picked up the
woman taken her to the motel where he lived, and
that he and two friends had whipped her, poured molten
(02:49):
wax on her, bashed her head in with a bottle
of tequila, and then left her for dead in the forest.
Speaker 5 (02:55):
Jason was charged with first degree murder and sentenced to
forty six years in prison. He served fifteen until a
conviction integrity unit had the woman's autopsy re examined. Three
medical experts in independently verified that the woman had been
dead for days before her body was found, which proved
(03:15):
that Jason's confession could not have been true. What led
him to confess in the first place.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
The police didn't physically beat him to coerce that confession.
They didn't have to. They had other methods at their disposal,
and many of them can be grouped into what you
might simply call bullying with Jason Strong that began long
before he entered the interrogation room.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
So I was a bit of a mess. I was
definitely not a saint. I worked in an adult bookstore,
lived in a shady ass hotel next to it. I
abused drugs and alcohol. I was a very lost young person.
I'd gone through a lot in my life that just
led me down wrong paths. But because of that, it
drew the attention of a particular police officer that ended
(04:04):
up having a grudge against me and wanted to make
me suffer. He focused on me and started coming around
asking me if I knew things about drug dealers or
people that were selling and doing drugs. I'd always tell
him I don't know anything, and he wanted me to
be a snitch. And one day when he came around
asking those similar questions, and this had been after months
of him harassing me. He'd see me on the road,
(04:26):
pull me over, et cetera, and he would tell me, look,
if you don't cooperate with me, I'll make your life
a living hell. But that morning he knocked on my door,
He's like, can I come in. I'm like, I want
none to do with you, right, And he's like this
is about a murder investigation, and that scared me, so I'm.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
Like, oh fuck.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
You know, like, okay, you know what do you want
to know? They were trying to identify the victim because
it had been two weeks since they found this body.
But thankfully my boss at the time saw he was there,
came over and intervened he left, and I didn't think
much more of it. I thought, well, I didn't do anything,
so he's just harassing me like usual. But then that night,
while I was hanging out with my girlfriend and one
(05:03):
of her friends, we'd been drinking and smoking a little weed,
and I get a knock on the door and I
open it up and it's a bunch of cops with
gun shoved in my face. They pushed into my room,
threw me down, threw handcuffs on me, and started my
fifteen year nightmare. And that's the thing, like when we're
talking false confessions, it's not just what happens in the
(05:24):
interrogation room, it's how the whole thing starts. That initial
arrest is traumatic.
Speaker 5 (05:29):
Oh my god, Jason.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
It's a terrifying thing. And you know, my girlfriend's freaking out.
That adds more chaos. You're confused with what's going on.
I was under the influence, so that didn't help. And
so all that builds all the way to the police station.
Speaker 6 (05:46):
Jason was already exhausted by the time he arrived at
the police station. They arrested him at eleven o'clock at night.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
So I was already kind of going on little sleep
as it was because the night before I'd been out
with my girlfriend and you know, I maybe got five
hours of sleep within a forty eight hour window, and
then I was under the influence. So when they came
and got me, I was exhausted, confused, scared, had been
drinking and smoking.
Speaker 5 (06:13):
This made him even more vulnerable to another common form
of police pressure inducing exhaustion.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
And then when I'm in an interrogation room, it wasn't
like you know, they came in and said, hey, can
you tell us about this? And when I didn't know anything,
they left me alone. No, it went on all night
into the early morning hours. When you're put in that
interrogation room as an innocent person, your first thought is, well,
I didn't do anything wrong, so I want to cooperate
with the police. But by time you learned that they're
(06:42):
not your friend, it's too late. You're already in a
deep well and you can't get out. You'd feel trapped,
as if there's no safety net for you whatsoever, you know,
and they just keep going at you, going at you.
But I had two other cops that did the start
of the interrogation, and then when they left, two other
ones came in and they just kept going back and
forth all through the night, and like they would leave
(07:05):
and then as soon as I'd laid my head down,
or if they'd come right back again and start on
me again.
Speaker 6 (07:11):
This relentlessness is a form of withholding, withholding rest, sleep,
bathroom breaks, withholding quiet, or a moment to think and
collect your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Didn't let me have medication because I was on anxiety
and depression medication. Didn't let me have that, didn't let
me have access to an attorney, didn't let me have
access to a phone call until after I'd given them
what they'd wanted.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
And the longer they withhold these things, the greater the
pressure becomes.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
The average interrogation and these metrics come both out of
the UK and the US, lasts for about thirty minutes
to an hour, most interrogations up to two hours, the
vast majority up to four hours. When you look at
the database of wrongful convictions involving false confessions, suddenly those
(07:59):
numbers are up in the double digits. Now they're ten,
twelve to fifteen to twenty hour interrogations. Everybody has a
breaking point.
Speaker 6 (08:07):
That's saulcassenrofessor of psychology, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
who you heard from in episode one.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
I mean, over time, you get tired, you get fatigued,
you may be sleep deprived. Sometimes this timeframe involves not
sleeping through the night. You may get hungry, And importantly,
people don't quite understand we have social needs as well.
Speaker 6 (08:32):
That social need was particularly strong from Marty Tankliffe, whose
case will explore more fully in a later episode.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
You know, he's being interrogated about killing his parents, which
he didn't do when he's been exonerated for At one point,
he says, can I just go to the hospital and
be with my family? His father was in the emergency
room in a coma, not till we're done here. He
had a strong need, as strong as a need for
food and sleep. They wouldn't satisfy it until we're done here.
(09:02):
And I've seen that over and over again. The need
to check in with the people in your life powerful.
I see sometimes particularly in cases involving juveniles, where you know,
my mother doesn't know where I am. Can I call
her and tell her what's going on?
Speaker 6 (09:18):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (09:19):
I kept asking to call my mom and they said
that I couldn't until they were done.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Oh that happened to you.
Speaker 6 (09:25):
I mean, at one point her phone was on the
table and her mom was calling. Do not know this, Like,
the phone was on the table, it was ringing, and
her mom was calling, wondering where she was, and they
wouldn't let her answer the phone. And in fact, they
had tapped her phone, and they knew that Eda was
on the way to Roam to come to her rescue,
(09:46):
and that as soon as she got there, Amanda would
have that familial support.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
Can you imagine the stress Not only is your mother calling,
but you're not answering, and now you're worrying about your
mother or what she's thinking, and all of that accumulates
and kind of bombard you to the point where you
just you got to get out of here. You got
to stop this. You got to collect your thoughts. And
you know, your case is a good example because they
(10:12):
induced you at one five and then at five forty
five am into signing an Italian written confession. But as
soon as the pressure of the moment was lifted, you
sat down and wrote a retraction of those confessions. You
needed to collect your thoughts, and when you're in the
interrogation room for hours, you don't really have an opportunity
(10:35):
to do that.
Speaker 6 (10:37):
This kind of physical and social withholding is already exhausting enough,
but on top of that, the police have a further
form of bullying, repetition and contradiction. The accusation is repeated
ad nauseum, and the suspects protestations of innocence are contradicted
ad nauseum.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
An American style confrontational interrogation brings people in, presumably vets
them by some interview that can tell whether they're lying
or tell the truth. They immediately launched into an accusation
of guilt, and that accusation of guilt is made with confidence,
(11:18):
with certainty. If the suspect begins to deny any involvement,
they overcome those denials. They argue with those denials. They
sometimes threaten against those denials.
Speaker 5 (11:30):
You can see this with the case of Eddie Lowry,
who in nineteen eighty one was a twenty two year
old soldier stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas. He was
accused and coerced into confessing to the rape of a
seventy four year old woman. A key part of breaking
him down was simply refusing to accept his claims of innocence.
(11:50):
For hours on end.
Speaker 7 (11:52):
I kept tom I didn't do this. And this went
on for about seven hours. I didn't get no water,
I didn't get no breaks, I didn't get no food,
and I'm just sitting there taking all this abuse from them,
and I'm telling him I didn't commit a crime. Until
they had me so broken down. I had my arms
folded on the desk and my forehead was on my arms,
(12:13):
and I'm crying and I'm trying to tell them I.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
Didn't do this.
