Chapter 33 — Exercises

Work these without looking back at the chapter first; then check yourself. Items marked † have full worked solutions in the answers appendix. There are no answers in this file. The mix is recall, applied reasoning, transcript/evidence interpretation, "spot the overstatement," ethics dilemmas, and a cold-case extension. Handle the real cases and the interrogation material soberly, as the chapter does.

A. Recall and definitions

  1. Define false confession in one sentence, and state — in rough terms — how often it appears as a contributing factor among the DNA exonerations.

  2. † Distinguish an interrogation from an interview by (a) goal, (b) presumption, and (c) which party does most of the talking. Why does only one of the two have a mechanism for discovering it has the wrong person?

  3. Name the three steps of the Reid technique emphasized in §33.2 (confrontation; refusal of denials; minimization/themes), and state, for each, how it can move an innocent person toward confessing.

  4. Define coerced-compliant and coerced-internalized false confessions, and give the single feature that distinguishes them (hint: belief).

  5. Define a voluntary false confession and give two motives for one. Why is it the least relevant type to interrogation reform?

  6. What is custodial recording, and why must it cover the entire interrogation rather than only the final confession?

  7. † Define confession contamination and explain, in one sentence, why a confession's matching "guilty-knowledge" details do not, by themselves, authenticate it.

  8. What is the false-evidence ploy, and which U.S. Supreme Court case held that police may lie to a suspect about the evidence?

  9. State the constitutional test for admitting a confession, and explain in one line why a confession can pass that test and still be false.

  10. Spell out the PEACE mnemonic and state the model's governing purpose in a single sentence.

B. Applied reasoning

  1. † A suspect says afterward: "I knew I didn't do it. I just wanted the questioning to stop, and I figured I'd straighten it out later." Classify the false confession by type and name its defining internal contradiction.

  2. A different suspect, after a long interrogation with fabricated evidence, says: "Maybe I did do it and blacked out — they had so much proof, I must have." Classify this, and name the Chapter 32 idea about memory that makes it possible.

  3. Explain the "pivot" in Figure 33.1: what changes the instant an investigator decides "this is the person," and why that pivot is where wrongful convictions are born.

  4. Why does the length of an interrogation correlate so strongly with false confessions? Frame your answer in terms of "resistance is finite."

  5. † List the dispositional risk factors and the situational risk factors from §33.4 in two columns. Then explain why their combination (e.g., a youth + an 11-hour overnight session + a false-evidence ploy) is so much more dangerous than any one alone.

  6. Explain why minimization ("it got out of hand, didn't it?") paired with maximization ("the evidence is overwhelming") squeezes a suspect toward a false "yes." What is the implied bargain?

  7. The chapter calls a confession "an unrecorded human judgment produced under pressure." Connect this phrase to the book's validity spectrum: why is "the gold standard of evidence" an inversion of how the spectrum should rank a confession?

  8. Why are adolescents the single highest-risk group for false confessions? Give two developmental reasons and connect them to what an interrogation exploits.

C. Transcript and evidence interpretation

  1. † Re-read Figure 33.2 ("How a false confession acquires its 'guilty knowledge'"). Describe the two different paths by which a scene detail can end up in a confession, and explain why, reading only the final confession, the two paths are indistinguishable.

  2. State the single most useful test for whether a detailed confession reflects genuine guilty knowledge. Give an example of a fact that passes the test and one that fails it.

  3. Figure 33.3 dissects the Renner interrogation. List the four features of the process that match the §33.3–33.4 risk profile, and the two physical findings (with their chapters) that contradict the confession's content.

  4. An interrogator's question is: "You hit him with the pipe, didn't you?" Explain how this single question can contaminate a confession, and rewrite the interaction so that a later "the weapon was a pipe" would actually be probative.

  5. A confession statement reads beautifully and matches the crime scene in every particular, but the entire interrogation that produced it was unrecorded. Explain precisely what you cannot determine about it, and why the recording gap is the decisive problem rather than an incidental one.

