SSS 2011-11-23

时间：2011-12-02 06:08:53

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Confessing to a crime usually is not enough to throw you behind bars. Many states require independent evidence to corroborate¹ a confession². But if a suspect confesses and forensic³ investigators⁴ know, it can cause them to favor evidence in support of a guilty verdict—even if the confession is coerced⁶ or false. So says a study in the journal Psychological Science.

Researchers analyzed⁷ 241 cases from the Innocence⁸ Project, which uses DNA⁹ tests to try to exonerate¹⁰ prisoners who are in fact not guilty. Most of the wrongful convictions were based on eyewitness¹¹ mistakes. But a quarter of the bad verdicts involved false confessions¹².

And such cases were much more likely to involve botched forensic evidence—which tended to pile up after the confessions were made. That sequence suggests that investigators' scientific conclusions were corrupted¹³ by belief in the defendant's guilt⁵.

Even more troubling, the authors say, is that tainted¹⁴ evidence can influence a trial long after a confession has been thrown out—as with the Amanda Knox trial in Italy. For judges and juries, the message is clear: even evidence that appears to be a smoking gun may be smoke and mirrors.

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.

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