False Confessions Quotes

The abhorrence of society to the use of involuntary confessions does not turn alone on their inherent untrustworthiness. It also turns on the deep-rooted feeling that the police must obey the law while enforcing the law; that, in the end, life and liberty can be as much endangered from illegal methods used to convict those thought to be criminals as from the actual criminals themselves.

they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.

I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence.

Tortures are a dangerous invention, and seem to be a test of endurance rather than of truth.

I want to take back at least half of the “I love you”s, because I didn’t mean them as much as the other ones.

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.

While the notion that torture works has been glorified in television shows and movies, the simple truth is this: torture has never been an effective interrogation method.

I was just like a pathological liar when I was a kid. I think I just wanted to one-up somebody. Somebody would be like, 'Oh, God, my legs hurt.' I'd be like, 'Your legs hurt? I'm getting mine amputated next week.' And that's actually how my mother found out. She came to school and somebody was like, 'God, that's such a shame about Jennifer's legs.' She made me purge. I had to spill out all of my lies. I was like, 'I said that Dad drove a barge, and we were millionaires, and you were pregnant, I had to get my legs amputated, and I spayed cats and dogs on the weekends.' Now I can't lie.

Torture doesn't work.

Many criminals believe what they say is true; they could pass a lie detector test.

One of the techniques terrorists employ is to allege torture and mistreatment when they are captured, regardless of whether it is true.

I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it.

… there are numerous examples of cases where relying on information obtained through torture has disastrous consequences. The reality is that use of torture produces inconsistent results that are an unreliable basis for action and policy. The overwhelming consensus of intelligence professionals is that torture produces unreliable information. And the overwhelming consensus of senior military leaders is that resort to torture is dishonorable. Use of such primitive methods actually puts our own troops and our nation at risk.

Is there anything about the JonBenet Ramsey case that isn't weird and disturbing?

The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.

Witches admitted their relations with the devil. Our blood boils - how could they be forced to admit this when there is no devil. But reason tells us this is not true. The devil does exist and was in fact the inquisitor.

Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church or robbing a bank, but never to being bores.

The U.S. is, so far as I know, the only nation which places such extensive reliance on the polygraph. It has gotten us into a lot of trouble.

40% of homicides go unsolved. You know, it's not a very good record. And, also, 95% of convictions in America come from plea bargaining, which is often coerced. It's like we have the worst of both worlds. We don't convict the guilty enough, and we coerce the innocent too much.

Torture is an extremely effective tool for getting people to talk. It is a terrible tool for getting people to tell the truth.

Wrongful convictions need to be addressed in America. There are a lot of Brian Banks behind bars right now.

With increased awareness should come greater caution about how confessions are used at trial - and a greater willingness to overturn convictions when it becomes clear that a confession was untrue.

I have never worked on interrogation; I have never seen an interrogation, and I have only a passing knowledge of the literature on interrogation. With that qualification, my opinion is that the point of interrogation is to get at the truth, not to get at what the interrogator wants to hear.

Experienced military and intelligence professionals know that torture, in addition to being illegal and immoral, is an unreliable means of extracting information from prisoners.

Because interrogations are intended to coerce confessions, interrogators feel themselves justified in using their coercive means. Consistency regarding the technique is not important; inducing anxiety and fear is the point.