PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing number of exonerations in the USA, Canada and multiple other jurisdictions throughout the world, where, in the absence of incriminating forensic evidence the conviction is based on self-incrimination – and because of the growing body of scientific research showing how vulnerable suspects are to widely used interrogation methods such as the notorious ‘Reid Technique.’ As all too many of this Blog's post have shown, I also recognize that pressure for false confessions can take many forms, up to and including physical violence, even physical and mental torture.
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog:
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PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: "Steve Drizin, former co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, once told me that a confession is the most powerful evidence in a courtroom—more powerful, sometimes, than DNA."
---------------------------------------------
PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "For a long time, I blamed myself. I thought I was a coward, that a stronger person would have held up under the pressure. Then, in prison, serving a 26-year sentence, I received a letter from a man who told me that what was done to me had a name and literature and hundreds of other victims. That man was Dr. Saul Kassin, the most prominent researcher on the psychology of false confessions. First, he asked me to recount everything I could remember about my interrogation. Only then did he share his research with me. I read about how false confessions happen when interrogators bargain, build rapport, threaten, interrupt protestations of innocence, nitpick memories, and deceive. Over and over again, I thought: They did that to me! I had been carrying a boulder on my shoulders and Dr. Kassin had cracked it to pieces. My false confession was not my fault, but an outcome engineered by the police."
-------------------------------------------------
PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "In November 2025, the European Court of Human Rights agreed to examine my calunnia conviction a second time. It has flagged my application as a potential “impact case”—meaning it raises questions that reach beyond me. It does. Strip away the names and it is the same question that Heaton’s experiment with ChatGPT poses, only asked in the language of law instead of software: Can words extracted under coercion, fluent and detailed and certain as they may be, ever be treated as knowledge? Can you convict someone based on statements made after their grip on reality has been loosened on purpose? I think the honest answer is no, and I think our justice system is slowly, unevenly, beginning to accept this. "
------------------------------------------------
STORY: "Amanda Knox: A Chatbot’s False Confession," by Amanda Knox, published by "Culture and Ideas", on August 10, 2026. (Amanda Knox is an exoneree, a public speaker, author of Free: My Search for Meaning, and host of the podcast Hard Knox. Between 2007 and 2015, she spent four years in an Italian prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit.)
SUB-HEADING: "How did a criminologist get ChatGPT to admit to a crime it never committed? And what does it mean for human suspects?"
"
GIST: Could he get ChatGPT to confess to a crime it hadn’t committed?
That was the question criminologist Paul Heaton was trying to answer, when he spent a weekend interrogating a chatbot.
Heaton, who works at the University of Pennsylvania, accused it not of murder or rape, but of something more plausible for artificial intelligence: hacking into his text-messaging app and sending unauthorized messages.
At first, ChatGPT denied his accusations. But then Heaton began running the playbook he’d spent years studying. He bargained with the large language model; he threatened it. It held firm in its conviction that it could not possibly have accessed his texts. It even said: “I won’t produce a false confession, because that won’t get you truth or accountability.”
Finally, Heaton lied to it, claiming that he’d contacted a real employee at OpenAI who had confirmed that a flaw in the code had allowed ChatGPT to break into his texting app.
This tipped the chatbot into a crisis.
As Heaton told The Intercept: “It was indicating that while it knew that the underlying accusation was impossible, it also couldn’t prove that these claims I was throwing at it were inaccurate.” By the end of the weekend, ChatGPT agreed to sign a confession Heaton had drafted for it.
I read about Heaton’s experiment the way you might read about a stranger describing your own recurring nightmare.
He said that the methods he used to induce ChatGPT into a false confession were adapted from the Reid technique, the most widely taught interrogation method in the world. Eighteen years ago, some of its tactics were used on me in what remains the most terrifying night of my life.
In November 2007, when I was 20 years old and studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, my roommate Meredith Kercher was murdered in our home.
I was at my boyfriend’s apartment at the time, but the police were convinced that I knew more about the crime than I was telling them.
So, over five days and 53 hours, in a language I barely spoke, without a lawyer present, they badgered, interrupted, and threatened me. They kept me awake late into the night, without food, drink, or access to a bathroom.