Speaker 6 (12:16):
We'll return to Eddie's case later, but you can see
that same pattern at play with the police who interrogated
Jason Strong.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
It didn't matter what I said. They would just keep
going and going and going, because their training teaches them that.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
It's basically, no matter what you say in that interrogation room,
it's a sign of guilt. If you're too quiet, well
it's because you're guilty. If you're too verbal, it's because
you're guilty. If you're agitated, it's because you're guilty. Everything
is a sign of guilt. I started getting angry, and
I was cussing at them and saying, you know, fuck you,
why aren't you listening to me? I didn't do anything
that was a sign of guilt. That was my violent
(12:52):
nature coming out Later, when I broke down and I
was sobbing and crying, they said, well, that was a
sign of my guilt. I was showing my regret and
horror of what I had done. And it's like nothing
you say matters to them. It's all a sign of
guilt because they've already got you pegged, and that's what
they want.
Speaker 6 (13:10):
This tactic is common because it works. Here's false confessions
expert Steve Drissen, who you heard from last episode.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
It's not about whether or not you did this crime.
It's about why you committed this crime. And every time
the suspect tries to assert their innocence, they interrupt them
or they say, we're not here to discuss your innocence.
That's off the table.
Speaker 5 (13:35):
That relentless pattern of interruption and contradiction serves to bully
the suspect into compliance.
Speaker 8 (13:42):
The interrogation becomes very repetitive because it's about accusation, denial, confrontation.
Speaker 6 (13:49):
That's false confessions. Expert Richard Leo, Professor of Law and
Psychology at the University of San Francisco.
Speaker 8 (13:56):
So they accuse the suspect of committing the crime. They
expect the person to deny. They cut off their denials,
they reaccuse them, they tell him why they believe the
person is lying. I'm trying to be as concise as
I can, but that that's kind of a thumbnail structure
of how interrogation works, trying to break the person down,
(14:19):
overcome their denials, and move them to stop saying I
didn't do it, and start saying I did do it.
Speaker 5 (14:26):
But this exhaustion and endless repetition is just the beginning.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Well, and it's the threats too, you know, like you
got you got one cop that's saying, hey, you're going
to go to prison the rest of your life. You're
going to be raped and brutalized and beaten, and you
you have all these images in your head and stuff
you've seen in movies, and hear these cops trying to
tell you they don't think you're innocent, and they just
keep railing on you over and over and it's like
what the fuck man, and you just lose your mind.
(14:53):
It's an it's an emotional overload. It really is.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
One of the things that scared me the most when
I was interrogated at the age of twenty was the
threat of spending thirty years in prison. The idea of
that was so terrifying I could barely comprehend it. But
while one officer was screaming that threat at me, another
was speaking in gentler tones, but no less coercive. Just
(15:42):
tell us what happened and this will all be over.
You can go back to Raphael, you can call your mom.
Good cop, bad cop, the carrot and the stick. You've
probably seen such tactics dramatized on cop shows, and it's
one thing that they get right because a lot of
the exoneries I've met who are coerced into false confessions
(16:05):
describe this alternation of hard and soft power.
Speaker 9 (16:10):
If you don't comply with me, they're going to find
you somewhere out in the alley, and nobody's going to
know what happened to you.
Speaker 6 (16:20):
That's Johnny Hincopier, who you met in episode one, wrongly
convicted of the subway murder in New York City.
Speaker 9 (16:27):
He just kept on saying things like that. He's saying,
if you don't work with me, you're going to go
to prison for the rest of your life, you know.
So who do you think they're gonna believe.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
You or me?
Speaker 6 (16:39):
And as with Amanda, the carrot was the promise of going.
Speaker 9 (16:42):
Home, and he said again, do you want to go home?
Because I can have somebody drive you home immediately.
Speaker 8 (16:50):
He kept on.
Speaker 9 (16:51):
Saying that I can have somebody take you home immediately.
If you memorize the story and you repeat this story
to somebody else, and I'm going to introduce you to
I'm going to take you home. I guarantee you I'm
going to take you home.
Speaker 5 (17:05):
The story that Johnny memorized sent him to prison for
two twenty five years. But the thing is he believed
he was going home after signing those statements. So did
the Central Park five. They all expected to go home
after their confessions. So did I. Even when they put
(17:26):
me in handcuffs and took me to prison, I still
thought I was just a witness, and I believed the
police when they told me they were taking me somewhere
from my own protection. It was days later, when I
was officially charged with murder that it hit me that
I was not going home anytime soon. How is it
(17:47):
that people could confess to serious crimes like murder and
yet still believe they would be released once the interrogation stopped.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Suggest James, over time convey to the suspect that if
they confess to one of these scenarios that leniency will follow.
And all of these scenarios are pitted against You're a monster,
You're cold and remorseless, and if you don't confess to this,
(18:24):
I'm going to have to tell the district attorney that
you don't care at all about the victim. And imagine
yourself who you'd rather be when this case comes to trial,
and who do you think the judge is going to
feel more sensitive to. Who are they going to care
(18:45):
more about when it comes time for you to face
the music. So over time, these tactics wear down a
suspect to a place of hopelessness where they just give
up and they just say, I'm going to accept this explanation.
Sometimes they do it because they just figure, look, I
got to get out of this room. And once I
(19:07):
get out of this room, I'll talk to my lawyer,
I'll talk to my loved ones. Everybody will recognize that
this confession is false. And the truth of the matter
is is that people don't recognize that you know, and
their goose is cooked.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
That's why so many false confessors report that after they confessed,
they didn't realize they were going to be arrested. They
had no idea. In some cases they thought they were
going to go home. In the case, I just looked
at you know, the young woman said, is this going
to go on my record? And again the courts allow
it because it's not an explicit promise. I'm not saying
(19:50):
confess and go home. But as sure as hell is implied,
and any average person that reads it comes home with
that conclusion.
Speaker 6 (19:58):
The promise of leniency and the threat of serious consequences
each become more effective the more they are used. In alternation,
which installed Casson's words, increases the stress associated with denial
while reducing the stress associated with confessions. The suspect is
badgered by a two pronged attack sure to produce psychological whiplash.
(20:20):
You can see this in the case of Eddie Lowry,
whom you heard from earlier.
Speaker 7 (20:25):
He's the one telling me that he would help me.
He'd give me through this, give me the help I needed.
He would talk to the judge by just come clean.
And again I'm denying this. I'm telling him I didn't
commit this crime. There's nothing I can tell you, and
then he would get tired of it, and then he
walked out, and then the other detective would come in,
and then he was putting his finger in my face,
(20:45):
telling me, I know you committed this crime. We're going
to find you guilty of this crime. If we had
the death penalty and she had died, we'd be asking
the death penalty on you, and telling me what a
horrible person I was, what a monster I was for
committing this crime, and that I needed to come clean
and confess to this crime. He was bringing up things
about my sister being raped. He was bring up stuff
(21:09):
about my brother being killed, and just stuff that was
really affected me emotionally besides being accused of this crime.
Speaker 6 (21:18):
The threats gradually ratchet up over the course of the interrogation.
You can see that in the case of Christopher Ochoa.
Speaker 10 (21:25):
I was twenty two years old. I lived in Austin, Texas.
At the time. I was working at a rocal pizza hut,
and I was just a typical kid just to enjoin
my life. I was about to enroll in college.
Speaker 6 (21:38):
It was October of nineteen eighty eight when a woman
who worked at a pizza hut was assaulted during an
early morning robbery. She was tied up with her bra
raped and shot in the head.
Speaker 10 (21:48):
I woke up and I had turned on the news
and there was the first coverage of this murder sort
of crime that happened. It was a shock, a little scary,
you know, because at that time I was a prep
cook at another pizza hut. After a week, do you
(22:08):
reopened the pizza hut after the crime scene investigation. One
of my roommates he was gonna give me a ride home.
So he's driving me home and then he says he
wants to pull over at the pizza hut where his
crime happened. I didn't really want to, so he drove
up to the pizza hut said, come on, let's just
go in there and we'll have a beer. I didn't
feel comfortable, so I just went along with it. I
(22:31):
went into the pizza hut with him. They had places
of security guard outside of the door. He ordered two
beers to raise the toast to the memory of the victory.
