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Psychological And Cultural Aspects Of Interrogations And False Confessions: Using Research To Inform Legal Decision-Making, Richard A. Leo, Mark Costanzo, Netta Shaked-Schroer
Psychological And Cultural Aspects Of Interrogations And False Confessions: Using Research To Inform Legal Decision-Making, Richard A. Leo, Mark Costanzo, Netta Shaked-Schroer
Richard A. Leo
False confessions are a major cause of wrongful convictions. In many countries, physical abuse and torture are still used to extract confessions from criminal suspects. Cultural orientations such as collectivism and power distance may influence the tendency to confess, and a suspect's past experience in a country that uses physical abuse during interrogations may render suspects fearful and more prone to falsely confess. After looking at interrogations outside the United States, we examine the issue of why false confessions sometime occur in the U.S. legal system. We prove an overview of the stages of a typical interrogation and provide a …
Studying Wrongful Convictions: Learning From Social Science, Richard A. Leo, Jon B. Gould
Studying Wrongful Convictions: Learning From Social Science, Richard A. Leo, Jon B. Gould
Richard A. Leo
There has been an explosion of legal scholarship on wrongful convictions in the last decade, reflecting a growing concern about the problem of actual innocence in the criminal justice system. Yet criminal law and procedure scholars have engaged in relatively little dialogue or collaboration on this topic with criminologists. In this article, we use the empirical study of wrongful convictions to illustrate what criminological approaches—or, more broadly, social science methods—can teach legal scholars. After briefly examining the history of wrongful conviction scholarship, we discuss the limits of the (primarily) narrative methodology of legal scholarship on wrongful convictions. We argue that …