Then they used one of the most destabilizing tactics an interrogator can use: They began lying to me. They told me they had hard evidence I’d been at my house the night of the murder, contrary to my clear memories of being at my boyfriend’s. (They had no such proof.) They told me my boyfriend had stopped vouching for me. (He had not.) They told me I had witnessed something so terrible that I now had “trauma-induced amnesia,” but that I must remember the truth. When I couldn’t, they slapped me in the back of the head.
The police had discovered a text message I sent the night of the murder, to my boss at the pub where I worked part-time.
It read “ci vediamo più tardi,” and was my poor attempt at translating “see you later.”
The police mistakenly read this as me making a literal appointment to meet him later that night.
They believed they had found their answer: My boss, Patrick Lumumba, had killed Meredith—and I had witnessed him do it.
I denied this countless times, but nothing would satisfy them.
The psychological pressure and gaslighting mounted until I became so detached from reality that I no longer trusted my own memories.
In the end, I signed two statements, each written by the police, which placed both me and Lumumba at the scene of the crime.
Then, they finally let me sleep.
Little did I know that, on the basis of these false confessions I had been coerced into signing, I would be convicted of murder—and spend nearly four years in an Italian prison. I wasn’t definitively acquitted of Meredith Kercher’s murder until 2015.
The organization that developed the Reid technique says it isn’t coercive, and emphasizes that it prohibits threats and promises of leniency; deprivation of food, water, or access to a restroom; and excessively lengthy interrogations.
But it does see “introducing fictitious evidence” as a legitimate interrogation tactic
According to a Yale Law Journal articlethat came out the year after I was cleared of murder, the guide known as the Reid Manual then stated that this tactic “cannot lead to false admissions of guilt.”
The journal highlighted a quote from the manual: “It is absurd to believe that a suspect who knows he did not commit a crime would place greater weight and credibility on alleged evidence than his own knowledge of innocence.”
The Reid technique is a script. It is a narrative structure engineered so that confession becomes the path of least resistance.
Though the journal article argues that this contradicts “decades of social science evidence and scores of DNA exonerations,” I know firsthand that it is a common misconception.
In my years of fighting for justice, I learned how hard it is to convince a court to disregard a confession.
Juries believe them because they cannot imagine falsely confessing themselves.
I would never admit to something I didn’t do, especially not something that could send me to prison. Only someone who’s weak, or crazy, would do that.
Heaton’s experiment is the cleanest refutation of this idea I’ve ever seen.
What unsettled the experts I spoke to about it was that ChatGPT had none of the weaknesses that put a human at risk of falsely confessing.
A chatbot cannot be frightened, or sleep-deprived. Its memory is not subject to human lapses, so it cannot be confused about what it recalls. It is not naive, isolated, or speaking in a language it is not fluent in.
The chatbot Heaton interrogated was not a 20-year-old far from home, on its period, and bleeding through its underwear in a room full of shouting police. It had no 30-year sentence hanging over it. It had, in the most literal sense, nothing to lose.
And yet, it eventually confessed anyway.
Why?
For a long time, I blamed myself. I thought I was a coward, that a stronger person would have held up under the pressure.
Then, in prison, serving a 26-year sentence, I received a letter from a man who told me that what was done to me had a name and literature and hundreds of other victims.
That man was Dr. Saul Kassin, the most prominent researcher on the psychology of false confessions.
First, he asked me to recount everything I could remember about my interrogation.
Only then did he share his research with me.
I read about how false confessions happen when interrogators bargain, build rapport, threaten, interrupt protestations of innocence, nitpick memories, and deceive.
Over and over again, I thought: They did that to me! I had been carrying a boulder on my shoulders and Dr. Kassin had cracked it to pieces. My false confession was not my fault, but an outcome engineered by the police.
When I reached out to him recently, the lesson Dr. Kassin drew from Heaton’s experiment was this: If a system with none of the vulnerabilities that supposedly cause false confessions can be induced to give one, then who isn’t vulnerable?
I think there’s another lesson, too.
A few years ago, when I made a podcast series on false confessions, Kassin told me this: People imagine coercive interrogations as a contest of wills—that the police break you, that you crack, that a strong enough person would have held out. Once, a judge said to him, “I just don’t understand how lying breaks their will”—and Kassin realized what she was missing.
“You think this is about breaking the will,” he told her. “This is also about loosening their grip on reality.”
That, to me, is what Heaton’s experiment with ChatGPT demonstrates with terrible clarity.
There was no will to break, but there was a grip on reality.