Speaker 6 (22:42):
To me, I found that kind of out, so did
whoever saw them there. For the next Friday. Well, Christopher
Ochoa was working the morning shift at his pizza hut.
Two detectives came in looking for him.
Speaker 10 (22:53):
A big white detective and a female Hispanic detective. They
wanted to ask me questions about a birdery. So I
was already a suspect, twenty two years old. I was
still trusting law enforcement. They asked me, do you mind
coming to the station.
Speaker 5 (23:09):
Did they say anything to you in the car.
Speaker 10 (23:11):
My curiosity got the best of me because I thought
it was about the murder, and it was, but obviously
they're in this little game. No, it's about a burglary.
And they asked me, how come you're asking about the
murder about the murderer, right, and so well, I'm just curious.
(23:32):
The big white detective took me to what I know
now is in the interrogation room. He walks me to
this room, he closes the door, he leaves, will be
right with you. No clocks, just that window that they have.
And that detective. I didn't see him for a bit anymore.
All of a sudden, here comes uh, the Mexican American
(23:55):
detective Chicano. He busts in the door. His name is Polonco,
Detective Polunco, Hector Polunco, the very first thing he told
me when he walks in. Do you know what they
called me out in the street. I had no idea
I wasn't you know, he says in Spanish, I am
the boogeyman. They call me the boogeyman. Obviously register of
(24:18):
blank stare because it didn't mean anything to me. So
he walks out, and then walks the good cut detective Malaysia,
and he walks in and he says, look, man, my
partner's a hot head.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
You know.
Speaker 10 (24:33):
Just tell us what you know, right, and you'll be
able to go home. You know, we'll let you go home. Look, sir,
if I knew, I will tell you. But I don't
know anything. I would I would not. I don't know
a damn thing about. So he walks out, and then
it comes home, unquot again, yelling at me, you looked
at it, my arms, grabbing my arms, a little, lying
(24:55):
to me, And I didn't know what he was talking
about because I didn't do anything. But he kept on
yelling at me. If you know who did it, If
you don't tell me, you're gonna get charged with the
capital murder, and you you get you can get the
death penance. You would walk out, Malaysia would walk back
in and he says, look all you guys, just tell us,
(25:18):
you know, he walks out. Pol uncle comes in. This
is a long interrogation. It was about twelve thirteen hours.
At some point he walks in. He grabs my arm.
Pass my arm. This is where the needle's going to
go if you don't cooperate. This is where they're going
to put that catch you. And I'm gonna make sure
(25:40):
I'm there. I'm gonna make sure i'm there to watch you.
Speaker 6 (26:01):
The bullying, the exhaustion, the promises and threats. If these
aren't enough to break the suspect, the police have an
even more at their disposal.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Lies have been a regular part of police interrogations since
interrogations have, you know, become critical parts of a state's case,
and police officers lie with impunity. And typically the lies
that are most dangerous are lies that.
Speaker 6 (26:34):
Are about evidence, right, Steve Drissen, Director of the Center
on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
When a suspect feels that the evidence against them is
overwhelming and a law enforcement officer is telling them that
it's overwhelming, even though the suspect knows that they're innocent.
It creates such a sense of confusion and disorientation in
(27:03):
the suspect that it becomes easier to manipulate them right.
You know, sometimes it's so overwhelming that the suspect actually
comes to believe that they might have committed this crime.
They begin to doubt their own memory.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
That's what's known as an internalized false confession. It's what
happened to me during my interrogation, and it's the hardest
kind of false confession for most people to understand. We'll
return to that phenomenon later.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
So these kinds of lies are probably the cudgel that
brings suspects down to a place of hopelessness, very very
quickly during the course of the interrogation. They're an extremely
powerful tactic in interrogations. We lionize detectives who trick suspects
(27:59):
into confessing. You know, I'll never forget this episode of
The Wire where a detective hooks up a suspect to
a copy machine and he fills the paper unbeknownst to
the suspect. The paper rack with true and false and
(28:20):
true and false, and when the suspect answers a question,
the word false comes up. When he presses the button
on the copy machine to print out paper, and suspect
thinks it's acting like a lie detective machine and ultimately confess.
And these guys are like, we do anything we need
(28:41):
to do in order to get these suspects.
Speaker 6 (28:43):
That's just scrappy police work.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
That's exactly right. These detectives come heroic for solving these
cases with lies, but we know that it's not necessary
and that when you do that, it increases the risk
of false confessions.
Speaker 6 (29:05):
Most people don't realize that it's entirely legal for the
police to lie to you. You can face criminal charges
for lying to the police, but police deception during interrogations
was sanctioned by the Supreme Court in Fraser v. Cup
in nineteen sixty nine, and to this day, many police
claim that lying is an essential tool of conducting investigations.
Speaker 11 (29:27):
We have all been in situations where we feel like
we don't have any other options, we feel cornered. Maybe
we haven't had the experience of being interrogated, but we
have all had the feeling of this person isn't listening
to me. No matter how I say it, it's not
getting through.
Speaker 6 (29:43):
That's Lara Zarowski, Executive and Policy director of the Washington
Innocence Project.
Speaker 11 (29:48):
Survival instincts kick in, you really want to make sense
of it. And so one of the very clearly most
common interrogation tactics that will lead someone to a false
confession is changing their reality by lying about the context.
So again, it's about context. The context matters. And I
have to talk about Ted brad when I talk about
(30:10):
the choice to make a wrongful conviction, because his case
was the one that, even though I'd been in the
work for years and had actually gone to law school
because of a case of wrongful conviction that involved a
false confession, I was so convinced that this happens. And
yet I don't think I really understood, like truly where
it landed with me. That I was like, I would
(30:31):
have done the same thing. And that was because Ted
Bradford was in Yakima, Washington. He was being interrogated for
a single perpetrator sexual assault that happened in this small
town that he lived in. He was being interrogated and
they kept telling him we know it was you, we
have the evidence from the crime scene. Your goose is cooked.
(30:52):
There's no way you're getting out of here until you
tell us quote unquote the truth.
Speaker 6 (30:56):
Here's how Ted Bradford described it himself when testifying earlier
this year and from the Washington State Legislature in support
of a bill to ban police deception during interrogations.
Speaker 12 (31:07):
To begin with, when they asked me to sign a
Miranda waiver, I asked them, well, do I need an attorney,
and they said, probably not, We're just going to ask
you a few questions. So I signed the waiver of
my rights and from there it was just nine and
(31:28):
a half hours of constant badgering accusations. I was told
that there was evidence that the crime scene left by
the perpetrator, and that when they tested that, they said,
it's going to prove that you did it, so you
might as well confess. I knew I was innocent, and
(31:51):
the only way I could see out of that situation,
because believe me, that's all I wanted was to be
out of that room and out of that interrogation.
Speaker 6 (32:02):
So that was my light of hope there. I thought, just.
Speaker 12 (32:07):
Give them the statement, give them what they want. Now
they'll test that evidence that they claimed was at the
crime scene, and this will all be over.
Speaker 11 (32:15):
He was so worried about his job and he was
so convinced based on what they said that if he
just told them he did it, that they would let
him go, and that there was DNA at the crime scene,
so they were going to test it and realize that
they had made a mistake. And this was in nineteen
ninety six, So keep in mind, in nineteen ninety six,
DNA technology was fledgling, and it was new, but even
(32:35):
ted new. I mean, the first DNA exoneration was in
nineteen eighty nine, so this had not been that long. Yeah,
but even then, he understood, if you've got physical evidence
from the crime scene, you're going to know it wasn't
me because I was at work right, right, And so
he made a calculated choice based on what he believed
his options and the reality of the situation to be.
Speaker 12 (32:55):
Several weeks later, I found out that the testing of
the crime scene evidence was inconclusive. They'd lied about the
suspect's biological evidence being left at the scene.