D. Spot the overstatement / junk-science alert

  1. † A prosecutor argues: "He confessed, and he knew the door was unlocked — only the arsonist could know that. Case closed." Identify two distinct errors in this reasoning using the chapter's vocabulary, and rewrite the claim honestly.

  2. A detective testifies: "In twenty years, no innocent person has ever confessed to me." Name the assumption embedded in this claim and explain, using the chapter, why it is not the reassurance it sounds like.

  3. A confession is described in court as "voluntary, so it's reliable." Separate the two concepts the chapter insists are distinct, and explain why one does not establish the other.

  4. A television interrogation ends with a hardened detective extracting a tearful, detailed confession in twenty minutes, and the show treats it as proof of guilt. Using §33.1–33.2, name two ways this is misleading about how real interrogations and real confessions work.

E. Ethics and reasoning

  1. † You are a detective. You have a suspect you strongly believe is guilty, no physical evidence, and the legal right (under Frazier v. Cupp) to tell him his fingerprints were found at the scene when they were not. The chapter says this tactic is the one most strongly tied to false confessions. Argue both sides, then state the rule you would adopt for yourself and why.

  2. A lab analyst learns, mid-analysis, that the suspect has already confessed. Using the §33.5 Cognitive-Bias Watch, describe the risk to the rest of the investigation and the safeguard. Why is a confession more dangerous to objectivity than a single ambiguous data point?

  3. Should police be permitted to interrogate a frightened 16-year-old for eleven hours overnight without a parent or attorney present? Build your answer from the §33.4 risk factors and the §33.6 reforms, and name the specific protections you would require.

  4. A judge must decide whether to admit a defense psychologist's expert testimony on false confessions. State the strongest argument for admitting it (what juror intuition does it counter?) and the limit on what the expert may say.

F. Synthesis and validity spectrum

  1. † In one paragraph, explain how this chapter advances at least two of the book's four themes (exclusion over proof; the validity spectrum; cognitive bias; the CSI effect cutting both ways). Name which themes and exactly how.

  2. Compare a false confession to a microscopic hair "match" (Chapter 19) and to cell-site pinpointing (Chapter 25) as examples of evidence that juries over-trust. What do all three share, and why is the confession the most dangerous of the three?

  3. Place "a detailed confession produced by an unrecorded, 11-hour, guilt-presumptive interrogation using the false-evidence ploy" on the NAS/PCAST validity reasoning. What error rate has been measured for it, and what does that absence imply about the weight it should carry?

G. Cold-case extension

  1. † Cold Case. Using only what this chapter and the cited earlier chapters establish, write the exclusion entry you would add to the Mill Creek workbook (Appendix I) for Cody Renner. State (a) the honest status of his confession at its true strength, (b) the two independent physical findings that exclude him and their chapters, (c) why his confession's matching details prove nothing, and (d) the one thing you decline to conclude (who did set the fire) and why that is the capstone's job, not this chapter's.

  2. Cold Case, reform tie-in. List the three features of the Renner interrogation that the §33.6 reforms would each have addressed (recording; time limits; the false-evidence ploy / vulnerable-suspect protections). For one of them, state exactly how the reform would have changed what a court could later evaluate about the confession.

  3. Cold Case, integrative. A colleague argues: "Even if the interrogation was flawed, Renner still confessed — shouldn't that count for something against him?" Answer using the contamination test (§33.5) and the physical contradictions (Chapters 11, 25). Explain why, in this case, the confession counts for nothing as evidence of guilt, and why saying so is honest rather than soft.

H. Short writing

  1. In 150–200 words, explain to a juror — who is certain they would never confess falsely — why that certainty is itself a bias, and how they should instead evaluate a confession. Use the fundamental attribution error and the "judge the process, not the person" principle.

  2. † In 150–200 words, contrast the Reid technique and the PEACE model: their purposes, their treatment of the suspect's account, their use of deception, and which one can recognize that it has the wrong person — and why that difference matters for false confessions.

  3. In 150–200 words, write the paragraph you would put at the top of a department policy on recording interrogations, justifying complete recording specifically by reference to the contamination problem and what a recording lets a court later reconstruct.