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Saul Kassin is an American academic, who serves as a professor of psychology at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice [1] and Massachusetts Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Kassin was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, and then in Belle Harbor, New York. He attended Brooklyn College from 1971 to 1974 and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree. While there, he helped run experiments on implicit learning for cognitive psychologist Arthur S. Reber. From 1974 to 1978, he attended the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut, where he received his Ph.D. in personality and social psychology. From there, he began his psychology and law career by studying jury decision making with Lawrence S. Wrightsman at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. After two years at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, he started at Williams College in 1981, where he spent most of his career. In 1984–85, while on sabbatical from Williams, Kassin was awarded a U.S. Supreme Court Judicial Fellowship and worked at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, DC. In 1985–86, worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.
Over the years, Kassin has authored and edited several books, including: The Psychology of Evidence and Trial Procedure, The American jury on trial: psychological perspectives, and Confessions in the Courtroom (all with Lawrence S. Wrightsman). He is also co-author of the textbook Social Psychology with Steven Fein and Hazel Rose Markus, now in its twelfth edition [2] and editor of Pillars of Social Psychology (2022), a book of memoirs contributed by legendary social psychologists. [3]
For his work on false confessions, Kassin has won lifetime contribution awards from the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group (iiiRG), the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS), and the European Association of Psychology and the Law (EAPL). In 2017, he received the American Psychological Association (APA) Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest. [4] [5] In 2021, he received the James McKeen Cattell Lifetime Achievement Award for Applied Research from the Association for Psychological Science (APS). [6]
Kassin was the president of Division 41 of APA, a.k.a. AP-LS. He continues to teach, research, write, and lecture to various groups in the area of social psychology and the law. He has appeared as a guest analyst on several major TV networks and syndicated news shows and in a number of podcasts - including Shankar Vedantam's Hidden Brain, Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert, and Erin Moriarty's My Life of Crime - and documentaries such as the 2012 film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon titled The Central Park Five . [7] To raise public awareness, Kassin has also written several newspaper editorials [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] and an article on the false confessions that surrounded the infamous 1964 killing of Kitty Genovese. [13]
Kassin is a staunch critic of deceptive interrogation tactics that can cause innocent people to confess. [14] [15] In light of research showing that Miranda does not protect the innocent, [16] [17] he is also a vocal advocate for the requirement that all interrogations be videotaped in their entirety—without exception. Kassin is best known for pioneering the scientific study of false confessions. In 1985, he and Lawrence Wrightsman introduced a taxonomy that distinguished three types of false confessions—voluntary, compliant, and internalized. [18] This classification scheme is commonly used. [19] [20]
Kassin created the first laboratory research methods (the most notable being the computer crash experiment) [21] used in forensic psychology to study the problems with certain types of police interrogation techniques and why innocent people confess. Along with fellow experts Steven Drizin, Thomas Grisso, Gisli Gudjonsson, Richard Leo, and Allison Redlich, he wrote a 2010 AP-LS White Paper called "Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendations." [22] Over the years, Kassin has published many other empirical articles on the subject of confessions and has introduced such terms as positive coercion bias, [23] minimization and maximization, [24] guilt-presumptive interrogation, [25] the phenomenology of innocence, [26] [27] and the forensic confirmation bias [28] In recent articles, he explains why judges, juries, and others tend to believe false confessions even when contradicted eyewitnesses, alibis, DNA, and other evidence. [29] [30] [31] In 2018, he and his colleagues published a survey of confession experts worldwide that indicated the consensus of opinions within the scientific community. [32]
Kassin has long advocated for the mandatory video recording of suspect interviews and interrogations from start to finish. With funding support from the National Science Foundation, he and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments on the effects of video recording on police, suspects, and lay fact finders, including the first fully randomized field experiment involving actual suspects. The results have all been published. [33] [34] [35]
Kassin's work is cited all over the world. He has worked on many high-profile cases and with the Innocence Project to use psychology to help prevent and correct wrongful convictions. He has testified as an expert witness in state, federal, and military courts and was the subject of a feature article published in SCIENCE. [36]
Published in June 2022, Kassin's newest book is titled DUPED: Why Innocent People Confess - And Why We Believe Their Confessions. [37] Combining real cases and psychological research, this book describes how this unimaginable aspect of human behavior happens and then how false confessions corrupt forensics and other evidence, forces guilty pleas, blinds judges and juries, and stigmatizes defendants their entire lives—even after they are exonerated.
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychologists in the United States, and the largest psychological association in the world. It has over 157,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It has 54 divisions, which function as interest groups for different subspecialties of psychology or topical areas. The APA has an annual budget of around $125 million.
