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Proof: A True Crime Podcast
Murder at the Bike Shop | Sidebar 9
00:26:14
Why would someone confess to a crime they didn’t commit—especially a brutal triple homicide? On this week’s SIDEBAR, we talk with false confession expert Dr. Tina Zottoli about the psychology behind false confessions.
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D
Hi, and welcome to this week's sidebar. In episode nine, you heard about the confessions made in the Polderman case and how five defendants were ultimately convicted. For this sidebar, we wanted to talk more about false confessions and how they happen. So Jacinda interviewed Dr. Tina Zatoli, an expert in the field.
- [01:27]
B
Thank you so much for having me on. My name is Tina Zatoli. I'm an associate professor at Montclair State University. I'm a clinical psychologist by training. My area of expertise falls really at the intersection of psychology and law. I primarily focus on decisions that people make in legal context that might lead to adverse outcomes, like wrongful convictions. And in particular, I focus on admissions made in those contexts. So guilty pleas, largely, and also false confessions.
- [01:55]
E
So false confessions, it's something that's hard to understand how that happens. Like, as individuals, I think we all think, well, I wouldn't do that. But it does happen.
- [02:08]
B
It does happen. And it happens more frequently than I think most people would be comfortable understanding. We don't know exactly how many people falsely confess, of course, but we can have a sense of how common the problem is just by looking at exoneration cases in the United States. It's very difficult to get a case overturned, as you know, once. Once there's been a conviction. But we've got 3,785 documented exonerations in the United States since 1989, 481 of those have had false confessions. So that's about 13 or 14%. And in terms of cases where we have DNA exonerations, the number is actually around 25 to 30% of those cases. The reason we can't know precisely how many people falsely confess or plead guilty falsely is because once you've done that, you're convicted. And unless that conviction is overturned, we can't know for sure, right, if a person is in prison or because they falsely confessed or pleaded guilty. But we have data from lots of other sources, including the exoneration data that I mentioned, and including interviews with individuals who have pleaded guilty and have been convicted and so forth. And so in terms of the exoneration cases, 25% of the cases that we have documents in the United States that have been exonerated, so their cases have been overturned, 25% of those defendants pleaded guilty to the crimes that they did not commit. And there are a number of reasons why someone would plead guilty.
- [03:32]
E
In this last episode of Proof, we hear about five individuals who, in some form or another, all confessed except for Joe, and only one of them ended up taking a plea deal, and that was Brandy. So, yeah, if you could explain kind of the psychology, not necessarily hers, because you haven't talked to her, but just the psychology of why you would take a plea deal if you weren't guilty in these cases.
- [03:58]
B
One of the key factors here, of course, is that she and other individuals confessed. So once there's a confession in a case, it is a false confession or a true confession are powerful pieces of evidence for a jury. So knowing that. Knowing that the expectation of conviction is high because there is evidence, again, false evidence or true evidence increases the risk could lead an individual to consider that their best chance or the best out is to plead guilty. But in addition, you've got lots of other factors here. These defendants, and particularly Brandi, are facing very substantial sentences if they're convicted at trial. Brandi had children, right? And she's being told, you're never going to see your children again. But when you're thinking that you're facing a very small prison sentence or no prison time relative to being away from your children for decades upon decades, you begin to realize that the guilty plea is really not a choice anymore, or it's more of a Hobson's choice. Right? There's really no option at all. And we find this in many cases of demonstrated false guilty pleas, but also in cases where individuals who have actually even committed their crimes and plead guilty say, I had no choice. I had no choice but to take the guilty plea because the outcome following a trial is just too great.
- [05:13]
E
And do you find that false confessions, when there's multiple defendants are more likely to happen in that case versus just when you're the single defendant being interrogated?
- [05:24]
B
That's a really interesting question. And I'm glad that you asked it because these cases are interesting because you have multiple defendants. They're all being lied to in an effort to produce a confession, which then is used as corroborating evidence for another confession. And I hate to say it, but that's not that unusual. I mean, there are a number of high profile cases just like this. Susan described this really well in the episode where she talked about the prisoner's dilemma. Essentially, if you all keep your mouth shut, right, there's no evidence really against you because the only thing that's really going to damn you in these cases is the confession. But then you have layered on top of this the pressure from the police saying, hey, you know, the game is lost, so and so has already confessed. And you see that a lot. It becomes a domino effect because then the individual is realizing, well, I've just got to protect myself. So what do I do? How do I respond in order to get the best outcome possible here, even though there's no good outcome? And what I found really interesting about this case, I couldn't help think about the Norfolk Four case when I was listening to this episode. I don't know if you're familiar with that case, but very briefly, just a similar situation where you've got four false confessions. If you look at the story objectively, it blows your mind that you get these four confessions.
