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Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution restricts prosecutors from using a person's statements made in response to interrogation in police custody as evidence at their trial unless they can show that the person was informed of the right to consult with an attorney before and during questioning, and of the right against self-incrimination before police questioning, and that the defendant not only understood these rights but also voluntarily waived them.
Interrogation is interviewing as commonly employed by law enforcement officers, military personnel, intelligence agencies, organized crime syndicates, and terrorist organizations with the goal of eliciting useful information, particularly information related to suspected crime. Interrogation may involve a diverse array of techniques, ranging from developing a rapport with the subject to torture.
The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment is an international human rights treaty under the review of the United Nations that aims to prevent torture and other acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment around the world.
The Reid technique is a method of interrogation. The system was developed in the United States by John E. Reid in the 1950s. Reid was a psychologist, polygraph expert, and former Chicago police officer. The technique is known for creating a high pressure environment for the interviewee, followed by sympathy and offers of understanding and help, but only if a confession is forthcoming. Since its spread in the 1960s, it has been a mainstay of police procedure, especially in the United States.
A forced confession is a confession obtained from a suspect or a prisoner by means of torture or other forms of duress. Depending on the level of coercion used, a forced confession is not valid in revealing the truth. The individuals being interrogated may agree to the story presented to them or even make up falsehoods themselves in order to satisfy the interrogator and discontinue their suffering.
A miscarriage of justice occurs when a grossly unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. Miscarriages are also known as wrongful convictions. Innocent people have sometimes ended up in prison for years before their conviction has eventually been overturned. They may be exonerated if new evidence comes to light or it is determined that the police or prosecutor committed some kind of misconduct at the original trial. In some jurisdictions this leads to the payment of compensation.
Torture, the infliction of severe physical or psychological pain upon an individual to extract information or a confession, or as an illicit extrajudicial punishment, is prohibited by international law and is illegal in most countries. However, it is still used by many governments. The subject of this article is the use of torture since the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which prohibited it.
The prohibition of torture is a peremptory norm in public international law – meaning that it is forbidden under all circumstances – as well as being forbidden by international treaties such as the United Nations Convention Against Torture. It is generally agreed that torture is inherently morally wrong because all forms of torture "involve the intentional infliction of extreme physical suffering on some non-consenting and defenceless person", although it does not necessarily follow that torture is wrong in all circumstances. In practice, torture has been employed by many or most prisons, police and intelligence agencies throughout the world. Philosophers are divided on whether torture is forbidden under all circumstances or whether it may be justified in one-off situations, but without legalization or institutionalization.
A false confession is an admission of guilt for a crime which the individual did not commit. Although such confessions seem counterintuitive, they can be made voluntarily, perhaps to protect a third party, or induced through coercive interrogation techniques. When some degree of coercion is involved, studies have found that subjects with highly sophisticated intelligence or manipulated by their so called "friends" are more likely to make such confessions. Young people are particularly vulnerable to confessing, especially when stressed, tired, or traumatized, and have a significantly higher rate of false confessions than adults. Hundreds of innocent people have been convicted, imprisoned, and sometimes sentenced to death after confessing to crimes they did not commit—but years later, have been exonerated. It was not until several shocking false confession cases were publicized in the late 1980s, combined with the introduction of DNA evidence, that the extent of wrongful convictions began to emerge—and how often false confessions played a role in these.
In the law of criminal evidence, a confession is a statement by a suspect in crime which is adverse to that person. Some secondary authorities, such as Black's Law Dictionary, define a confession in more narrow terms, e.g. as "a statement admitting or acknowledging all facts necessary for conviction of a crime," which would be distinct from a mere admission of certain facts that, if true, would still not, by themselves, satisfy all the elements of the offense. The equivalent in civil cases is a statement against interest.
Richard Jason Ofshe is an American sociologist and professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his expert testimony relating to coercion in small groups, confessions, and interrogations.
Torture in the United States includes documented and alleged cases of torture both inside and outside the United States by members of the government, the military, law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, health care services, and other public organizations.
Saul Kassin is a distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice - City University of New York and Massachusetts Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Michael Gelles is an American forensic psychologist. He is notable for the role he played in uncovering the unauthorized use of abusive techniques during the interrogation of captives held in extrajudicial detention, apprehended during the "war on terror".
