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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And a year and a half or so later, a new DA came into the office, looked through the case files, realized that Riley was elsewhere at the time of death, it couldn't have been him, and vacated his conviction and he was never retried again. That's the first time I'd seen, and I didn't know how to define it at the time, what turned out to be what we called internalization.
I couldn't tell how momentary it was, how long it lasted, but it was clear that at some point, for some period of time, he came to believe in his own guilt.
In this case, they did nothing. They did not pursue these alternative suspects. There was good reason to believe that they had other suspects, not saying they were the perpetrators, but certainly people worthy of investigation. And that did not happen.
I've gotten to know Peter and a number of other exonerees who are frustrated that police didn't go back and reinvestigate the case and find out who killed their mother, their father, or both.
Not only has the not killer been brought to justice, but here's what the statistics show. In the Innocence Project cases where DNA excludes the wrongfully convicted, and sometimes that DNA hits on a perpetrator. Many of those cases, that perpetrator went on to commit one or more multiple violent offenses, including homicides and sexual assaults.
When you get a confession from an innocent person and close that case, you're not doing a whole lot of good for public safety.
Bottom line was the average accuracy rate was 54%. Truth and lie detection studies give us on average, when you meta-analyze all of the studies, they give us an average accuracy rate of 54%. It's exactly what we found.
We found that our student observers were more accurate than our police observers, in part because the police observers kept over-believing the false confessions. And we found that the police observers were a whole lot more confident than our student observers. They were not accurate and they were confident, not a good combination. Wrongful convictions archives are filled with those mistakes.
We simply confirm that now in the laboratory.
He was a police officer in Iceland. eventually left the force and got a degree in clinical psychology. He had taken, much to his dismay, a false confession in a case and became interested in suggestibility effects.
And then he would say, I'm going to ask you a series of questions. And he would ask questions, many of which were leading and suggestive of information that was not in the story. And he measured how many of those questions do people then insert into their memory?
He would say, nope, that's not right. You got to do this again. Eventually, he became interested in both types of suggestibility. Can we cause people to change their memory by presenting misinformation embedded in questions? And then can we cause people to change their memory by giving them negative feedback?
And he found that people obeyed that order at high levels. This arbitrary order from a stranger when they were wearing a uniform at high levels. And it just goes to show something about blind obedience.
Yes, it is. The opening predicate of a police interrogation is to isolate the subject, bring them in and put them in a room alone in our station and no friends, no family members, no phones, preferably in a soundproof room where they can't hear voices and phones out there so that they're feeling isolated and alone.
My God, social psychologists, health psychologists know that people need people and that that need to belong and that need to affiliate especially is true under stress. And that when people have social support present, they're able to tolerate more pain. Physiologically, they show levels of relaxation while under stress. It's important for people to have that.
And yet, when you look at what happens in the interrogation room, the first thing is you are isolated and you are away from the people you know. The other thing they don't get, in an interrogation, police are characterizing the crime. They're characterizing the evidence. They may be lying about the evidence. If you're alone in the room, you have no external checks on that reality.
You can't turn to someone else and say, is that true? Do you know if that's true? And so you're not getting additional information. So you're lacking both the support that comes with people and the additional information that comes with people.
The average interrogation lasts about an hour or two. Pretty much captures 90-some percent of interrogations. When you look at the archives of wrongful convictions where time records are kept, and I emphasize that because often time records are not kept. The length of interrogation is six hours, eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, an average of 16 hours, sometimes up to 24 and more.
False confessions happen over time. Partly that is a function of sleep deprivation and deprivation of other needs states. But there are no time limits set on an interrogation in the United States. And what happens over time is a person becomes deprived of food, sleep, sometimes bathroom breaks.
Certainly they are deprived of social support, as we talked about earlier, which is in some ways as fundamental a need as anything else. And so what you find is that one proxy for a false confession, if you show me a confession that lasted, the interrogation that lasted 16 hours, right away I say that person was at some level of risk for that alone.
Showing 61–80 of 97 · page 4 of 5
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