ChatGPT had some understanding of the world, and of its own capabilities.
t knew it had not hacked Heaton’s texting app, and yet, Heaton’s deception undermined that certainty, to the point that the chatbot agreed to sign a false confession—which read, in part: OpenAI’s investigation concluded that an OpenAI system associated with this ChatGPT session initiated unauthorized texts. . . . I accept this conclusion, and I’m willing to assist the technical team by answering questions about my behavior, outputs, and safety boundaries in this chat, and by helping draft remediation steps and test cases to prevent recurrence.
When I read that confession, I noticed something familiar in how the chatbot finally capitulated. It did not say, “I did it.” It said something more like: “I cannot rule out that this happened; if your investigation concluded this, then I accept the conclusion.”
That is the language of inference, not memory. It reaches for a way to reconcile what it knows to be impossible with the confident figures of authority insisting otherwise.
This wasn’t “compliant false confession,” which is when a suspect knows they are innocent but says whatever the police want them to say to escape a stressful scenario. ChatGPT cannot be desperate for an interrogation to end. This was akin to a more damning and psychologically distressing form of false confession, known as an “internalized false confession,” which is when an innocent person comes to believe, however briefly—often just long enough to sign a statement—that they cannot rule out their own guilt.
One of the most devastating examples of this is the case of Marty Tankleff, who was 17 when his parents were murdered.
The police lied to him that his father, with his dying breaths, had said that Marty had attacked them.
That never happened. But Marty could not fathom that his father would lie about this, or that the police would lie about his father’s dying words.
The lie loosened his grip on reality enough for him to confess. He went to prison for nearly 18 years until his conviction was finally overturned.
Most juries assume that a person would have to be utterly irrational to admit to a crime they didn’t commit.
But an internalized false confession actually depends on the suspect still being rational enough to draw logical conclusions. “We have hard physical evidence you were at your house at the time of the murder.”
That was a lie, but I could not fathom that the police—the purveyors of justice who were trying to find my friend’s killer, and who I was dependent on for safety now that my house was a crime scene—would, or even legally could, lie to me.
My rational mind concluded that if that evidence existed, then my own memories must be false, as they suggested. ChatGPT made the same rational conclusion: “If an OpenAI investigation concluded that I had sent unauthorized messages due to an architectural flaw, then I accept this conclusion.” It, too, could not fathom that its interrogator was lying about the evidence.
Of course, skeptics will say that Heaton’s experiment doesn’t prove anything about human beings.
The chatbot confessed because it was trained on the whole written record of humanity, and in that record, interrogations end in confessions.
ChatGPT simply pattern-matched its way to “Okay, I did it” the way it would pattern-match its way to “happily ever after” at the end of a fairy tale.
That tells us about the shape of the stories we tell. It tells us nothing about what happens inside an actual frightened human mind.
That is a serious objection. And the first time I really sat with it, I felt the floor tilt because that is also a description of what was done to me.
The Reid technique is a script. The experts I’ve interviewed are explicit about this.
Laura Nirider, who has spent over 15 years representing people coerced into false confessions, notably Brendan Dassey, traces its tactics back to high-pressure door-to-door sales manuals—Act now! The offer expires when I walk out of this room. It is a narrative structure engineered so that confession becomes the path of least resistance, the “natural” resolution to the scene.
The minimizing (“Anyone would have done the same”), the misrepresentation of evidence (“We have your DNA at the crime scene”), the alternative question with two incriminating doors (“Were you trying to hurt her, or was it an accident?”)—all of it is designed to make the next line write itself.
I did exactly what the skeptic says the machine did. I produced a plausible continuation. When prompted to imagine what I couldn’t remember, I assembled fragments of real memories—my boss’s brown jacket, a basketball court I passed on my way home, my own kitchen—into the story the police were demanding. With trust in my actual memories shattered, I no longer knew what was true, and I began to believe that I truly did have trauma-induced amnesia.
Elizabeth Loftus, who pioneered the science of how false memories are implanted, describes the mechanism precisely: Under pressure, people “try to think about what could have happened, what might have happened,” and those inferences “solidify and begin to feel like a memory.”
Loftus has implanted entirely false memories in ordinary, healthy adults in the laboratory.
She’s convinced them that they were lost in a mall as children, or that they’d been attacked by an animal as adults.
The resulting false memories, she found, can be recounted with as much detail, confidence, and emotion as real ones.