- [06:36]
D
In this case, doctors at Holy explain how this can happen even when the confessions don't make Sense. In the Norfolk Four case, false confessions led to the arrest of seven sailors for the 1997 rape and murder of another sailor's wife. The case began with one false confession, but when it was discovered that man's DNA did not match the crime scene, detectives kept going back again for more and more names, more and more accomplices, hoping to finally find the sailor whose DNA matched what was found on the victim. Four of the seven who'd been accused gave false confessions and were convicted. The other three did not falsely confess and were released. Then, two years after the murder in 1999, an eighth man came forward and confessed to committing the crime alone. His DNA matched the only DNA found on the victim, and his confession was the only confession that matched the scene. And yet the four who falsely confessed were convicted anyway. It would be 18 more years before they were pardoned, even though their confessions were completely illogical. As Dr. Sattulli explained, though, convictions happen in false confession cases even when the confessions just don't make any sense.
- [07:49]
B
I was thinking about that as I was listening to this episode because the confessions are so absurd. And you would think that the police or the interrogators would recognize this and they think, oh, you know, I've got the wrong guy. Unfortunately, in these cases, like many other cases where there are multiple confessions, the police are seeking a confession absent any actual direct evidence that they can use to actually corroborate or sort out whether this person is actually telling them the truth. And then what you see happen in cases like this is then the police get information or they get new information from their suspect, or they find evidence and they realize, hey, you know what so and so told me that doesn't match the evidence. So instead of thinking, maybe I've got the wrong guy, they go back and they tweak and they tweak and they tweak. And that was really interesting in the case, I think it was Ben Platt. He didn't do it in the end. He said, no, I'm not going to do this again. But they went back to him and they said, well, what if we told you Brandi said Joe was there? How would that essentially try to get him to change his story? And this is what you see a lot in cases like this, where you have multiple individuals who've confessed as you see the story change over time as the police learn new things in general.
- [09:02]
E
Do you think the same issue happens with detectives where they don't really believe in false confessions either? Right. Like, well, he certainly. They wouldn't confess that they didn't do it. So even though the evidence doesn't match, they must have done it. Like, is that going on too? Or is.
- [09:19]
B
I do think so. Look, you can never get into the head of any particular detective. Are there detectives out there who don't care if they're going after an innocent guy? I'm sure there are detectives out there like that, but I do think that what you're describing is confirmation bias. I believe this guy did it. And that belief is maybe even stronger once he's begun to make admissions. And so obviously you wouldn't admit to this if you were innocent. So now you've admitted to this, but it's not matching the evidence. So why are you lying about this? And you go back, right, and you begin to see things through this lens of, well, this guy must have done becomes interesting when you look at these cases with multiple confessions. Become really interesting when you do the autopsy of the case because you see how the detectives are trying to fit these pieces in. Well, you don't match the DNA, for instance. Well, it couldn't have Just been, you give me another name and let me go after that guy. And before you know it, you've got this conspiracy that is really just made out of whole cloth.
- [10:16]
E
And in this case, you know, there was a single set of footprints and there was male DNA that didn't match any of the five. And they were able to come up with a story that they were guided, instructed how to clean up the crime scene and leave behind fake evidence.
- [10:34]
B
That's right. I. Yeah. That's why I couldn't stop thinking about the Norfolk Four case when I was listening this episode. Because it's like when you look at the crime scene, you look at the evidence that's there. How do you get the false confessions to fit that? And the cops go back in this case saying, well, you were instructed on how to clean things and to leave decoy evidence. I mean, that blew my mind. Leave something with somebody else's fingerprints, right. And then when you look at that crime scene and you look at the evidence, you go, how could this have happened? How could have bungling, basically just older than teenagers ransacked this house and not left it looking and got cleaned up all of their evidence? It blows the mind, right?
- [11:14]
E
The crime scene photos are really horrific and it was a bloody mess. There's no other way to put it. I mean, just blood everywhere and there's nothing looks like it was cleaned up at all. There's no evidence anything was cleaned up. The footprints that go through, you know, I don't know, it's very confusing. It's hard to believe, but it makes me wonder, like, are there. One, it's police officers. Detectives are allowed to lie in interrogations, unfortunately, and even to juveniles, except for a few states more recently. But the question is, is it ethical? And two, what are the best practices for interrogations? Are there guidelines for best practices for interrogations?