Speaker 11 (33:08):
And if he had been told the truth, if they
had used rapport building techniques, if they had not terrified
him into and also you know, let him sleep, given
him food, if they had done all of those things,
they never would have gotten the false confession that put
him in prison for eleven years for something he didn't do,
and require him to register as a sex offender and
(33:30):
allow the actual perpetrator to go free. They would have
not been stuck on that investigative trail and frankly given
up on their investigation because they got their confession. So
all analysis stops there, and that isn't good for justice.
It's not good for victims. It's certainly not good for
Ted Bradford and his family. But at the end of
the day, it completely defeats the purpose of our entire system,
(33:51):
all because they decided to use deceptive tactics because they
wanted him to confess, and he did.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
In my own interrogation, the police lied to me about
several things. They told me they had hard evidence that
I was at my house the night of the murder,
a lie such evidence existed. They told me I was
just a witness when I was in fact a suspect.
They had been tapping my phone for days. They told
(34:18):
me Raphael had retracted my alibi, saying I wasn't with
him the night of the murder. This was particularly destabilizing
because I just couldn't imagine why he would lie about that.
That's because I couldn't imagine that they had coerced him
with the same lies they were telling me. And worst
of all, I couldn't imagine that the police, who I
(34:41):
was raised to trust and respect, who I was depending
on for my safety in the wake of my roommate's
murder while a killer was on the loose, I could
not fathom that they would lie to me. All of this,
compounded by the bullying, exhaustion, promises, and threats, reshaped my
(35:02):
sense of reality and made it hard to know what
was true and what wasn't, including my own memories.
Speaker 4 (35:10):
I had a number of conversations with judges several years ago,
and I was talking about why it's so dangerous to
lie to a suspect about evidence false confessions.
Speaker 6 (35:22):
Expert Saul Cassen.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
And I see this all the time. You know, we
have cell phone records that are pinging your phone at
the crime scene at that time, which is a lie.
Or you failed the polygraph, the light detective test, which
is science if it's a lie. Or we found hair
in the victim's grasp and we matched it to your
(35:44):
hair and it's a lie. I was trying to explain
to these judges that is psychologically coercive, that form of
deception can lead somebody to confess. And I wasn't understanding
what they weren't understanding until one judge articulated it this way.
She said, I just don't understand how lying breaks their will.
(36:08):
And I took a deep breath and realized, oh, you
think this is about breaking the will, This is also
about loosening their grip on reality.
Speaker 5 (36:19):
The polygraph test is especially problematic in this regard. First
of all, it's a pseudoscientific and unreliable indicator of deception. Rather,
it measures physiological signs of arousal or stress. But polygraph
examiners and many suspects believe it works. This means that
(36:40):
examiners suffering from confirmation bias may read signs of deception
that aren't there, and if a suspect believes it's a
scientifically reliable tool, being told they failed the test can
be deeply destabilizing. Polygraph examiners also go out of their
way to convince suspects that the polygraph is infallible. Selcassen
(37:03):
explains in his book Duped that they will even resort
to trickery to do so, asking the subject to pick
a card from the deck and then to lie or
tell the truth in response to a question about that card.
Using the con of marked cards, the examiner gets to
impress the subject with an accurate true false judgment that
(37:25):
makes the news that they've failed the polygraph test often
a lie itself all the more distressing.
Speaker 7 (37:32):
Looked at me and said, mister Lowry, my test has
showing me that you're lying. I said, lying, How am
I lying? I told you the truth about everything. He goes, well,
the test says you're lying. He goes, listen, if you
tell me the truth right now, you admit that that
you did this, I'll talk to the two detectives and
they'll go easy on you. And I said, look, I
(37:54):
go I didn't commit this crime. I don't know what
you're talking about. I've told you the truth about everything,
and I'm innocent. And he walked out, got to two detectives.
They came back in and got me and put me
back into that interrogation room, and that's when things really
went downhill.
Speaker 6 (38:09):
Perhaps the most egregious use of the you failed the
polygraph lie was in the wrongful conviction of Christopher Tapp
in nineteen ninety six, over sixty hours of interrogation, the
police staged seven sham polygraph tests, telling Tap that he
failed each one. As Saul Cassen put it, in each instance,
(38:29):
the objective was to bring his story more into line
with the newly discovered evidence.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
Why about the evidence and suspects get disoriented and confused
and they're not so sure anymore what happened or didn't happen.
Investigators are trained that in order to bolster the accusation
of guilt, made with certainty, and overcome the objections and denials,
you need to point to the evidence you have, let
(38:55):
the suspect know we have evidence, and that breaks the
suspect down into a state of despair.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Great.
Speaker 4 (39:02):
If you have evidence, I have no problem with that.
But here's the next step. If you don't have eviden
you're allowed to manufacture it. You're allowed to lie about
it and pretend that you do. And the US courts
don't see a problem with that. And there's the difference.
We're not just allowed in this country to confront suspects
(39:25):
with real evidence. We're allowed to make it up. And
sometimes that is particularly powerful, potent evidence. I think you're familiar.
For example of the case of Marty Tankliff, accused of
killing his parents. Well, they came in and said, to Marty,
we just spoke with the hospital. Your father has regained consciousness.
(39:45):
He said, you did this, and Marty was agast. Lies
like that. I've seen them in cases in which the
suspect was thirteen and fourteen. You bring in a kid,
you lie about the evidence repeatedly, you lie more than once.
The lies are big lies, not small lies. And some
(40:09):
some times you even cite the person in their life
they trust most. Now stop and ask yourself this question,
and that's okay. The courts think that's okay. And of
course they've been there for hours and they're under stress,
so that doesn't help. And that's one of the tactics
that is horrific and needs to be banned. And the
(40:32):
good news is about six or eight states now in
the last three years have banned the presentation of false
evidence to minors. Nice first step, but should only be
considered a first step because that same tactic can have
that same effect on adults.
Speaker 6 (40:51):
Believe it or not, these forms of psychological coercion aren't
just happening unofficially or because the police don't know any better.
They're actually part of the manual. In the next episode
of False Confessions, we'll explore the problematic gospel of interrogation
practices the read tech meek, which has influenced interrogations around
(41:12):
the world for more than fifty years.
Speaker 5 (41:14):
In the meantime, get lost with us. Find us on
Blue Sky at Amanda Knox dot com.
Speaker 6 (41:21):
At wyscracker dot bsky dot.
Speaker 5 (41:23):
Social, on Instagram at Amamanox at mccarbon. You can learn
more about our work and how to support it at
Amanda Knox dot com and listen. We just need you
to come clean here. We know you love Labyrinths. We
know you want to leave us a five star review.
Don't make this harder than it has to be.
Speaker 6 (41:44):
False Confessions, a Labyrinths mini series, is brought to you
by Knox Robinson Productions. This episode was written and produced
by us along with our managing producer Andre Sapp and
our production assistant Charlie Darnell. Our theme music is by
Josh Budo Karp.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
That was the podcast Hard Knocks. If you like what
you heard, you can find more episodes wherever you get
your podcasts. One last note, the slight Change Family is
taking Labor Day off this year, so we'll be back
in your feed with a new episode on September eighth.
Speaker 5 (42:15):
See you then,
Pushkin hay Slight Changers. It's Maya. You may have listened
to our recent episodes with Amanda Knox. If you didn't,
here's a quick recap. Amanda was just twenty years old
when she was found guilty of a murder she did
not commit. She spent four years in an Italian prison
(00:36):
before being exonerated. She details that experience in her latest
memoir and on her podcast, Hard Knocks. On her show,
she takes some of the most painful lessons she's learned
from her experience with a criminal justice system and explores
them with other exonarees, psychologists, and justice experts. It's gripping
and often heartbreaking, a necessary listen for people interested in
(00:58):
these issues. Today, I'm sharing an episode with you of
Hard Knocks formerly known as Labyrinths. The episode is called
False Confessions How to Break the Mind. It's about how
ordinary people, often vulnerable or scared, can be convinced to
say things that simply aren't true, and how these moments
can lead to wrongful imprisonment. It's a fascinating listen and
(01:21):
got me thinking about the conditions that can make someone
doubt their own truth. And a quick note. This episode
includes mentions of murder and sexual violence, including some brief
but graphic descriptions, so please take care while listening.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I did start to lose my grip on understanding what
reality was, like what was really going on, because not
only had they been showing me these horrible pictures and
showing me that I had two people making statements against me,
but then they also started saying, well, we found evidence
in your vehicle and this and that, which in my
brain I'm like, well, I know that's not true because
(01:58):
I didn't do anything. But they're saying they found evidence, Like, how,
what the fuck is going on? Am I being framed?