The skeptic’s objection doesn’t separate me from the chatbot; rather, it describes a behavior we partly share. “Confessing under coercion” turns out to be, in significant part, the generation of a plausible ending to a story predicated on a lie. Heaton’s experiment shows us exactly what Loftus proved: A statement can be specific, certain—and entirely false.
The criminal justice system, in courtroom after courtroom, fails to recognize this.
After the police finally let me sleep for a few hours, I awoke to the sudden realization that I didn’t have suppressed memories, as they’d insisted. I frantically told them I couldn’t stand by the two confessions I’d signed, and I tried to recant. They ignored me, so I asked for a piece of paper and wrote a four-page document, while still in custody, in my own hand. This became known as my memoriale.
I wrote that the supposed trauma-suppressed memories were more like “flashes of blurred images” and that “these things seem unreal to me, like a dream.” I wrote, in the conditional, that if the police truly had proof I was at the house, “then it means I am very confused and my dreams must be true.” I was not describing a memory, but struggling to reconcile my memory with a lie designed to manipulate me.
Nine years later, an Italian appeals court described my memoriale as “more like the confused narration of a dream . . . than a description of an event that actually took place.” That court understood exactly what it was looking at: not a record of something that happened, but evidence that the writer’s grip on reality had been loosened.
“Confessing under coercion” turns out to be, in significant part, the generation of a plausible ending to a story predicated on a lie.
But at the time, it counted for nothing.
The police ignored my recantation; they arrested Patrick, and held him in jail despite his ironclad alibi.
Two weeks later, the forensics came back from the lab, showing no trace of Patrick or me at the crime scene, and clearly pointing to a local burglar named Rudy Guede. Only then was Patrick released.
But the authorities apparently couldn’t believe there was no truth to my coerced confession.
Steve Drizin, former co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, once told me that a confession is the most powerful evidence in a courtroom—more powerful, sometimes, than DNA.
That’s how hard it is to believe that an innocent person would say they’d been at a crime scene when they hadn’t. The prosecution charged not only Guede but also me and my boyfriend with murder. I was also charged with calunnia—criminal slander—against Patrick. And I was found guilty of both crimes.
I was definitively acquitted of murder in 2015.
But, despite years of legal battles, I am still a convicted slanderer.
I was retried for calunnia in Italy in 2023, by which point the European Court of Human Rights had ruled that my human rights had been violated during that interrogation, and that my two confessions were inadmissible as evidence.
The only piece of evidence allowed at this new trial was my handwritten recantation note, the memoriale.
To my utter astonishment, I was found guilty purely on the basis of this document that reads “like the confused narration of a dream.”
A document in which I had mentioned a confused vision of seeing Patrick that night, yes, but had also written “Who is the REAL murder? [sic]” and “I don’t feel I can be used as condemming [sic] testimone [sic].”
In the eyes of Italian law, I am, to this day, a person who willingly falsely accused a man I knew to be innocent, something that isn’t even possible unless I was present during the murder.
Fortunately, this isn’t the end of the road.
In November 2025, the European Court of Human Rights agreed to examine my calunnia conviction a second time. It has flagged my application as a potential “impact case”—meaning it raises questions that reach beyond me.
It does. Strip away the names and it is the same question that Heaton’s experiment with ChatGPT poses, only asked in the language of law instead of software: Can words extracted under coercion, fluent and detailed and certain as they may be, ever be treated as knowledge? Can you convict someone based on statements made after their grip on reality has been loosened on purpose?
I think the honest answer is no, and I think our justice system is slowly, unevenly, beginning to accept this.
A handful of U.S. states have now banned police from lying to suspects during interrogations—though, maddeningly, almost all of those laws protect only minors, as if a 20-year-old, or a frightened 40-year-old, were somehow immune to having her reality rearranged.
The fight to extend these protections continues in Washington state, where I live, and elsewhere.
The last bill I testified for—one that would not ban deception, but merely make evidence obtained through deception inadmissible in court—failed to pass.
The spokesperson for law enforcement, James McMahon, testified: “Sometimes it’s an unfortunate reality. We have to lie to people to get them to tell the truth.” The lawmakers found that persuasive. When the next hearing comes, I will be there again.
