Recently, the Netflix series “Making a Murderer” has drawn people in with its look at a man who was convicted of a crime he allegedly didn’t commit.
This brings up the question, “why would an innocent person ever send themselves to prison?”
Nevertheless, there are many instances of innocent people falsely confessing to a crime they did not commit and reasons as to why a person would do this.
One MSU associate professor has recently found in her now-published research that sleepiness or sleep deprivation is directly correlated with falsely confessing to a crime.
“We know a lot of cases of false confessions and shady interrogation tactics,” Kimberly Fenn, associate professor of psychology, said. “The police will interrogate the suspect for many hours and will keep them overnight. The suspects and the victims end up being extremely sleep deprived.”
According to The Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted individuals, the causes for false confessions include eyewitness misidentification, government misconduct, unvalidated or improper forensic science and inadequate defense.
Fenn’s research shows the police interrogation tactic of keeping the suspects awake overnight leads to false confessions. This, Fenn said, is extremely unethical.
“These tactics cause damage to the suspects and the victims,” Fenn said. “I don’t want to use the word ‘torture,’ but they definitely use unethical methods.”
Fenn recruited 88 participants for her two-phase research study showing how sleep deprivation increased false confessions.
In phase one, Fenn had the participants come into the lab and perform some simple tasks on the computer.
The students were firmly told not to press the escape key on the keyboard, or they would cause the researches to lose all of their important data.
One week later, Fenn had the participants come into the sleep lab for phase two.
They were divided into two groups, those who would stay up all night and be sleep deprived, and those who would sleep through the night.
In the morning, Fenn falsely accused all of the students of pressing the escape key and causing the researchers to lose all of their data.
Of the students who slept through the night, only 18 percent falsely confessed to pressing the escape key.
Of the students who stayed up all night, 50 percent falsely confessed to pressing the escape key.
The results from the experiment showed being deprived of sleep strongly increases your chances of falsely confessing to a crime.
“Our results make intuitive sense,” Fenn said. “It makes sense that sleep deprivation would lead to false confessions.”
Fenn said she doesn’t think her work will have any kind of impact on how law enforcement interrogates their suspects.
“Some of their strategies are designed to get dangerous people off the streets, and they believe that their tactics work,” Fenn said. “They believe that their tactics help them incarcerate dangerous people. They aren’t going to change them any time soon.”
“The one thing I think could actually happen, and I hope it happens, is that the police take into account the physiological state of the suspects and the victims,” Fenn said.
“False confessions are so important to the jury, they can be more important than actual evidence.”
Fenn gave the example of Brendan Dassey, nephew to Steven Avery in the “Making a Murderer” documentary.
Dassey confessed to raping, killing and dismembering a woman with his uncle Avery in a highly coercive interrogation setting.
“He clearly has lower cognitive ability, maybe even clinically low, and the police obviously use coercive interrogation techniques,” Fenn said. “These techniques were a big part of his false confession. The police fed him information, and he had no parents or lawyers present.”
Now, Dassey is serving a life sentence for his role in a crime he might not have committed.
Since Fenn has published her findings on sleep deprivation increasing false confessions, she is working on research to investigate why there are so many false eyewitness testimonies.
“Our memory for faces isn’t very good, especially for cross-race identifications,” Fenn said. “It is easier for us to identify people of our own race and harder for people outside of our race.”