Am I in some weird dream or something?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Like?
Speaker 4 (02:07):
What the fuck is happening?
Speaker 5 (02:10):
Feeling lost?
Speaker 6 (02:11):
Then you're in the right place.
Speaker 5 (02:13):
I'm Amanda Knox and I'm Christopher Robinson and this is
false Confessions a Labyrinth miniseries.
Speaker 6 (02:26):
That was Jason Strong and in nineteen ninety nine, at
the age of twenty four, he was brought into an
interrogation room for questioning regarding the murder of an unidentified
woman found in a forest preserve near North Chicago. Jason
confessed to the police that he had picked up the
woman taken her to the motel where he lived, and
that he and two friends had whipped her, poured molten
(02:49):
wax on her, bashed her head in with a bottle
of tequila, and then left her for dead in the forest.
Speaker 5 (02:55):
Jason was charged with first degree murder and sentenced to
forty six years in prison. He served fifteen until a
conviction integrity unit had the woman's autopsy re examined. Three
medical experts in independently verified that the woman had been
dead for days before her body was found, which proved
(03:15):
that Jason's confession could not have been true. What led
him to confess in the first place.
Speaker 6 (03:23):
The police didn't physically beat him to coerce that confession.
They didn't have to. They had other methods at their disposal,
and many of them can be grouped into what you
might simply call bullying with Jason Strong that began long
before he entered the interrogation room.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
So I was a bit of a mess. I was
definitely not a saint. I worked in an adult bookstore,
lived in a shady ass hotel next to it. I
abused drugs and alcohol. I was a very lost young person.
I'd gone through a lot in my life that just
led me down wrong paths. But because of that, it
drew the attention of a particular police officer that ended
(04:04):
up having a grudge against me and wanted to make
me suffer. He focused on me and started coming around
asking me if I knew things about drug dealers or
people that were selling and doing drugs. I'd always tell
him I don't know anything, and he wanted me to
be a snitch. And one day when he came around
asking those similar questions, and this had been after months
of him harassing me. He'd see me on the road,
(04:26):
pull me over, et cetera, and he would tell me, look,
if you don't cooperate with me, I'll make your life
a living hell. But that morning he knocked on my door,
He's like, can I come in. I'm like, I want
none to do with you, right, And he's like this
is about a murder investigation, and that scared me, so I'm.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
Like, oh fuck.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
You know, like, okay, you know what do you want
to know? They were trying to identify the victim because
it had been two weeks since they found this body.
But thankfully my boss at the time saw he was there,
came over and intervened he left, and I didn't think
much more of it. I thought, well, I didn't do anything,
so he's just harassing me like usual. But then that night,
while I was hanging out with my girlfriend and one
(05:03):
of her friends, we'd been drinking and smoking a little weed,
and I get a knock on the door and I
open it up and it's a bunch of cops with
gun shoved in my face. They pushed into my room,
threw me down, threw handcuffs on me, and started my
fifteen year nightmare. And that's the thing, like when we're
talking false confessions, it's not just what happens in the
(05:24):
interrogation room, it's how the whole thing starts. That initial
arrest is traumatic.
Speaker 5 (05:29):
Oh my god, Jason.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
It's a terrifying thing. And you know, my girlfriend's freaking out.
That adds more chaos. You're confused with what's going on.
I was under the influence, so that didn't help. And
so all that builds all the way to the police station.
Speaker 6 (05:46):
Jason was already exhausted by the time he arrived at
the police station. They arrested him at eleven o'clock at night.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
So I was already kind of going on little sleep
as it was because the night before I'd been out
with my girlfriend and you know, I maybe got five
hours of sleep within a forty eight hour window, and
then I was under the influence. So when they came
and got me, I was exhausted, confused, scared, had been
drinking and smoking.
Speaker 5 (06:13):
This made him even more vulnerable to another common form
of police pressure inducing exhaustion.
Speaker 2 (06:21):
And then when I'm in an interrogation room, it wasn't
like you know, they came in and said, hey, can
you tell us about this? And when I didn't know anything,
they left me alone. No, it went on all night
into the early morning hours. When you're put in that
interrogation room as an innocent person, your first thought is, well,
I didn't do anything wrong, so I want to cooperate
with the police. But by time you learned that they're
(06:42):
not your friend, it's too late. You're already in a
deep well and you can't get out. You'd feel trapped,
as if there's no safety net for you whatsoever, you know,
and they just keep going at you, going at you.
But I had two other cops that did the start
of the interrogation, and then when they left, two other
ones came in and they just kept going back and
forth all through the night, and like they would leave
(07:05):
and then as soon as I'd laid my head down,
or if they'd come right back again and start on
me again.
Speaker 6 (07:11):
This relentlessness is a form of withholding, withholding rest, sleep,
bathroom breaks, withholding quiet, or a moment to think and
collect your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Didn't let me have medication because I was on anxiety
and depression medication. Didn't let me have that, didn't let
me have access to an attorney, didn't let me have
access to a phone call until after I'd given them
what they'd wanted.
Speaker 5 (07:33):
And the longer they withhold these things, the greater the
pressure becomes.
Speaker 4 (07:38):
The average interrogation and these metrics come both out of
the UK and the US, lasts for about thirty minutes
to an hour, most interrogations up to two hours, the
vast majority up to four hours. When you look at
the database of wrongful convictions involving false confessions, suddenly those
(07:59):
numbers are up in the double digits. Now they're ten,
twelve to fifteen to twenty hour interrogations. Everybody has a
breaking point.
Speaker 6 (08:07):
That's saulcassenrofessor of psychology, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
who you heard from in episode one.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
I mean, over time, you get tired, you get fatigued,
you may be sleep deprived. Sometimes this timeframe involves not
sleeping through the night. You may get hungry, And importantly,
people don't quite understand we have social needs as well.
Speaker 6 (08:32):
That social need was particularly strong from Marty Tankliffe, whose
case will explore more fully in a later episode.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
You know, he's being interrogated about killing his parents, which
he didn't do when he's been exonerated for At one point,
he says, can I just go to the hospital and
be with my family? His father was in the emergency
room in a coma, not till we're done here. He
had a strong need, as strong as a need for
food and sleep. They wouldn't satisfy it until we're done here.
(09:02):
And I've seen that over and over again. The need
to check in with the people in your life powerful.
I see sometimes particularly in cases involving juveniles, where you know,
my mother doesn't know where I am. Can I call
her and tell her what's going on?
Speaker 6 (09:18):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (09:19):
I kept asking to call my mom and they said
that I couldn't until they were done.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
Oh that happened to you.
Speaker 6 (09:25):
I mean, at one point her phone was on the
table and her mom was calling. Do not know this, Like,
the phone was on the table, it was ringing, and
her mom was calling, wondering where she was, and they
wouldn't let her answer the phone. And in fact, they
had tapped her phone, and they knew that Eda was
on the way to Roam to come to her rescue,
(09:46):
and that as soon as she got there, Amanda would
have that familial support.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
Can you imagine the stress Not only is your mother calling,
but you're not answering, and now you're worrying about your
mother or what she's thinking, and all of that accumulates
and kind of bombard you to the point where you
just you got to get out of here. You got
to stop this. You got to collect your thoughts. And
you know, your case is a good example because they
(10:12):
induced you at one five and then at five forty
five am into signing an Italian written confession. But as
soon as the pressure of the moment was lifted, you
sat down and wrote a retraction of those confessions. You
needed to collect your thoughts, and when you're in the
interrogation room for hours, you don't really have an opportunity
(10:35):
to do that.