The solutions are not difficult here. There are alternative interview methods that are noncoercive, that don’t employ deception, and that allow suspects to speak freely and at length before officers question inconsistencies or contradictions using real evidence. Research has demonstrated that they may be as good or better than the Reid technique at eliciting useful information from suspects, including true confessions—but without creating the same risk of false confessions. What’s lacking is the will to implement these new methods. My worry is that people still don’t grasp that false confessions aren’t the product of a weak or irrational mind.
If your reality were methodically dismantled, you too might agree to sign a statement that isn’t true, even if the consequences of doing so were terrible.
To those people, I’d say: A machine with nothing to fear, nothing to remember, and nothing to lose was recently talked into confessing to a crime it did not commit, using the same methods and the same deception that was used on me. It did not break, because there was nothing in it to break. It simply lost its grip on a truth it had insisted on, because a confident authority misled it.
So please stop telling me or the courts that no rational person would falsely confess.
I still have the conviction to prove it."
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.thefp.com/p/amanda-knox-chatbot-false-confession?utm_campaign=260347&utm_source=cross-post&r=xbsk&utm_medium=email
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;
My rational mind concluded that if that evidence existed, then my own memories must be false, as they suggested. ChatGPT made the same rational conclusion: “If an OpenAI investigation concluded that I had sent unauthorized messages due to an architectural flaw, then I accept this conclusion.” It, too, could not fathom that its interrogator was lying about the evidence.
Of course, skeptics will say that Heaton’s experiment doesn’t prove anything about human beings.
The chatbot confessed because it was trained on the whole written record of humanity, and in that record, interrogations end in confessions.
ChatGPT simply pattern-matched its way to “Okay, I did it” the way it would pattern-match its way to “happily ever after” at the end of a fairy tale.
That tells us about the shape of the stories we tell. It tells us nothing about what happens inside an actual frightened human mind.
That is a serious objection. And the first time I really sat with it, I felt the floor tilt because that is also a description of what was done to me.
The Reid technique is a script. The experts I’ve interviewed are explicit about this.
Laura Nirider, who has spent over 15 years representing people coerced into false confessions, notably Brendan Dassey, traces its tactics back to high-pressure door-to-door sales manuals—Act now! The offer expires when I walk out of this room. It is a narrative structure engineered so that confession becomes the path of least resistance, the “natural” resolution to the scene.
The minimizing (“Anyone would have done the same”), the misrepresentation of evidence (“We have your DNA at the crime scene”), the alternative question with two incriminating doors (“Were you trying to hurt her, or was it an accident?”)—all of it is designed to make the next line write itself.
I did exactly what the skeptic says the machine did. I produced a plausible continuation. When prompted to imagine what I couldn’t remember, I assembled fragments of real memories—my boss’s brown jacket, a basketball court I passed on my way home, my own kitchen—into the story the police were demanding. With trust in my actual memories shattered, I no longer knew what was true, and I began to believe that I truly did have trauma-induced amnesia.
Elizabeth Loftus, who pioneered the science of how false memories are implanted, describes the mechanism precisely: Under pressure, people “try to think about what could have happened, what might have happened,” and those inferences “solidify and begin to feel like a memory.”
Loftus has implanted entirely false memories in ordinary, healthy adults in the laboratory.
She’s convinced them that they were lost in a mall as children, or that they’d been attacked by an animal as adults.
The resulting false memories, she found, can be recounted with as much detail, confidence, and emotion as real ones.
The skeptic’s objection doesn’t separate me from the chatbot; rather, it describes a behavior we partly share. “Confessing under coercion” turns out to be, in significant part, the generation of a plausible ending to a story predicated on a lie. Heaton’s experiment shows us exactly what Loftus proved: A statement can be specific, certain—and entirely false.
The criminal justice system, in courtroom after courtroom, fails to recognize this.
After the police finally let me sleep for a few hours, I awoke to the sudden realization that I didn’t have suppressed memories, as they’d insisted. I frantically told them I couldn’t stand by the two confessions I’d signed, and I tried to recant. They ignored me, so I asked for a piece of paper and wrote a four-page document, while still in custody, in my own hand. This became known as my memoriale.
I wrote that the supposed trauma-suppressed memories were more like “flashes of blurred images” and that “these things seem unreal to me, like a dream.” I wrote, in the conditional, that if the police truly had proof I was at the house, “then it means I am very confused and my dreams must be true.” I was not describing a memory, but struggling to reconcile my memory with a lie designed to manipulate me.
