Proposed White Paper: "Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendations."
In recent years, several high-profile cases have surfaced in which innocent people falsely confessed to crimes during police interrogations. False confessions have been a contributing factor in approximately twenty percent of cases in which convictions are overturned by post-conviction DNA exonerations.
In 2006, the AP-LS Executive Committee approved a proposal to have a distinguished panel of experts draft a White Paper on police interrogation and the problem of false confessions (Saul Kassin, Chair; Steven Drizin, Thomas Grisso, Gisli Gudjonsson, Richard Leo, Allison Redlich). A draft has now been prepared. It was reviewed and approved by the AP-LS Scientific Review Committee (William Thompson, Chair), is under review by Science Advisory Board members named by the panel (Richard Petty, Daniel Schacter, Laurence Steinberg), and is available here for review by AP-LS members and other interested parties. If you have comments, please send them to: apls.whitepaper@gmail.com. All comments will be reviewed by the authors of the report and the AP-LS Executive Committee and will be considered in preparing subsequent drafts.
The AP-LS Executive Committee is expected to hold open hearings on the revised draft of this report at the 2008 APA meeting and the 2009 AP-LS meeting. If the Executive Committee votes to formally endorse the report, it will then be submitted to Law and Human Behavior as an official AP-LS White Paper. A previous White Paper, on line-up procedures and eyewitness identification, was published in 1998 and has proved influential in subsequent public policy discussions. In order to make this report as strong and objective as possible, AP-LS invites and welcomes your comments and suggestions. Feedback will be most useful if received by September 1, 2008.