Speaker 6 (10:37):
This kind of physical and social withholding is already exhausting enough,
but on top of that, the police have a further
form of bullying, repetition and contradiction. The accusation is repeated
ad nauseum, and the suspects protestations of innocence are contradicted
ad nauseum.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
An American style confrontational interrogation brings people in, presumably vets
them by some interview that can tell whether they're lying
or tell the truth. They immediately launched into an accusation
of guilt, and that accusation of guilt is made with confidence,
(11:18):
with certainty. If the suspect begins to deny any involvement,
they overcome those denials. They argue with those denials. They
sometimes threaten against those denials.
Speaker 5 (11:30):
You can see this with the case of Eddie Lowry,
who in nineteen eighty one was a twenty two year
old soldier stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas. He was
accused and coerced into confessing to the rape of a
seventy four year old woman. A key part of breaking
him down was simply refusing to accept his claims of innocence.
(11:50):
For hours on end.
Speaker 7 (11:52):
I kept tom I didn't do this. And this went
on for about seven hours. I didn't get no water,
I didn't get no breaks, I didn't get no food,
and I'm just sitting there taking all this abuse from them,
and I'm telling him I didn't commit a crime. Until
they had me so broken down. I had my arms
folded on the desk and my forehead was on my arms,
(12:13):
and I'm crying and I'm trying to tell them I.
Speaker 4 (12:15):
Didn't do this.
Speaker 6 (12:16):
We'll return to Eddie's case later, but you can see
that same pattern at play with the police who interrogated
Jason Strong.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
It didn't matter what I said. They would just keep
going and going and going, because their training teaches them that.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
It's basically, no matter what you say in that interrogation room,
it's a sign of guilt. If you're too quiet, well
it's because you're guilty. If you're too verbal, it's because
you're guilty. If you're agitated, it's because you're guilty. Everything
is a sign of guilt. I started getting angry, and
I was cussing at them and saying, you know, fuck you,
why aren't you listening to me? I didn't do anything
that was a sign of guilt. That was my violent
(12:52):
nature coming out Later, when I broke down and I
was sobbing and crying, they said, well, that was a
sign of my guilt. I was showing my regret and
horror of what I had done. And it's like nothing
you say matters to them. It's all a sign of
guilt because they've already got you pegged, and that's what
they want.
Speaker 6 (13:10):
This tactic is common because it works. Here's false confessions
expert Steve Drissen, who you heard from last episode.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
It's not about whether or not you did this crime.
It's about why you committed this crime. And every time
the suspect tries to assert their innocence, they interrupt them
or they say, we're not here to discuss your innocence.
That's off the table.
Speaker 5 (13:35):
That relentless pattern of interruption and contradiction serves to bully
the suspect into compliance.
Speaker 8 (13:42):
The interrogation becomes very repetitive because it's about accusation, denial, confrontation.
Speaker 6 (13:49):
That's false confessions. Expert Richard Leo, Professor of Law and
Psychology at the University of San Francisco.
Speaker 8 (13:56):
So they accuse the suspect of committing the crime. They
expect the person to deny. They cut off their denials,
they reaccuse them, they tell him why they believe the
person is lying. I'm trying to be as concise as
I can, but that that's kind of a thumbnail structure
of how interrogation works, trying to break the person down,
(14:19):
overcome their denials, and move them to stop saying I
didn't do it, and start saying I did do it.
Speaker 5 (14:26):
But this exhaustion and endless repetition is just the beginning.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Well, and it's the threats too, you know, like you
got you got one cop that's saying, hey, you're going
to go to prison the rest of your life. You're
going to be raped and brutalized and beaten, and you
you have all these images in your head and stuff
you've seen in movies, and hear these cops trying to
tell you they don't think you're innocent, and they just
keep railing on you over and over and it's like
what the fuck man, and you just lose your mind.
(14:53):
It's an it's an emotional overload. It really is.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
One of the things that scared me the most when
I was interrogated at the age of twenty was the
threat of spending thirty years in prison. The idea of
that was so terrifying I could barely comprehend it. But
while one officer was screaming that threat at me, another
was speaking in gentler tones, but no less coercive. Just
(15:42):
tell us what happened and this will all be over.
You can go back to Raphael, you can call your mom.
Good cop, bad cop, the carrot and the stick. You've
probably seen such tactics dramatized on cop shows, and it's
one thing that they get right because a lot of
the exoneries I've met who are coerced into false confessions
(16:05):
describe this alternation of hard and soft power.
Speaker 9 (16:10):
If you don't comply with me, they're going to find
you somewhere out in the alley, and nobody's going to
know what happened to you.
Speaker 6 (16:20):
That's Johnny Hincopier, who you met in episode one, wrongly
convicted of the subway murder in New York City.
Speaker 9 (16:27):
He just kept on saying things like that. He's saying,
if you don't work with me, you're going to go
to prison for the rest of your life, you know.
So who do you think they're gonna believe.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
You or me?
Speaker 6 (16:39):
And as with Amanda, the carrot was the promise of going.
Speaker 9 (16:42):
Home, and he said again, do you want to go home?
Because I can have somebody drive you home immediately.
Speaker 8 (16:50):
He kept on.
Speaker 9 (16:51):
Saying that I can have somebody take you home immediately.
If you memorize the story and you repeat this story
to somebody else, and I'm going to introduce you to
I'm going to take you home. I guarantee you I'm
going to take you home.
Speaker 5 (17:05):
The story that Johnny memorized sent him to prison for
two twenty five years. But the thing is he believed
he was going home after signing those statements. So did
the Central Park five. They all expected to go home
after their confessions. So did I. Even when they put
(17:26):
me in handcuffs and took me to prison, I still
thought I was just a witness, and I believed the
police when they told me they were taking me somewhere
from my own protection. It was days later, when I
was officially charged with murder that it hit me that
I was not going home anytime soon. How is it
(17:47):
that people could confess to serious crimes like murder and
yet still believe they would be released once the interrogation stopped.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
Suggest James, over time convey to the suspect that if
they confess to one of these scenarios that leniency will follow.
And all of these scenarios are pitted against You're a monster,
You're cold and remorseless, and if you don't confess to this,
(18:24):
I'm going to have to tell the district attorney that
you don't care at all about the victim. And imagine
yourself who you'd rather be when this case comes to trial,
and who do you think the judge is going to
feel more sensitive to. Who are they going to care
(18:45):
more about when it comes time for you to face
the music. So over time, these tactics wear down a
suspect to a place of hopelessness where they just give
up and they just say, I'm going to accept this explanation.
Sometimes they do it because they just figure, look, I
got to get out of this room. And once I
(19:07):
get out of this room, I'll talk to my lawyer,
I'll talk to my loved ones. Everybody will recognize that
this confession is false. And the truth of the matter
is is that people don't recognize that you know, and
their goose is cooked.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
That's why so many false confessors report that after they confessed,
they didn't realize they were going to be arrested. They
had no idea. In some cases they thought they were
going to go home. In the case, I just looked
at you know, the young woman said, is this going
to go on my record? And again the courts allow
it because it's not an explicit promise. I'm not saying
(19:50):
confess and go home. But as sure as hell is implied,
and any average person that reads it comes home with
that conclusion.
Speaker 6 (19:58):
The promise of leniency and the threat of serious consequences
each become more effective the more they are used. In alternation,
which installed Casson's words, increases the stress associated with denial
while reducing the stress associated with confessions. The suspect is
badgered by a two pronged attack sure to produce psychological whiplash.
(20:20):
You can see this in the case of Eddie Lowry,
whom you heard from earlier.
Speaker 7 (20:25):
He's the one telling me that he would help me.
He'd give me through this, give me the help I needed.
He would talk to the judge by just come clean.
And again I'm denying this. I'm telling him I didn't
commit this crime. There's nothing I can tell you, and
then he would get tired of it, and then he
walked out, and then the other detective would come in,
and then he was putting his finger in my face,
(20:45):
telling me, I know you committed this crime. We're going
to find you guilty of this crime. If we had
the death penalty and she had died, we'd be asking
the death penalty on you, and telling me what a
horrible person I was, what a monster I was for
committing this crime, and that I needed to come clean
and confess to this crime. He was bringing up things
about my sister being raped. He was bring up stuff
(21:09):
about my brother being killed, and just stuff that was
really affected me emotionally besides being accused of this crime.
Speaker 6 (21:18):
The threats gradually ratchet up over the course of the interrogation.