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 congenial rapport with the subject to torture.
The Reid technique is a method of interrogation after investigation and behavior analysis. The system was developed in the United States by John E. Reid in the 1950s. Reid was a 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 1970s, it has been widely utilized by police departments in the United States.
Forensic psychology is the application of scientific knowledge and methods to help answer legal questions arising in criminal, civil, contractual, or other judicial proceedings. Forensic psychology includes research on various psychology-law topics, such as jury selection, reducing systemic racism in criminal law; eyewitness testimony, evaluating competency to stand trial; or assessing military veterans for service-connected disability compensation. The American Psychological Association's Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists reference several psychology subdisciplines, such as social, clinical, experimental, counseling, and neuropsychology.
Legal psychology is a field focused on the application of psychological principles within the legal system and its interactions with individuals. Professionals in this area are involved in understanding, assessing, and questioning suspects, evaluating potential jurors, investigating crimes and crime scenes, conducting forensic investigations, and handling other legal contexts. The term "legal psychology" distinguishes this practical branch of psychology from the more theory-oriented field of clinical psychology.
A miscarriage of justice occurs when an 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.
Gísli Hannes Guðjónsson, CBE is an Icelandic-British academic, educator, forensic psychologist and former detective. He is Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Psychiatry of King's College London and a Professor in the Psychology Department at Reykjavik University. Gísli is an internationally renowned authority on suggestibility and false confessions and is one of the world's leading experts on false memory syndrome.
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.
The Gudjonsson suggestibility scale (GSS) is a psychological test that measures suggestibility of a subject. It was created in 1983 in England by psychologist Gísli Hannes Guðjónsson, who had been a detective in Iceland. It involves reading a short story to the subject and testing recall. This test has been used in court cases in several jurisdictions but has been the subject of various criticisms.
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.
Gary L. Wells is an American psychologist and a scholar in eyewitness memory research. Wells is a professor at Iowa State University with a research interest in the integration of both cognitive psychology and social psychology and its interface with law. He has conducted research on lineup procedures, reliability and accuracy of eyewitness identification. Wells has received many awards and honorary degrees, and he has gained recognition for his work and contributions to psychology and criminal justice.
Interrogational torture is the use of torture to obtain information in interrogation, as opposed to the use of torture to extract a forced 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.
Steven A. Drizin is an American lawyer and academic. He is a Clinical Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in Chicago, where he has been on the faculty since 1991. At Northwestern, Drizin teaches courses on Wrongful Convictions and Juvenile Justice. He has written extensively on the topics of police interrogations and false confessions. Among the general public, Drizin is known for his ongoing representation of Brendan Dassey, one of the protagonists in the Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer.
Investigative interviewing is a non-coercive method for questioning victims, witnesses and suspects of crimes. Generally, investigative interviewing "involves eliciting a detailed and accurate account of an event or situation from a person to assist decision-making". This interviewing technique is ethical and research based, and it stimulates safe and effective gathering of evidence. The goal of an investigative interview is to obtain accurate, reliable and actionable information. The method aims at maximising the likelihood of obtaining relevant information and minimise the risks of contaminating evidence obtained in police questioning. The method has been described as a tool for mitigating the use of torture, coercion and psychological manipulation, and for averting forced confessions and errors of justice leading to wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice.
Lawrence Samuel Wrightsman, Jr. was an American psychologist known for his research in social psychology and the psychology of law. He taught at the University of Kansas from 1976 until his retirement in 2008. He served as president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) from 1976 to 1977 and of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) from 1977 to 1978. According to the SPSP, "The textbooks, articles, and addresses that Larry wrote helped create the field of psychology and law as we know it."
Amy Bradfield Douglass is a social psychologist whose research focus on the intersection of psychology and law specifically concerning eyewitness testimony. Douglass is a Whitehouse Professor of Psychology at Bates College. Douglass is also a publish author of two textbooks. She is most well known for her research, and is recognized as an expert for trial consulting.
Laura Smalarz is a psychologist researching psychology as it is related to the law. Dr. Smalarz focuses her work on forensic evidence, eyewitness identification, and the wrongfully convicted. She is an Associate Professor of psychology and director of the psychology and law lab at Arizona State University.
Antoinette Kavanaugh is a Forensic Clinical Psychologist based in Chicago, Illinois. She has been working as a forensic psychologist for over twenty years with specialized training within the fields of forensic psychology and law and research-evaluation methods.
Jeff Kukucka is a legal psychologist specializing in wrongful convictions. As of October 2024, he is an associate professor at Towson University.
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