The widespread and systematic use of torture in Turkey goes back to the Ottoman Empire. After the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, torture of civilians by the Turkish Armed Forces was widespread during the Dersim rebellion. The Sansaryan Han police headquarters and Harbiye Military Prison in Istanbul became known for torture in the 1940s. Amnesty International (AI) first documented Turkish torture after the 1971 Turkish coup d'état and has continued to issue critical reports, particularly after the outbreak of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict in the 1980s. The Committee for the Prevention of Torture has issued critical reports on the extent of torture in Turkey since the 1990s. The Stockholm Center for Freedom published Mass Torture and Ill-Treatment in Turkey in June 2017. The Human Rights Foundation of Turkey estimates there are around one million victims of torture in Turkey.
Interrogational torture is the use of torture to obtain information in interrogation, as opposed to the use of torture to force a person to make a confession regardless of whether it is true or false. Torture has been used throughout history during interrogation, although it is now illegal and a violation of international law. Although there is limited information as to whether interrogational torture is ever an effective interrogation method, it frequently generates false or misleading information and can impair subsequent information collection.
Imagination inflation is a type of memory distortion that occurs when imagining an event that never happened increases confidence in the memory of the event.
Richard Patrick Zuley is a former homicide detective in the United States who had a 37-year career in the Chicago Police Department. He is most known for obtaining confessions from suspects by torture. Since the early 2000s, some of these convictions have been investigated and overturned as wrongful, following allegations that he had tortured and/or framed suspects. Since 2013 he has been the subject of several civil suits from inmates claiming abuse and frame-ups to gain convictions.
Lathierial Boyd is an African-American man from Chicago who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1990 and served 23 years in prison. His appeals were turned down. An investigation by WGN-TV television in 2001 helped document new evidence in his case.
The PEACE method of investigative interviewing is a five stage process in which investigators try to build rapport and allow a criminal suspect to provide their account of events uninterrupted, before presenting the suspect with any evidence of inconsistencies or contradictions. It is used to obtain a full account of events from a suspect rather than just seeking a confession - which is the goal of the Reid technique, in which interrogators are more aggressive, accusative, and threatening in terms of proposing consequences for the suspect's failure to confess to the crime.
References
- ↑ Milne, Rebecca and Rull, Ray (1999). Investigative Interviewing. Psychology and Practice. Chichester UK: Wiley.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ↑ "Centre for Investigative Interviewing". This definition has been used by the Centre for Investigative Interviewing, Australia. Retrieved 15 January 2020.
- ↑ Rachlew, Asbjørn (14 March 2017). "From interrogating to interviewing suspects of terror: Towards a new mindset". Penal Reform International.
- ↑ Gudjonsson, Gisli H. (2007). Investigative interviewing. Handbook of criminal investigation. Routledge. pp. 466–492. ISBN 9781843921882.
- ↑ Griffiths, Andy, and Asbjørn Rachlew (2018). From interrogation to investigative interviewing: The application of psychology. In The Psychology of Criminal Investigation. Routledge. pp. 154–178.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ↑ Powell, Martine B., Ron P. Fisher, and Rebecca Wright (2005). Investigative Interviewing in Psychology and Law: An Empirical Perspective. The Guilford Press. pp. 11–42.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ↑ Méndez, Juan E. (5 August 2016). "Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Interim report to the UN General Assembly. 5 August 2016". digitallibrary.un.org. UN. Retrieved 15 January 2020.
- ↑ Fahsing, I. A., & Rachlew, A. (2013). Investigative interviewing in the Nordic region. In International developments in investigative interviewing. Willan. pp. 65–91.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ↑ Schollum, Mary (2005). "Investigative interviewing: The literature. Wellington, New Zealand" (PDF). Office of the Commissioner of Police. Retrieved 15 January 2020.
- ↑ Westera, Nina J., Rachel Zajac, Deirdre A. Brown (2017). Witness interviewing practices in New Zealand. In International Developments and Practices in Investigative Interviewing and Interrogation. Volume 1: Victims and witnesses. London: Routledge. pp. 123–134.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)