Why people confess to crimes they didn’t commit

Finally, last summer Burton’s attorneys brought in Saul Kassin, a psychologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City who is one of the world’s leading experts on interrogation. “Having Dr. Kassin come in and give a master class on the science of false confessions was a turning point,” says Steven Drizin, co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, who led the team that pursued Burton’s exoneration. Although scores of people have been cleared of false confessions since DNA evidence entered U.S. courtrooms, the Burton case was the first time someone had been exonerated on the basis of the scientific analysis of interrogation.

Source: www.sciencemag.org