7 Ways Police Can Brainwash You Into A False Confession

7 They'll Pretend You're Not Being Interrogated

After watching the entirety of The Wire and, well, working at Cracked, we've got a pretty good idea of how the whole "getting arrested" thing works. After roughing you up a little, the police will cuff you and read you your Miranda rights. If you pay close attention to the first three of said rights, you'll know that, so long as the only word you allow to escape your firmly clenched lips is "lawyer," then you've effectively cast a magic spell that protects you from false prosecution. But why would you do that if you're innocent? Unless ... are you some kind of murderer?

Plus it doesn't always work that way. If you're being detained, police are required to read you the Miranda rights before anything you say can be admissible in court, but the key word there is "if." Police officers, as a general rule, are more aware of this requirement than you are, and that's why they'll often avoid detaining a suspect until after they incriminate themselves in an unofficial (yet completely admissible) interview. You're not under arrest; you're free to go at any time. This isn't an interrogation; it's a friendly conversation. And you wouldn't refuse to interact during a friendly conversation, would you? Oh, you would? Why is that? Is it because, um, you're a murderer?

Even if this "conversation" does morph into an interrogation, that doesn't necessarily mean you'll experience Hollywood's most-echoed monologue firsthand: A study of police interrogations during the '90s found that more than 80 percent of suspects waived their Miranda rights -- just signed their protections away as nonchalantly as you granted Apple your everlasting soul when you accepted the iTunes EULA -- all to avoid making themselves look suspicious. Because those rights are for the guilty, and you're not some kind of murderer, are you?

6 They'll Assume You're Guilty

Innocent until proven guilty. It's the single most important tenet of the American justice system. Without it, we'd all be living in Judge Dredd, which is only cool if you're Stallone. You're not. You're Rob Schneider. It's also a damn nigh impossible ideal for a police officer to uphold, considering the fact that the way they're trained to interrogate suspects is effectively forcing them to think that every single suspect is guilty.

You see, interrogators are trained to use body language like posture, gestures, and eye contact to determine when someone is lying. The problem is that most of the cues that officers are instructed to observe are simply behaviors that people display when they're nervous. They're the types of things you'd do if, say, a police officer were questioning you as a murder suspect. In that situation, you are absolutely going to act nervous. That anxiety tells the police officer you're lying, so he's going to question you even harder. Harder questioning will make you even more nervous, which will in turn make him even more convinced that you're guilty, and so on and so forth in a snowball of bullshit that psychologists have coined the Othello error, named after the way Desdemona's behavior increasingly convinces Othello of her guilt until he finally snaps and murders the shit out of her. Remember, in this analogy, you're Desdemona. Desdemona Schneider.

5 They'll Minimize The Crime

So we've reached an impasse. The police interrogator knows you're guilty; you know you're not guilty. But you're a tough cookie -- like, ginger snap tough -- and getting a little worked up isn't going to crumble one such as you. This is around the time the cop -- Detective Dirk Steelgirth -- gets friendly. Makes it sound as if the crime wasn't so bad after all, and even if you're the guilty party, that's hardly your fault. Also, you maybe wanna grab a beer after? Watch a sunset?

This is a technique called minimization. It's an attempt to get you in an agreeable mood by downplaying the seriousness of the situation. If an interrogator were to sit down with a suspected rapist, for instance, he might say, "If she hadn't gone around dressed like that, you wouldn't be in this room now." We feel like we should take a long shower and then be arrested just for making up that example. Only we shouldn't, because that's an actual quote from an actual police interrogation manual.

4 They'll (Legally!) Lie About Evidence

When Gary Gauger's parents were brutally murdered in their home late one night, the police brought Gauger in for questioning. Convinced of his guilt (as comic books have taught us, all villains have alliterative names), interrogators relentlessly questioned Gauger, who had not requested an attorney because, again, innocent people aren't supposed to need attorneys. When a confession wasn't forthcoming, detectives told Gauger they had found bloody clothes in his bedroom and a bloody knife in his pocket. Gauger finally broke and, after his resulting confession, was sentenced to death and spent three years behind bars before the actual killers -- two motorcycle gang members -- were caught bragging about the murder.

There was never a bloody knife. No bloody clothes. In fact, there was never any evidence indicating Gauger was the murderer at all -- police just hauled him in while his parents' ravaged corpses were still warm and started nailing him with charges because there's something about the name Gary that's super untrustworthy.