- [12:00]
B
These are great questions to start with. The first one, about lying. Lying is, in my opinion, and not just my opinion, my opinion of the opinion of all of the experts in the field. Lying is probably one of the worst things you can do in the context of interrogation, because lying can give an innocent person an expectation that there's a, a way to be saved later, right. If I just confess now. They say they've got DNA, they say they have fingerprints. Well, let me get out of this terrible situation and then they'll figure out later that I'm innocent. But as you can see, in this case and others know, they're just going to figure out a way to get that confession to fit Right. And sometimes the police are lying. There is no evidence there anyway. And so you're thinking it's an out, and then that evidence isn't there to subsequently exonerate you. But also, the lying about evidence is so dangerous because it makes people feel trapped. Right. And, well, if you have this evidence and someone else is saying this like, there's no way out for me, I've got to figure out some way to make this situation better for me. So that's two things. And then the third thing, of course, is that it confuses suspects, and it can lead some suspects to begin to believe that they actually did commit the crime. Now, that, I don't think is a problem here in your case that you're describing, but in many cases, telling someone, for instance, they failed a lie detector test, or someone else said you were there, you sure you have your dates right? It can confuse an individual and then cause them to come to believe they may have, in fact, been involved in a crime in some way.
- [13:27]
E
That reminds me of season two with Jake Silva. He was 18 years old when he's arrested for the murder of Renee Ramis. And in his interrogation, you can see he's so confused. He holds his head and he starts going up and down, and you hear him saying, I don't understand. Like, how do I not remember this? If you're telling me I did this, but I don't remember it. Could this have happened? And he's, like, trying to. It just broke my heart because I think, you know, in his case, it could have turned to a false confession very quickly because you can see that he's very confused. He doesn't understand. He believes what he's being told, but he knows he wasn't there. And, you know, I think of that often with him that why didn't he do this? Right, right.
- [14:13]
B
It's actually remarkable. Ye.
- [14:16]
E
You know, they're telling him, we know you were there. There's fingerprints. And I don't remember being there. I just don't. Yeah, I can see why someone would start to believe. Wait, like, did I black out? Did I have too much to drink? Did this happen? Why wouldn't you believe someone of authority telling you this stuff?
- [14:33]
B
It's frankly nothing short of torture. Actually, if you ask me to be frank, it really is psychological torture. I don't know if you're familiar with the case of Marty Tankliffe, but the kind of famous story that gets told about that case all the time is that, you know, he was told by the police that his father actually didn't die, went to the hospital and he actually said to the police it was Marty who did this. And when the police told Marty that his father said it was you, Marty was like, my father would never lie. Yeah, you're right, Marty, your father would never lie. But the police can, right? And these things are just so. Yeah, it's a very dangerous practice. And unfortunately, the United States has not moved to abolish that practice or at least to restrict it in many cases. Other countries have, of course.
- [15:16]
D
In 1988, when Marty Tankliff was 17 years old, his parents were attacked overnight in his home. His mother was dead when Marty found her and his father was unconscious. But the police lied about his father waking up and identifying him. His father never did wake up again before he died a week later. Marty did confess when police told him his dad had identified him as the attacker. But then Marty quickly recanted. He was convicted anyway. But in 2007, he was exonerated and released from prison after extensive evidence surfaced that implicated his father's business partner. Alright, so to all the men listening to our show right now, go ahead and like press mute for the next 30 seconds or so. Okay. To all the ladies listening, we wanted to tell you about honeylune.
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E
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E
Are there like best practices or guidelines for how to conduct an interrogation?
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B
Yeah. So the American Psychology Law Society, along with the apa, puts out a white paper. Now, I believe they're called scientific review papers, which lay out what we think are the best practices in the field. I won't, I won't go through all of these here, but some things that I think are perhaps obvious or we should not be lying to suspects. We should move away from what I will term accusatorial practices designed to elicit a confession and move more towards techniques that are designed to elicit information. Right. So many nations have moved in those directions. So for instance, the UK and other countries have adopted or called it the peace techniques. These techniques do elicit confessions, but they do it in a way that really does allow the police to use the evidence they have collected to kind of ascertain whether or not what the individual is saying to them is the truth. Another really important practice we advocate for is to record everything, not just that final confession, but everything from the beginning, from what we call the pre interview to the interrogation in the United States, the whole thing. So you can go back and you can look to see, well, how much of this information that the suspect is giving to you is actually coming from the suspect and not from the detective. There are other things as well, but those are sort of like the primary. Obviously we shouldn't have interrogations going for hours upon hours. Without breaks, things of that nature.
- [19:47]
E
I was going to ask you, are there any laws or any rules about how long someone can be interrogated or how long they can go without a break or how long between interrogations?
- [20:00]
B
So there's no set of rules that apply broadly across the United States. As you know, for anything really, there may be jurisdictional differences. Off top of my head. I can't think of specific ones that say no more than six hours before a break or something like that. I can find that for you. Send it over. But there's certainly not a blanket set of rules that apply across. Across jurisdictions in the United States.
