False Confessions & Eyewitness Identifications
answer the following 4 questions, using the information of the 4 videos.
Prompt 1: As your learn from these materials, interrogation is a task of persuasion, not fact-finding. Do you think that this is an appropriate approach to the interrogation process?
Prompt 2: according to prompt 1, how do you protect against the problematic biases and tactics that you see that follow from the presumption of interrogated suspect’s guilt? If not, how do you compensate for the valuable role that true (rather than false) confessions play in solving crimes?
Prompt 3: Do you see a need for different interrogation guidelines for adults and juveniles? Under what conditions, if any, should juveniles be subjected to interrogations?
Prompt 4: Like confessions, eyewitness identifications are valued highly by juries. And like confessions, eyewitness identifications are far less reliable than juries and the public believe. Consider the standard procedures for lineup identifications described in the text and which you saw in the Central Park Five and Contaminated Memories. What could have been done, if anything, to protect against these false eyewitness identifications? What can be done in the future to prevent them?
- Each answer must be a minimum of 15 sentences and adequately supported by a reference to at least one person, event, concept, or issue from one of the Video.
- Across all four answers, you must reference all four Videos.
Ken Burns: The Central Park Five
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/
Answer preview
The ultimate goal of interrogation is to solve crimes. Through interrogation, facts concerning crimes are unearthed. However, the police in America use interrogation to coerce people to admit to committing crimes even when they are innocent. In America, the police treat all suspects as adults such that the interrogation techniques do not reflect the diverse needs of the suspects. Usually, the police apply intimidations…
(1300 words)