How can they get away with blatantly misleading a suspect in such a manner? Well, quite simply, because they can. As long as their little white lies aren't found by a court to be coercive (e.g., "You will lose your state benefits if you don't confess"), police interrogators are generally allowed to lie about having physical evidence, eyewitnesses, or the fact that their weighty dongs are capable of invoking blunt head trauma in tight-lipped interviewees.

3 They'll Lie About Lie Detector Results

It's time to break out the big guns -- time to wire your ass up to a polygraph machine and curb-stomp your self-esteem by deceiving you into believing you've failed the test. Think about it. Why else would cops use lie detectors during interrogations? As a general rule, the things aren't even admissible in court, because results vary widely from subject to subject and are entirely reliant on the interpretation of the person performing the test. Surely the person doing said interpretation is an expert, though, right? Of course they are! Just maybe not in things like psychology or physiology or actually using a polygraph machine.

Take the case of Jeff Deskovic, a 16-year-old who was accused of raping and murdering a classmate (spoiler: He didn't). During his interrogation, a sheriff's investigator dressed up as a civilian polygraph expert (read: nerd) hyped Deskovic up on a bladder-bursting load of coffee (important because caffeine amps up the very processes that a polygraph machine measures) and subjected him to a multi-hour lie detector test. When Deskovic wouldn't fess up, the investigator said, "What do you mean you didn't do it; you just told me through the test you did. We just want you to verbally confirm this." Then, just to twist the screws, a "good cop" entered the room and said that he was the only thing standing between Deskovic and a severe ass-beating by literally every other cop at the station.

Predictably, the interview ended with Deskovic weaving a completely fictional account of how he'd raped and murdered the victim before falling to the floor and sobbing in the fetal position. That wasn't an exaggeration on our part. That's what he did, and the very least of what we'd do in his place.

2 They'll Keep You There Until You Break

A study of false confession cases revealed that the average admission of guilt came after 16 goddamned hours of interrogation. Take the average American workday, double it, and imagine sitting in a stark room for that amount of time while our (former) friend Detective Steelgirth relentlessly hammers his insistence that you're a criminal into your cranium. Even fucking Professor X couldn't withstand that level of mental pressure.

And 16 hours is just the average. Take Stefan Kiszko, England's wrongful conviction poster boy: He was interrogated for two days straight after being accused of the sexual assault and murder of an 11-year-old girl. This was a man with the mental capacity of a 12-year-old, yet he still had the wherewithal to maintain his innocence for two entire days. When Kiszko finally did confess, it was only because police officers told him that was the only way he'd get to go home.

Perhaps Kiszko placed a naive faith in things like "evidence" and "a jury of his peers." If so, he was correct on the first count: The main piece of evidence from the crime scene was sperm, which Kiszko was incapable of producing due to some faulty plumbing. But he was wrong about it mattering one iota: Having confessed to the crime, he was convicted and sent to prison, where he endured 16 agonizing years of brutal beatings by fellow inmates before ultimately being exonerated and ... promptly dying of a heart attack.

Oh, were you expecting a happy ending to this story? Sorry about that. Happy endings are for Stallones, not Schneiders.

1 You Will Be Persuaded To Plead Guilty

Let's say you manage to emerge from your interrogation panic-induced-false-confession-free. If you're among the lucky percentile of people who can afford a defense lawyer, good for you! You'll likely see your day in court. For everyone else, you'll be assigned a public defender who isn't given enough time to prepare a case and knows significantly less about your case than the prosecution. These attorneys often don't even think they can win, so they may not even try. Instead, they'll do their damnedest to convince you to plead guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence -- and 97 percent of people do.

Here's how it plays out in real life: At 17 years old, Brian Banks was accused of rape. The evidence was on his side, but his defense attorney sat him down and flat-out told him that a jury would convict him on the grounds of being "a large black teenager" alone.

She gave him 10 minutes to choose between A) entering a guilty plea and receiving six years in prison, or B) being black in a courtroom and receiving 41. Guess which option he chose. Go on, guess.

False confessions resulting from shitty interrogation techniques are but a surface symptom of a deeper infection within the criminal justice system. And just because a confession comes in the form of a trade-off for a lighter sentence, don't think that makes you any less guilty in the eyes of the world -- studies have shown that jurors weigh a confession more heftily than any other type of evidence. If you say you're a murderer, your fellow man will gladly take your word for it. It turns out we're quite trusting in that regard.

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We're not saying don't trust the police, but maybe be a little cautious? See why in 6 Completely Legal Ways The Cops Can Screw You and 5 Terrifying Ways Police Can Legally Screw You Over.

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