Video Recorded Confessions
What if confessions are video recorded? Today, many police departments tape confessions for presentation in court. But could you tell the difference between a true confession and a false confession? Maybe not. Inside prison walls, Kassin and colleagues (2005) videotaped male inmates giving full confessions to the crimes for which they were incarcerated and concocting false confessions to offenses suggested by the researchers that they did not commit. College students and police investigators then watched and judged 10 different inmates, each of whom gave a true or false confession to one of five crimes. The results showed that neither group exhibited high levels of accuracy.
In light of recently discovered false confessions, a number of states now require that the full interrogations be video recorded. This is an important reform to current practice, in part because the presence of a camera inhibits police from using extreme interrogation tactics and in part because it enables judges and juries later to see for themselves how a confession came about. For judges and juries empowered to evaluate confessions in court, it is necessary to see the pro- cess by which these confessions were taken. One might wonder, Does recording change the process by inhibiting suspects? No. In a recent field experiment, police randomly informed some suspects but not others that they were being recorded. Ultimately, no differences were found in terms of whether the suspects waived their rights, talked to police, or incriminated them- selves.