You can see that in the case of Christopher Ochoa.
Speaker 10 (21:25):
I was twenty two years old. I lived in Austin, Texas.
At the time. I was working at a rocal pizza hut,
and I was just a typical kid just to enjoin
my life. I was about to enroll in college.
Speaker 6 (21:38):
It was October of nineteen eighty eight when a woman
who worked at a pizza hut was assaulted during an
early morning robbery. She was tied up with her bra
raped and shot in the head.
Speaker 10 (21:48):
I woke up and I had turned on the news
and there was the first coverage of this murder sort
of crime that happened. It was a shock, a little scary,
you know, because at that time I was a prep
cook at another pizza hut. After a week, do you
(22:08):
reopened the pizza hut after the crime scene investigation. One
of my roommates he was gonna give me a ride home.
So he's driving me home and then he says he
wants to pull over at the pizza hut where his
crime happened. I didn't really want to, so he drove
up to the pizza hut said, come on, let's just
go in there and we'll have a beer. I didn't
feel comfortable, so I just went along with it. I
(22:31):
went into the pizza hut with him. They had places
of security guard outside of the door. He ordered two
beers to raise the toast to the memory of the victory.
Speaker 6 (22:42):
To me, I found that kind of out, so did
whoever saw them there. For the next Friday. Well, Christopher
Ochoa was working the morning shift at his pizza hut.
Two detectives came in looking for him.
Speaker 10 (22:53):
A big white detective and a female Hispanic detective. They
wanted to ask me questions about a birdery. So I
was already a suspect, twenty two years old. I was
still trusting law enforcement. They asked me, do you mind
coming to the station.
Speaker 5 (23:09):
Did they say anything to you in the car.
Speaker 10 (23:11):
My curiosity got the best of me because I thought
it was about the murder, and it was, but obviously
they're in this little game. No, it's about a burglary.
And they asked me, how come you're asking about the
murder about the murderer, right, and so well, I'm just curious.
(23:32):
The big white detective took me to what I know
now is in the interrogation room. He walks me to
this room, he closes the door, he leaves, will be
right with you. No clocks, just that window that they have.
And that detective. I didn't see him for a bit anymore.
All of a sudden, here comes uh, the Mexican American
(23:55):
detective Chicano. He busts in the door. His name is Polonco,
Detective Polunco, Hector Polunco, the very first thing he told
me when he walks in. Do you know what they
called me out in the street. I had no idea
I wasn't you know, he says in Spanish, I am
the boogeyman. They call me the boogeyman. Obviously register of
(24:18):
blank stare because it didn't mean anything to me. So
he walks out, and then walks the good cut detective Malaysia,
and he walks in and he says, look, man, my
partner's a hot head.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
You know.
Speaker 10 (24:33):
Just tell us what you know, right, and you'll be
able to go home. You know, we'll let you go home. Look, sir,
if I knew, I will tell you. But I don't
know anything. I would I would not. I don't know
a damn thing about. So he walks out, and then
it comes home, unquot again, yelling at me, you looked
at it, my arms, grabbing my arms, a little, lying
(24:55):
to me, And I didn't know what he was talking
about because I didn't do anything. But he kept on
yelling at me. If you know who did it, If
you don't tell me, you're gonna get charged with the
capital murder, and you you get you can get the
death penance. You would walk out, Malaysia would walk back
in and he says, look all you guys, just tell us,
(25:18):
you know, he walks out. Pol uncle comes in. This
is a long interrogation. It was about twelve thirteen hours.
At some point he walks in. He grabs my arm.
Pass my arm. This is where the needle's going to
go if you don't cooperate. This is where they're going
to put that catch you. And I'm gonna make sure
(25:40):
I'm there. I'm gonna make sure i'm there to watch you.
Speaker 6 (26:01):
The bullying, the exhaustion, the promises and threats. If these
aren't enough to break the suspect, the police have an
even more at their disposal.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Lies have been a regular part of police interrogations since
interrogations have, you know, become critical parts of a state's case,
and police officers lie with impunity. And typically the lies
that are most dangerous are lies that.
Speaker 6 (26:34):
Are about evidence, right, Steve Drissen, Director of the Center
on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
When a suspect feels that the evidence against them is
overwhelming and a law enforcement officer is telling them that
it's overwhelming, even though the suspect knows that they're innocent.
It creates such a sense of confusion and disorientation in
(27:03):
the suspect that it becomes easier to manipulate them right.
You know, sometimes it's so overwhelming that the suspect actually
comes to believe that they might have committed this crime.
They begin to doubt their own memory.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
That's what's known as an internalized false confession. It's what
happened to me during my interrogation, and it's the hardest
kind of false confession for most people to understand. We'll
return to that phenomenon later.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
So these kinds of lies are probably the cudgel that
brings suspects down to a place of hopelessness, very very
quickly during the course of the interrogation. They're an extremely
powerful tactic in interrogations. We lionize detectives who trick suspects
(27:59):
into confessing. You know, I'll never forget this episode of
The Wire where a detective hooks up a suspect to
a copy machine and he fills the paper unbeknownst to
the suspect. The paper rack with true and false and
(28:20):
true and false, and when the suspect answers a question,
the word false comes up. When he presses the button
on the copy machine to print out paper, and suspect
thinks it's acting like a lie detective machine and ultimately confess.
And these guys are like, we do anything we need
(28:41):
to do in order to get these suspects.
Speaker 6 (28:43):
That's just scrappy police work.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
That's exactly right. These detectives come heroic for solving these
cases with lies, but we know that it's not necessary
and that when you do that, it increases the risk
of false confessions.
Speaker 6 (29:05):
Most people don't realize that it's entirely legal for the
police to lie to you. You can face criminal charges
for lying to the police, but police deception during interrogations
was sanctioned by the Supreme Court in Fraser v. Cup
in nineteen sixty nine, and to this day, many police
claim that lying is an essential tool of conducting investigations.
Speaker 11 (29:27):
We have all been in situations where we feel like
we don't have any other options, we feel cornered. Maybe
we haven't had the experience of being interrogated, but we
have all had the feeling of this person isn't listening
to me. No matter how I say it, it's not
getting through.
Speaker 6 (29:43):
That's Lara Zarowski, Executive and Policy director of the Washington
Innocence Project.
Speaker 11 (29:48):
Survival instincts kick in, you really want to make sense
of it. And so one of the very clearly most
common interrogation tactics that will lead someone to a false
confession is changing their reality by lying about the context.
So again, it's about context. The context matters. And I
have to talk about Ted brad when I talk about
(30:10):
the choice to make a wrongful conviction, because his case
was the one that, even though I'd been in the
work for years and had actually gone to law school
because of a case of wrongful conviction that involved a
false confession, I was so convinced that this happens. And
yet I don't think I really understood, like truly where
it landed with me. That I was like, I would
(30:31):
have done the same thing. And that was because Ted
Bradford was in Yakima, Washington. He was being interrogated for
a single perpetrator sexual assault that happened in this small
town that he lived in. He was being interrogated and
they kept telling him we know it was you, we
have the evidence from the crime scene. Your goose is cooked.
(30:52):
There's no way you're getting out of here until you
tell us quote unquote the truth.
Speaker 6 (30:56):
Here's how Ted Bradford described it himself when testifying earlier
this year and from the Washington State Legislature in support
of a bill to ban police deception during interrogations.
Speaker 12 (31:07):
To begin with, when they asked me to sign a
Miranda waiver, I asked them, well, do I need an attorney,
and they said, probably not, We're just going to ask
you a few questions. So I signed the waiver of
my rights and from there it was just nine and
(31:28):
a half hours of constant badgering accusations. I was told
that there was evidence that the crime scene left by
the perpetrator, and that when they tested that, they said,
it's going to prove that you did it, so you
might as well confess. I knew I was innocent, and
(31:51):
the only way I could see out of that situation,
because believe me, that's all I wanted was to be
out of that room and out of that interrogation.
Speaker 6 (32:02):
So that was my light of hope there. I thought, just.
Speaker 12 (32:07):
Give them the statement, give them what they want. Now
they'll test that evidence that they claimed was at the
crime scene, and this will all be over.