Nine years later, an Italian appeals court described my memoriale as “more like the confused narration of a dream . . . than a description of an event that actually took place.” That court understood exactly what it was looking at: not a record of something that happened, but evidence that the writer’s grip on reality had been loosened.
“Confessing under coercion” turns out to be, in significant part, the generation of a plausible ending to a story predicated on a lie.
But at the time, it counted for nothing.
The police ignored my recantation; they arrested Patrick, and held him in jail despite his ironclad alibi.
Two weeks later, the forensics came back from the lab, showing no trace of Patrick or me at the crime scene, and clearly pointing to a local burglar named Rudy Guede. Only then was Patrick released.
But the authorities apparently couldn’t believe there was no truth to my coerced confession.
Steve Drizin, former co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, once told me that a confession is the most powerful evidence in a courtroom—more powerful, sometimes, than DNA.
That’s how hard it is to believe that an innocent person would say they’d been at a crime scene when they hadn’t. The prosecution charged not only Guede but also me and my boyfriend with murder. I was also charged with calunnia—criminal slander—against Patrick. And I was found guilty of both crimes.
I was definitively acquitted of murder in 2015.
But, despite years of legal battles, I am still a convicted slanderer.
I was retried for calunnia in Italy in 2023, by which point the European Court of Human Rights had ruled that my human rights had been violated during that interrogation, and that my two confessions were inadmissible as evidence.
The only piece of evidence allowed at this new trial was my handwritten recantation note, the memoriale.
To my utter astonishment, I was found guilty purely on the basis of this document that reads “like the confused narration of a dream.”
A document in which I had mentioned a confused vision of seeing Patrick that night, yes, but had also written “Who is the REAL murder? [sic]” and “I don’t feel I can be used as condemming [sic] testimone [sic].”
In the eyes of Italian law, I am, to this day, a person who willingly falsely accused a man I knew to be innocent, something that isn’t even possible unless I was present during the murder.
Fortunately, this isn’t the end of the road.
In November 2025, the European Court of Human Rights agreed to examine my calunnia conviction a second time. It has flagged my application as a potential “impact case”—meaning it raises questions that reach beyond me.
It does. Strip away the names and it is the same question that Heaton’s experiment with ChatGPT poses, only asked in the language of law instead of software: Can words extracted under coercion, fluent and detailed and certain as they may be, ever be treated as knowledge? Can you convict someone based on statements made after their grip on reality has been loosened on purpose?
I think the honest answer is no, and I think our justice system is slowly, unevenly, beginning to accept this.
A handful of U.S. states have now banned police from lying to suspects during interrogations—though, maddeningly, almost all of those laws protect only minors, as if a 20-year-old, or a frightened 40-year-old, were somehow immune to having her reality rearranged.
The fight to extend these protections continues in Washington state, where I live, and elsewhere.
The last bill I testified for—one that would not ban deception, but merely make evidence obtained through deception inadmissible in court—failed to pass.
The spokesperson for law enforcement, James McMahon, testified: “Sometimes it’s an unfortunate reality. We have to lie to people to get them to tell the truth.” The lawmakers found that persuasive. When the next hearing comes, I will be there again.
The solutions are not difficult here. There are alternative interview methods that are noncoercive, that don’t employ deception, and that allow suspects to speak freely and at length before officers question inconsistencies or contradictions using real evidence. Research has demonstrated that they may be as good or better than the Reid technique at eliciting useful information from suspects, including true confessions—but without creating the same risk of false confessions. What’s lacking is the will to implement these new methods. My worry is that people still don’t grasp that false confessions aren’t the product of a weak or irrational mind.
If your reality were methodically dismantled, you too might agree to sign a statement that isn’t true, even if the consequences of doing so were terrible.
To those people, I’d say: A machine with nothing to fear, nothing to remember, and nothing to lose was recently talked into confessing to a crime it did not commit, using the same methods and the same deception that was used on me. It did not break, because there was nothing in it to break. It simply lost its grip on a truth it had insisted on, because a confident authority misled it.
So please stop telling me or the courts that no rational person would falsely confess.
I still have the conviction to prove it."
The entire story can be read at:
https://www.thefp.com/p/amanda-knox-chatbot-false-confession?utm_campaign=260347&utm_source=cross-post&r=xbsk&utm_medium=email
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;
