False Confession Quotes

It is often necessary to trick people into confessing.

Not one of us has betrayed his God or his country. I do confess my guilt, which consists in having, to my shame and dishonor, suffered myself, through the pain of torture and the fear of death, to give utterance to falsehoods imputing scandalous sins and iniquities to an illustrious Order, which hath nobly served the cause of Christianity. I disdain to seek a wretched and disgraceful existence by engrafting another lie upon the original falsehood.

Anyone will say anything under torture.

If you have never been tortured, or locked up and verbally threatened, you may find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to something he had not done. Intuition holds that the innocent do not make false confessions.

Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.

The cops picked me up for attempted murder. I can still see the detectives, licking their chops. Thought they had me. Two weeks later, the cat came out of a coma and told the truth. I was innocent.

Pain will force even the truthful to speak falsely.

People plead guilty or admit to crimes they didn't commit for various reasons. Certain interrogation procedures produce high rates of false confessions.

Using legally approved tricks and lies, the detective coerces a false confession. Hiding facts that support innocence, the prosecutor forces a dubious plea of guilt. The judge sentences for acquitted conduct, as she is allowed to do. The defense attorney for the poor, overworked because of underfunding by the state, fails to summon sufficient resources to investigate and rebut. The legal immigrant is deported with no meaningful access to constitutional rights. These intrusions are woven into the statutes and enabled by courts

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.

I didn't confess. I was interrogated. They acted like my answers were wrong. They told me I was wrong, that I didn't remember correctly, that I had to remember correctly. And if I didn't, I would never see my family.

To be fair to the Inquisition, they only used confessions extracted after the torture had ended, which let them claim that admissions had been freely given; the fact that the torture would have started again if they hadn't confessed was a minor detail.

Tainted evidence often comes from torture.

Thousands of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury's believing their word over a police officer's are slim to none.

Torture was never intended in its earliest days to be a quest for the truth. It was intended to get people to confess to things they hadn't done like being a witch. We have turned it around and tried to legitimize it.

Accepting blame when it's not really due sometimes makes the point better.

You give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

There are a lot of weak people out there who will say almost anything they think a prosecutor wants them to say to save their skins.

There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.

I have an oscillating fan at my house. It goes back and forth. It looks like the fan is saying "no." So I like to ask it questions that a fan would say "no" to! Do you keep my hair in place? Do you keep my documents in order? Do you have 3 settings? LIAR! My fan lied to me. Now I will pull the pin up. Now you're not saying ANYTHING!

O, we all acknowledge our faults, now; 'tis the mode of the day: but the acknowledgment passes for current payment; and therefore we never amend them.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

The idea that a prisoner would confess to a complete stranger that he had committed a crime - I just didn't buy that.

It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.

Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial, and not an inquisitorial, system - a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not, by coercion, prove its charges against an accused out of his own mouth.