Speaker 11 (32:15):
He was so worried about his job and he was
so convinced based on what they said that if he
just told them he did it, that they would let
him go, and that there was DNA at the crime scene,
so they were going to test it and realize that
they had made a mistake. And this was in nineteen
ninety six, So keep in mind, in nineteen ninety six,
DNA technology was fledgling, and it was new, but even
(32:35):
ted new. I mean, the first DNA exoneration was in
nineteen eighty nine, so this had not been that long. Yeah,
but even then, he understood, if you've got physical evidence
from the crime scene, you're going to know it wasn't
me because I was at work right, right, And so
he made a calculated choice based on what he believed
his options and the reality of the situation to be.
Speaker 12 (32:55):
Several weeks later, I found out that the testing of
the crime scene evidence was inconclusive. They'd lied about the
suspect's biological evidence being left at the scene.
Speaker 11 (33:08):
And if he had been told the truth, if they
had used rapport building techniques, if they had not terrified
him into and also you know, let him sleep, given
him food, if they had done all of those things,
they never would have gotten the false confession that put
him in prison for eleven years for something he didn't do,
and require him to register as a sex offender and
(33:30):
allow the actual perpetrator to go free. They would have
not been stuck on that investigative trail and frankly given
up on their investigation because they got their confession. So
all analysis stops there, and that isn't good for justice.
It's not good for victims. It's certainly not good for
Ted Bradford and his family. But at the end of
the day, it completely defeats the purpose of our entire system,
(33:51):
all because they decided to use deceptive tactics because they
wanted him to confess, and he did.
Speaker 5 (33:57):
In my own interrogation, the police lied to me about
several things. They told me they had hard evidence that
I was at my house the night of the murder,
a lie such evidence existed. They told me I was
just a witness when I was in fact a suspect.
They had been tapping my phone for days. They told
(34:18):
me Raphael had retracted my alibi, saying I wasn't with
him the night of the murder. This was particularly destabilizing
because I just couldn't imagine why he would lie about that.
That's because I couldn't imagine that they had coerced him
with the same lies they were telling me. And worst
of all, I couldn't imagine that the police, who I
(34:41):
was raised to trust and respect, who I was depending
on for my safety in the wake of my roommate's
murder while a killer was on the loose, I could
not fathom that they would lie to me. All of this,
compounded by the bullying, exhaustion, promises, and threats, reshaped my
(35:02):
sense of reality and made it hard to know what
was true and what wasn't, including my own memories.
Speaker 4 (35:10):
I had a number of conversations with judges several years ago,
and I was talking about why it's so dangerous to
lie to a suspect about evidence false confessions.
Speaker 6 (35:22):
Expert Saul Cassen.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
And I see this all the time. You know, we
have cell phone records that are pinging your phone at
the crime scene at that time, which is a lie.
Or you failed the polygraph, the light detective test, which
is science if it's a lie. Or we found hair
in the victim's grasp and we matched it to your
(35:44):
hair and it's a lie. I was trying to explain
to these judges that is psychologically coercive, that form of
deception can lead somebody to confess. And I wasn't understanding
what they weren't understanding until one judge articulated it this way.
She said, I just don't understand how lying breaks their will.
(36:08):
And I took a deep breath and realized, oh, you
think this is about breaking the will, This is also
about loosening their grip on reality.
Speaker 5 (36:19):
The polygraph test is especially problematic in this regard. First
of all, it's a pseudoscientific and unreliable indicator of deception. Rather,
it measures physiological signs of arousal or stress. But polygraph
examiners and many suspects believe it works. This means that
(36:40):
examiners suffering from confirmation bias may read signs of deception
that aren't there, and if a suspect believes it's a
scientifically reliable tool, being told they failed the test can
be deeply destabilizing. Polygraph examiners also go out of their
way to convince suspects that the polygraph is infallible. Selcassen
(37:03):
explains in his book Duped that they will even resort
to trickery to do so, asking the subject to pick
a card from the deck and then to lie or
tell the truth in response to a question about that card.
Using the con of marked cards, the examiner gets to
impress the subject with an accurate true false judgment that
(37:25):
makes the news that they've failed the polygraph test often
a lie itself all the more distressing.
Speaker 7 (37:32):
Looked at me and said, mister Lowry, my test has
showing me that you're lying. I said, lying, How am
I lying? I told you the truth about everything. He goes, well,
the test says you're lying. He goes, listen, if you
tell me the truth right now, you admit that that
you did this, I'll talk to the two detectives and
they'll go easy on you. And I said, look, I
(37:54):
go I didn't commit this crime. I don't know what
you're talking about. I've told you the truth about everything,
and I'm innocent. And he walked out, got to two detectives.
They came back in and got me and put me
back into that interrogation room, and that's when things really
went downhill.
Speaker 6 (38:09):
Perhaps the most egregious use of the you failed the
polygraph lie was in the wrongful conviction of Christopher Tapp
in nineteen ninety six, over sixty hours of interrogation, the
police staged seven sham polygraph tests, telling Tap that he
failed each one. As Saul Cassen put it, in each instance,
(38:29):
the objective was to bring his story more into line
with the newly discovered evidence.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
Why about the evidence and suspects get disoriented and confused
and they're not so sure anymore what happened or didn't happen.
Investigators are trained that in order to bolster the accusation
of guilt, made with certainty, and overcome the objections and denials,
you need to point to the evidence you have, let
(38:55):
the suspect know we have evidence, and that breaks the
suspect down into a state of despair.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
Great.
Speaker 4 (39:02):
If you have evidence, I have no problem with that.
But here's the next step. If you don't have eviden
you're allowed to manufacture it. You're allowed to lie about
it and pretend that you do. And the US courts
don't see a problem with that. And there's the difference.
We're not just allowed in this country to confront suspects
(39:25):
with real evidence. We're allowed to make it up. And
sometimes that is particularly powerful, potent evidence. I think you're familiar.
For example of the case of Marty Tankliff, accused of
killing his parents. Well, they came in and said, to Marty,
we just spoke with the hospital. Your father has regained consciousness.
(39:45):
He said, you did this, and Marty was agast. Lies
like that. I've seen them in cases in which the
suspect was thirteen and fourteen. You bring in a kid,
you lie about the evidence repeatedly, you lie more than once.
The lies are big lies, not small lies. And some
(40:09):
some times you even cite the person in their life
they trust most. Now stop and ask yourself this question,
and that's okay. The courts think that's okay. And of
course they've been there for hours and they're under stress,
so that doesn't help. And that's one of the tactics
that is horrific and needs to be banned. And the
(40:32):
good news is about six or eight states now in
the last three years have banned the presentation of false
evidence to minors. Nice first step, but should only be
considered a first step because that same tactic can have
that same effect on adults.
Speaker 6 (40:51):
Believe it or not, these forms of psychological coercion aren't
just happening unofficially or because the police don't know any better.
They're actually part of the manual. In the next episode
of False Confessions, we'll explore the problematic gospel of interrogation
practices the read tech meek, which has influenced interrogations around
(41:12):
the world for more than fifty years.
Speaker 5 (41:14):
In the meantime, get lost with us. Find us on
Blue Sky at Amanda Knox dot com.
Speaker 6 (41:21):
At wyscracker dot bsky dot.
Speaker 5 (41:23):
Social, on Instagram at Amamanox at mccarbon. You can learn
more about our work and how to support it at
Amanda Knox dot com and listen. We just need you
to come clean here. We know you love Labyrinths. We
know you want to leave us a five star review.
Don't make this harder than it has to be.
Speaker 6 (41:44):
False Confessions, a Labyrinths mini series, is brought to you
by Knox Robinson Productions. This episode was written and produced
by us along with our managing producer Andre Sapp and
our production assistant Charlie Darnell. Our theme music is by
Josh Budo Karp.
Speaker 1 (42:00):
That was the podcast Hard Knocks. If you like what
you heard, you can find more episodes wherever you get
your podcasts. One last note, the slight Change Family is
taking Labor Day off this year, so we'll be back
in your feed with a new episode on September eighth.
Speaker 5 (42:15):
See you then,
Host
Dr. Maya Shankar
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