Forensic Psychology For Dummies (164 page)

Researching False Confessions

A few hours after two weak, elderly women were found battered to death in 1987 in their home in the South of England, a local 17-year-old was arrested and questioned intensively for over 14 hours. Eventually, he said things that the police took as incriminating him in the murders and associated sexual assaults and theft. This case is one of hundreds that Professor Ghisli Gudjonsson (see Chapter 5, ‘Dealing with false confessions’), a British forensic psychologist, studied that provide a clear example of a ‘false confession’. He examined cases, like this one, in which it was clear from later evidence that the suspect had confessed even though he didn’t commit the crime and tried to establish what it was that led to the confession.

In this case, the youth initially repeatedly denied any involvement in the murder or even being in the house. Yet after five different officers took turns in questioning him, telling him that witnesses had seen him near the victims’ house around the time of the murder, and repeatedly challenging his account of what he’d done and where he’d been, the teenager became very distressed, shaking and sobbing. Eventually, he admitted being near the house and agreed with the incriminating claims made by the police.

The next day, however, after he’d rested, he again denied any guilt. For a year, he was kept in custody but throughout all that time he maintained his innocence. He said he’d offered self-incriminating agreement to the claims put to him because the police kept questioning in such a way that he felt they’d never stop. He felt very tired and just wanted the interrogation to end. He became frightened of what they may do to him and so eventually gave in and told them what he thought they wanted to hear.

A year later, another man was charged with the murders and pleaded guilty. He had his guilt corroborated with other evidence, and was convicted.

Because of these cases and the intensive research that Professor Gudjonsson and his colleagues carried out over many years, courts around the world are much more cautious about accepting confessions as indications of guilt. The most extreme example of this situation is in India where a confession isn’t accepted by the courts, unless it’s given in court to a judge with no police officers present.

Examining the Role of Implicit Influence in the Lockerbie Bomber Case

On 21 December 1988, Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie in Scotland killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members. The police investigation identified clothing that had been with the bomb and believed that it came from a shop in Malta, where the shopkeeper at the time was Anthony Gauci.

Police approached Gauci about a year after the bomb exploded to see whether he was able to remember selling the clothing and who’d bought it. By the time the investigators questioned Anthony Gauci, they were sure that the person who put the bomb on flight 103 was Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. They therefore presented Gauci with various sets of photographs, some of which included a picture of al-Megrahi, to see whether Gauci was able to identify the customer from a year earlier. When Gauci did indeed select al-Megrahi from the set of photographs, apparently the police threw a party to celebrate.

The investigation and the identification of al-Megrahi was much more involved and complicated than I can indicate in a couple of paragraphs. But even this brief summary reveals reasonable doubts that a shopkeeper could remember who’d bought what clothes many months earlier. The possibility has to be considered that the police, even inadvertently, influenced Gauci’s judgements because they were so keen to get identification in this internationally significant case.

As part of a major study that I was asked to carry out in preparation for an appeal al-Megrahi wanted to make against his conviction, I set up an experiment to see whether people can be indirectly influenced to select a picture without being aware of it. In this experiment, two different sets of administrators were each given similar instructions. They were asked to show the set of pictures that Gauci had been shown to a number of different people and ask them to guess who the Lockerbie bomber in the set was.

One crucial difference existed in the instructions given to the administrators. One set were told which picture was al-Megrahi, but they were instructed not to tell anyone that. The other set of administrators weren’t given this simple piece of information.

The results found that the administrators who didn’t know who the ‘target’ picture was never had the photograph selected. Whereas those who ‘knew’, had the target selected in about a third of cases, much more than would happen by chance. This result showed that implicit influence (known as an
experimenter effect
) is likely to have been very powerful in this case.

Al-Megrahi was diagnosed with terminal cancer and released from prison on compassionate grounds, and his appeal dropped.

Identifying Ritual Murders in South Africa

Brigadier Gerard Labuschange is an unusual forensic psychologist. He’s a qualified clinical psychologist but leads an Investigative Psychology Unit within the South African Police Service. Therefore, uniquely, he carries out investigations as well as providing psychological evidence in court. He thus brings a rarely found systematic, scientific approach to his detective work as well as psychological insights.

He has been particularly interested in distinguishing a particular type of murder, which is usually only found in Africa, from other forms of murder. These murders are ones that happen because body parts of the victim are used in traditional African medicine. People outside of the culture that supports this type of murder have difficulty understanding just how powerful such long-established belief systems can be.

The brigadier’s gruesome task is to distinguish mutilations found on a murdered victim from those that may be the result of some psychotic, bizarre sexual or other mentally disturbed feature. This job requires understanding the belief systems involved that sustain this sort of murder and the sorts of victims (often children), that are considered appropriate for providing the necessary anatomical component. This understanding goes beyond the knowledge that a physician who carried out an autopsy would have. It requires psychological awareness that can recognise that the killer isn’t mentally disturbed at all, but totally accepts the attitudes and beliefs that support these horrible crimes.

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