- [20:23]
E
One of the reasons I was asking, because in this case, Ben Platt, he at one point was interrogated for 16 hours straight, and then they put him in a cell and eight hours later resumed again from the field of psych
- [20:39]
B
and law, we would argue that that should not be permitted. Such a lengthy interrogation is problematic. Also, if you look at there's a seminal paper by Steve Drizen and Richard Leo where they looked at known, you know, demonstrably proven false confession, looked at commonalities across these things. False confessions typically take a very long time. And it kind of makes sense, right, that it would, because innocent people do not want to falsely implicate themselves. And, you know, a good detective who's acting in good faith and who is thinking clearly should, I think, recognize. Right. If you have to engage in this, like, psychological torture to get to the confession, you don't have enough. Right. Because a truly guilty guy, if you're presenting clear and compelling evidence of guilt. Right. You might see this happening a lot quicker. And in fact, there is evidence that suggests that true confessions typically are produced much faster. So, yeah, so a very lengthy period of time is a commonality across demonstrably false confessions as is, which is replete across the statements made in your case. The vast majority of information coming from the suspect has really been given to them by the police, and they're putting the pieces together. It was interesting to me. You cut out the spaces, you can't put these long spaces into a podcast. People would stop listening. But I'm glad that you highlighted it to your listeners, because what's happening in those long spaces, and again, I can't get into somebody's head. But what I can assume, because we know what is usually happening for innocent people who are producing these confessions is they're trying to figure out what it is I need to say to get it right or how am I going to put these pieces together? So I'm glad that you highlighted that for your listeners, because if you really know what you did, it doesn't take that long to kind of tell the story. Right.
- [22:25]
E
As someone who goes to trial to testify, as an expert on this field, false confessions, do you feel like once you explain it, the jury believes it? Like, how do you convince somebody that this actually happens?
- [22:39]
B
So that is a really great question. Most of the work that I do with respect to pleas and confessions is appellate work. So it's judges. And here's what is fascinating, judge to judge differences. But what surprises me, or I should say what really surprised me in a recent case was that the judge had no idea that there were so many exonerations in the US that had false confessions in them and false pleas. This particular case had both a false confession and a false plea in it. The judge was so surprised, he stopped me in the middle of my testimony and asked me, he said, wait, what? How do you know that? And I. And I was shocked. Now, in the end, this, this particular case, the judge agreed with everything, and the man was subsequently exonerated, which was wonderful. But it was just surprising to me that he didn't know. So I think it is still, despite this work, has been, you know, the APA or APLs have two white papers out. I still think it's remarkable how challenging is for people to believe that someone would confess to a crime that they didn't commit or plead guilty.
- [23:40]
E
So, yeah, how do we change that? Have you found that police departments or police conferences are people open to having people like you come to speak to them about best practices in interrogation or how false confessions may happen?
- [23:55]
B
Yeah, it's variable. I think that we've moved much further along in the area of false confession than we have in false guilty pleas. There's much more of an acceptance that someone can be coerced into confessing in the context of interrogation than that someone would stand up in open court and falsely plead guilty. It's variable. Some places are very receptive. In the United States, there have been some changes. A couple of the big interrogation schools actually no longer teach the Reid techniques. They're teaching some of the newer methods. But Reed is still the most widely taught, most widely used interrogation technique. Yes, people are receptive to having you come in and talk. I'm asked to come and speak on guilty plea issues and false confession issues as well as various places.
- [24:36]
D
For decades, law enforcement agencies across the country have used the Reid technique, a structured interrogation method. But in recent years, that technique has come under scrutiny with growing concerns that it can produce false confessions. And some agencies have begun shifting towards less confrontational methods that are more focused on information gathering. Jacinda asked Dr. Satoli what she thinks needs to happen to see change in the way interrogations are conducted.
- [25:04]
B
Well, I'm going to tell you honestly, it is what you are doing. I can write 150 papers, right? We're currently writing the first white paper on guilty pleas. Right now we're going to write that paper. It's going to go out there. There's two white papers out there on confessions. The public needs to hear the stories, right? They need to hear what it's like for somebody to sit in that interrogation room and be pelted with the lies and be told you're going to die. You're going to go to prison for 50 years. The projects that you and people like you are doing I think is extremely effective. And then of course, what you're doing is you're bringing in people like me and others who can give you the science. I think that's really effective. Change is slow in our justice system.
- [25:43]
E
Yeah, change is slow. Thanks so much for your time.
- [25:49]
B
Thank you for, thank you for having me. Yeah, appreciate it.
- [25:55]
D
That's all for this week and we're taking a brief break next week. So there's no episode this upcoming Monday. But we'll be back again on Monday, March 30th with episode 10 when we're back in Kalamazoo and resume the search for Alan Nutter, the man who reportedly confessed to killing the old man in the bike shop at least a dozen times over.
- [26:22]
E
You've been listening to Proof Sidebar, a podcast by Red Marble Media in association with Glassbox Media. Send us your questions and comments@proof crimepodmail.com Follow us everywhere with the handle at Proof crimepod and on our website, proofcrimepod.com thanks so much for listening.
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