Saul Kassin
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Saul Kassin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Munsterberg has a chapter titled Untrue Confessions, and in it he describes this case out of Chicago, the murder of Bessie Hollister. What was interesting and what I think made him skeptical about the confession was, first of all, The suspect, whom confessed, had limited cognitive abilities and was a vulnerable person to issue as a suspect.
He then realized that they then brought him in for hours of interrogation, in which it was described that he embellished a story from one telling to another. Turns out he provided some details in that story. And it turns out that some of those details were false. And so we have a situation where he was interrogated for long periods of time. He was a vulnerable suspect.
And the confession he gave was not particularly accurate in relation to the case facts. And yet the prosecutor pushed forward. And within, I kid you not, one week, he was convicted. And shortly thereafter, he was hung.
Charles Lindbergh was at the time an American hero, and his infant son was kidnapped. And it was big news, as you can imagine. And 200 people volunteered confessions to that kidnapping. And ultimately, police did not charge any of them. Ultimately, none of them had anything to do with it.
It's interesting, to some extent ironic, that when someone volunteers a confession, police are inherently suspicious and they look for proof of guilt to corroborate that voluntary confession. So they might ask, for example, for facts. Okay, you say you committed this crime. Tell me about the case facts. Describe the crime scene to me or lead me to the weapon or lead me to the victim.
And invariably, innocent voluntary false confessors can't do it. Voluntary false confessions are cases in which innocent people, without any external pressure from police, step forward and confess to crimes they didn't commit. Sometimes they're protecting somebody else. It might be a child covering for a parent or a parent covering for a child.
So sometimes it's a sort of a rational reason like that. And sometimes it's a reason that reeks of pathology and somebody needing to gain attention. The motives may vary, but it is my sense that voluntary false confessions don't present much of a problem for the criminal justice system.
Yeah, the Salem Witch Trials are a great example. Compliant false confessions, these are cases where somebody is under great amounts of stress. They are motivated to put an end to that stress. They want out of that bad situation. They're not even thinking about long-term consequences. They may have come to believe it's in their better interest to confess than to deny involvement.
They know they're innocent. but they confess anyway as a way to get out of a bad situation. Those types of cases go back throughout history.
You know, I was teaching at Williams College. It's a liberal arts college in Massachusetts. It was 2002. And I was preparing for classes in the fall, and this producer called and said, I wonder if you can look at some confessions for us. I said, OK, what's the case? And she said, will you promise not to mention this to anyone? I said, sure, it's confidential.
And she said, it's the Central Park jogger. And I went silent.
For a city that was already on edge, this was the breaking point. The papers were just filled with headlines that, you know, we've got to solve this. I understand fully that when this happened and when it was reported and the heinousness of the crime, the city was in a state of outrage. and demanding that we find who did this. Within 72 hours, NYPD solved the case.
There were a number of kids running through the park that night, wreaking havoc on some bystanders, and police immediately started rounding people up, going into their neighborhoods, bringing others in. They interrogated all sorts of kids and ultimately found five kids who confessed, 14, 15, 16 years old.
The way New York City worked their confessions in those days, starting in the 1970s, 1980s, was the detectives interrogated off-camera. They brought their suspect to a point where they were ready to confess, and then they delivered them to an assistant district attorney who stepped in with a camera on and took the confession.
They described the jogger as she was running. They described her location. They described dragging her down through the grass. There were clear tread marks. And they gave a description of a woman who had been beaten in the head with a hard object, clothes pulled off, and left for dead.
Did you try to hide her so she wouldn't get found? You cannot look past those statements on video. They got some of the facts right. They're basically telling the same story. There are some annoying disparities and contradictions between them, but they get enough facts right.
He said he was involved in the rape. He was present and he played a minimal role. I believe he said he had held her legs while someone else pulled her pants down.
When you hear a statement like that, he not only describes what happened, but then describes his own expression of remorse. I'm sorry I did this, he basically said. This is my first rape. It's going to be my last.
Here's a confession that's not just communicating an admission of guilt and some narrative details that are accurate in relation to the crime facts, but now he's reflecting on his own motivation and remorse and acceptance of responsibility. How does a judge and a jury look past that statement?
And when you have four of them, even though they don't align with each other perfectly, how can a jury look past those four statements
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