Gaining Confessions - Essay Example

Gaining confessions from suspects are both challenging and rewarding in terms of the investigators’ ability to extract the accurate information to make a just conviction. O’Connor & Maher (2009) indicated that there are “four major areas of concern to address to reduce future wrongful convictions incidents: false confessions, inadequate investigations, mistaken eyewitness identification, and delayed, absent, mistaken, or improper forensic analysis” (par. 5). In this regard, the essay aims to proffer issues pertaining to gaining confessions in the criminal justice system.

The discourse would identify the different types of confessions; delve into the relevant aspects of interrogation, and present some recommendations to prevent or minimize the possibilities of generating false confessions. Wicremasinghe (2002) define a confession as “an admission the words of which expressly or substantially admit guilt or when they are taken together in the context inferentially admit guilt” (Wicremasinghe, 2002, par. 15). In the article written by O’Connor & Maher (2009), the authors cited Kissin (2008) as identifying three types of confessions, to wit: “(1) voluntary confessions – those in which people claim responsibility for crimes they did not commit without prompting from police; (2) compliant confessions – cases in which the suspect acquiesces in order to escape from a stressful situation, avoid punishment, or gain a promised or implied reward; and (3) internalized false confessions – those in which innocent but vulnerable suspects, exposed to highly suggestive interrogation techniques, come to not only confess but come to believe they committed the crime in question” (Kissin, 249 as cited by O’Connor & Maher, par. 22). Due to the controversial nature of confessions, per se, the authenticity of the information gathered during the confession