Voluntary False Confession – A false confession knowingly given in response to little or no police pressure: Miscarriages of Justice Assignment, UOL, Ireland

Miscarriages of Justice

• Voluntary False Confession – A false confession knowingly given in response to little or no police pressure. Reasons inter alia incl. a pathological desire for notoriety, a need for self-punishment over prior transgressions, mental impairment, and a desire to protect the actual perpetrator.
• Compliant False Confession – a false confession knowingly given to put an end to the interrogation or to receive an anticipated benefit or reward in exchange for the confession. These confessions are likely to occur when innocent victims succumb to pressure during interrogation and believe that the short-term benefits of a false confession outweigh the long-term cost of prolonged interrogation.
• Persuaded false confessions/Internalised false confession – a false confession knowingly given by an innocent person who comes to doubt the reliability of his/her memory and thus comes to believe that he/she may have committed the crime despite no memory of having doing so.