How the Police Generate False Confessions by James L. Trainum

Author:James L. Trainum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-17T04:00:00+00:00

Other Sources of Contamination

As we saw in the previous case study involving the serial rapist attempting to help investigators solve a murder mystery, not all contamination comes from the investigator. Sometimes what the investigator considers their hold-back information just ain’t all that is held back. These days, with twenty-four-hour news coverage, instant Internet news, social media posts, and neighborhood listservs, it is almost possible to know all that is public knowledge about the case. And there is still the old-fashioned way that such information spreads: through the neighborhood gossips and the rumor mill.

As such, the suspect may infer some hold-back information from the public details of the crime. This is known as “contamination by inference,” and to further understand this let’s look at a hypothetical case in which the body of a woman was discovered in an abandoned building. Based on the sex of the victim and the location where her body was found, it may be inferred by people hearing about the crime that a sexual assault had taken place. If information about a sexual assault was intentionally kept from the media by the investigator, they would believe that this is a detail that “only the killer would know.” If, while interviewing a subject regarding an unrelated incident, the investigator asks if they know anything about the woman found in the building, and the subject replied, “Oh, the one who was raped?” the investigator may jump to the erroneous conclusion that this person had “insider knowledge” and must somehow be involved in the crime.

Contamination by inference can also occur in the interrogation room. An example can be found in the case discussed previously in chapter 5 of the young man who suffered frontal lobe brain damage at birth and suffered from severe cognitive problems. The investigator believed that he had been involved in a domestic fight with his lover, who he then forced off a thirteen-story-high balcony to his death. The autopsy revealed injuries to the decedent’s neck, injuries that could have been caused by the fall but the investigators believed was the result of strangulation.

The investigators told the suspect that during the autopsy the medical examiner found some things that needed to be accounted for. The suspect was told that there was bruising and other injuries around the neck, including what looked like a thumbprint, all consistent with . . . . Two things happened at this point. The investigator paused, and though partially hidden behind the door, the video camera captured an upward motion of his hand as if going to his neck. The suspect filled in the blank with the most logical answer given all of the clues: strangulation.

During the trial, the prosecution harped repeatedly that it was the suspect who brought up that the decedent had been strangled, not the investigators. What was ignored was that the investigators painted the picture and left the suspect to infer the only possible thing that the picture depicted.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.