The text below deals with the risk of false confessions by juveniles in the american legal system, and is based on a conference retrieved on the Ted talks website.
The speaker is Lindsay Malloy who is a forensic developmental psychologist. She is a researcher and a professor. She states that adults and juveniles react differently when they face American legal system. According to her, juveniles are more likely to confess a crime than adults, even when they did not commit it.
She refers to a TV show broadcasted on Netflix, called « Making a murderer » which recounts the case of Brendan Dassey, a 16 year-old student who has been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for sexual assault and murder in 2007. Yet no evidence could have involved him but his own confession.
On the one hand, Lindsay Malloy points out that the American legal system is designed for adults ; on the other hand, according to her, 97 % of cases are resolved through pleas (rather than trials) in which confessions play a grounded role. These two arguments let us think that adolescents, in particular vulnerable ones, are widely disadvantaged to defend their own interests.
Differences in cognitive functioning between adolescents and adults
For most people, it seems unbelievable to confess to a crime you did not commit. Indeed it seems to be counterintuitive. Yet Lindsay Malloy found false confessions in approximately 25 percent of wrongful convictions of people who were subsequently exonerated by DNA evidence.
One study about exonerations (Kassin & al., 2010) showed that 8 % of adults had made false confessions compared to 42 % among juveniles.
If we think back to the case of Brendan Dassey, with an IQ about 70, he is said to be in the range of intellectual disability. This kind of deficit majors the risk of being psychologically manipulated, but even with a standard level of intelligence, and no specific physical or mental pathology, as Lindsay Malloy contends, adolescents, by nature, are suggestible and more prone to social influence than adults. Moreover, she emphasizes that adolescents are not good at long-term thinking.
Implications for the collection of confessions from adolescents in the U.S. justice system
Lindsay Malloy and her collaborators conducted a study (Malloy & al., 2014) which involved almost 200 adolescent inmates aged from 14 to 17. The findings showed that 17 % of them reported have told to the police at least one false confession, and 80 % felt have been threatened during police interrogations, so they considered confessing as the best option to get through this ordeal. As a result, Lindsay Malloy advocates that police interrogation techniques could be called into question.
In fact, in the United States, the police officers are allowed to question minors like adults. Therefore, the presence of an adult (lawyer or parent) to support them is not needed, and lying to juveniles (like saying « we already know the truth », or « we have your fingerprints ») is considered as a valuable technique.
Then police officers may play a role using for instance the well-known good cop and bad cop technique. The good cop fosters confession of minor suspects by pretending to be on their side (e.g. by saying « whatever you did we will stand behind you »), while the bad cop reaches the same effect by threatening them (e.g. by pretending to already know what the adolescent did).
Analysis
Thanks to a large body of research, it is already known that the PreFrontal Cortex (PFC) mature during long years until adulthood. PFC is the brain region where executive functions are located.
These latter encompass work memory, inhibition and mental flexibility. Some researchers (Carlson & al.) recently stated that executive functions can be distinguished whether they ar « hot » or « cold ». « Hot » executive functions refer to the way their neural systems vary according to the emotionally and motivationally situations, whereas « cold » ones are more neutral.
Therefore, this study raises the question of decision-making in adolescence, and could be a part of an explanation of why false confession may happen.
Given that decision-making involves amygdala (which is related to emotions) in adolescence, and prefrontal cortex (which is related to executive functions allowing reasoning) in adulthood, it becomes easier to understand how much adolescents could be influenced by the immediate context.
In addition, this conference made me think about other related topics, such as confirmation bias from police officers and judges, who, once a suspect is targeted, only focus on evidence of guilt, or false memory risk among victims when a police officer tells them about the main suspect.
All these contributions from psychology would be discouraging in this legal context, if they were not qualified by other researches. From this point of view, brain plasticity, which refers to the brain’s ability to change in response to experiences, is a path to hope. From 0 to 3 years old, the brain plasticity is known for a long time. Nevertheless adolescence is the second stage of life during which the brain is very malleable. Thus recent knowledge makes this stage tremendous according to Steinberg (2014) because of the amount of opportunities that are open, including for people who care about teenagers, such as psychologists, educators, and parents.
So I think that the groundbreaking body of recent research on adolescence allows us to shade the vulnerable aspects of adolescents highlighted by Lindsay Malloy’s conference, and to turn to interventions that offer hope to adolescents in order to strengthen their capacities for self-control and decision-making for example. In particular, what is at stake is the free will of teenagers, in today’s Western societies where adolescence has extended to its two extremes, beginning earlier and ending later than a century ago.
Words I have learned
We’re in your corner : nous sommes de ton côté
To overturn : annuler
Outcry : protestation
Gruesome : macabre
Blatant : flagrant
Hints of leniency : des indices de clémence
Mock : faux, simulé
Allegedly : soi-disant
To waive : renoncer à
Bibliography
Carlson, S.M., Zelazo, PH.D., & Faja, S. (2019). De la – aux – fonction.s executive.s : une synthèse neurocognitive et socioaffective en neurosciences cognitives et en psychologie du développement. Traduction Jérôme Alain Lapasset et Laura Bon. A.N.A.E., 160, 371-413 .
Kassin, S. M., Drizin, S. A., Grisso, T., Gudjonsson, G. H., Leo, R. A., & Redlich, A. D. (2010). Police-induced confessions: Risk factors and recommendations. Law and Human Behavior, 34(1), 3–38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-009-9188-6
Malloy, L. C., Shulman, E. P., & Cauffman, E. (2014). Interrogations, confessions, and guilty pleas among serious adolescent offenders. Law and Human Behavior, 38(2), 181–193. https://doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000065
Steinberg, L. (2014). Age of opportunity: Lessons from the new science of adolescence. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.