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September 24, 2010

Strange But True!

Q. Why would people confess to crimes they didn't commit, which happens more than might be expected?

A. Publicity-seeking in high-profile cases is one reason, as when more than 200 people confessed to the 1932 kidnapping of the son of world-famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, say Scott Lilienfeld et al. in “50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology.” In the late 1940s, aspiring actress Elizabeth Short — who always wore black — was brutally murdered, and the notorious “Black Dahlia” case prompted the confessions of more than 30 people. In other instances, false confessors may have a need for self-punishment, or a desire to protect the real perpetrator, or difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. Nowadays, police keep the details of crime scenes from the media to weed out such individuals. According to the Innocence Project (2008), in more than 25 percent of cases where DNA evidence later exonerated convicted individuals, they had pled guilty to crimes they didn't commit. Case in point was John Mark Karr's 2006 confession to the 1996 murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, though his DNA failed to match crime scene evidence. As TV and movies hammer home the message that those who confess to a crime are almost always the true culprits, reality says otherwise.


 
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