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SaswatMisraSecondPaper 2 - 19 Apr 2010 - Main.SaswatMisra
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< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | >
> | Criminal Confessions as Evidence: A Failure of the Adversarial System | | | | |
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< | -- By SaswatMisra - 09 Apr 2010 | | | | |
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> | 1. Confessions in Criminal Law
The prosecuting attorney and the accused are pitted in direct competition in the (adversarial) criminal justice system. Neither party seeks the truth per se. Rather, each party stretches the evidence, facts, and law to represent their cause, constrained only by a legal duty to act in “good faith” and a practical need to maintain credibility. The arbiter (i.e., judge and/or jury) decides the accused party’s guilt by comparing the evidence, facts, and law to some variant of the “reasonable doubt” standard.
The adversarial system is, of course, imperfect. The prosecutor and the accused often have very different resources available to present their case. The arbiter is inevitably influenced by his own biases and idiosyncrasies. Still, society generally accepts the adversarial system of criminal justice as legitimate despite these (and many other) imperfections.
However, it is the contention of this essay that the adversarial system breaks down completely when criminal confessions are used in place of substantive evidence in criminal trials. When a confession is given, the accused party “gives up,” while the prosecutor stays focused on "winning" rather than on determining the truth. Worse still, the arbiter, lacking more substantive evidence, is left only with his almost irrelevant intuition that "an innocent person would almost never confess" in rendering a verdict.
As a result, innocent people are convicted of crimes that they did not commit. While wrongful conviction obviously harms the accused, it also harms society. Wrongful convictions drain societal resources (incarceration and rehabilitation are expensive), corrode the legitimacy of the criminal system, and allow actual criminals to remain free and unchecked.
2. Why are Confessions Admissible as Evidence?
The fifth amendment of the Constitution guarantees that "no person ... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." This clause reflects a historical distrust of confessions, and the methods used to obtain them, in American and English law. Why then, are confessions allowed as evidence in criminal trials?
Confessions are allowed because they are practical. Confessions reduce trial costs, thereby allowing more potentially dangerous persons to be convicted using the same resources. Importantly, confessions mitigate the prosecutor’s need to acquire corroborative evidence, and so a confession is often the only or most prevalent piece of evidence at trial. For example, see ([1, page 14, quoting McCormick, 1972])("the introduction of a confession makes the other aspects of a trial in court superfluous, and the real trial, for all practical purposes, occurs when the confession is obtained"). In cases in which confessions are used, it has been estimated that a conviction would not be possible in 70-precent without the confession. See ([1, page 15]). In short, confessions are low-cost, high-reward cases for prosecutors, who are evaluated based on their conviction rates and the total number of convictions that they achieve.
3. False Confessions are Common within Certain Groups | | | | |
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> | Educated, mentally-healthy, and economically-prosperous adults generally do not confess to crimes that they did not commit. However, among certain socioeconomic groups, likely numbering in the millions, false confessions are common. | | | | |
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> | People who are have low-IQ or who are non-obviously mentally-challenged may confess to crimes they did not commit while agitated from having been hauled into an unfamiliar environment and confronted by authority figures (a situation worsened by police interrogation techniques, which often encourage intimidation and application of psychological pressure to elicit confessions). Disadvantaged immigrants, who additionally are not yet acclimated to the legal culture of the United States, may confess for related reasons. Those with undiagnosed mental-illness may confess, actually believing that they committed the crime. | | | | |
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> | Social outcasts and “drifters” are likely to view the legal system as arbitrary, or worse, as against them, and may confess from a utilitarian decision to minimize their expected penalty. Further, those who feel powerless and voiceless in society may enjoy the short-lived attention that confessing brings them (especially if the alleged crime is particularly visible). Some individuals may confess because they find familiarity and stability in the prison system and want to return to it. Finally, those involved even tangentially in organized crime may confess to cover for the serious crimes of other members of the organization. | | | | |
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> | 4. False Confessions and the Prosecutor | | | | |
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> | Unfortunately, in the adversarial system, an overworked prosecutor’s office has little incentive to dig beneath the surface of a confession and check for authenticity (for example, in the form of corroborative evidence). Doing so, would only hurt the office’s conviction rate, and, at a minimum, the prosecutor would have to spend her limited resources on a case that is “solved,” in the legal sense. Further, the victimized groups of people described above are unlikely to mobilize or complain as a cohesive whole over even egregious and systemic abuses of the confession system. | | | | |
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> | 5. False Confessions and the Arbiter | | | | |
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> | The lack of corroborative evidence in confession cases makes it difficult for the arbiter to fulfill his role as a safeguard in the adversarial system. In determining “reasonable doubt,” the arbiter must calculate, at least on some intuitive level: | | | | |
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> | "the probability that the accused party is innocent given than he confessed." | | | | |
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> | For the reasons stated above, in Section 3, this probability may often be large enough to merit serious contemplation. Unfortunately, very few arbiters will find this quantity intuitive. Instead, the arbiter, especially if it is a jury consisting of lay persons, will likely evaluate a much more intuitive, but almost irrelevant, quantity | | | | |
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> | "the probability that an accused person would confess given that they are innocent." | | | | |
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> | Guided by the principle that "an innocent person would almost never confess," the accused will likely be convicted under an intuitive, but irrelevant, pretense.
6. Conclusion
The safeguards of the adversarial system break down when an accused party confesses to a crime. Contrary to common thinking, criminal confessions, when presented in place of actual evidence, delegitimize the criminal justice system. Further, false confessions happen with regularity within certain groups of people, numbering in the millions. Requiring corroborative evidence in criminal confession cases would mean fewer “easy” convictions, and would force prosecutors to decide which crimes are really worth pursuing.
-- By SaswatMisra - 09 Apr 2010
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SaswatMisraSecondPaper 1 - 09 Apr 2010 - Main.SaswatMisra
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Paper Title
-- By SaswatMisra - 09 Apr 2010
Section I
Subsection A
Subsub 1
Subsection B
Subsub 1
Subsub 2
Section II
Subsection A
Subsection B
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
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