Sidelights | The Trap Behind Confessions: Why Do Innocent People Confess?

This lecture subverted our understanding of confessions. Most people assume a confession means the defendant admitting to the crime they committed and openly explaining the origins and process of the incident. However, is the confession we know truly a product of the defendant's free will? What puzzles us is: why would an innocent person articulate criminal facts they never committed? How could someone who has committed no crime ever confess to one?

During the lecture, Attorney Ch'en Yü-ch'ing explained the preconditions for a confession to serve as evidence. The creation and production of a confession must possess voluntariness—stemming from the defendant's own will—and the evidentiary content must possess probative reliability. Confessions lacking "voluntariness" include those obtained through "violence, threats, inducement, fraud, exhaustive interrogation, illegal detention, or other improper methods" as stipulated in Article 156 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. This helped the audience understand the "definition of a false confession" and opened the prologue to this lecture.

Attorney Ch'en Yü-ch'ing summarized the comparison between the old and new models of false confessions from the book Decoding "False Confessions": Why Do Innocent People Admit to Crimes? A Psychologist's Analysis of the Formation Process of False Confessions and Their Contradictory Psychology by the Japanese psychologist Hamada Sumio. The lecture noted that interrogators may lead defendants based on existing evidence and incorporate partial objective facts into the interrogation process. Consequently, defendants utilize the acquired information to play the role of the perpetrator. Thereafter, through the interrogator's continuous questioning of the defendant regarding errors and omissions to make corrections, the defendant (the innocent person) reinforces their identity and perception as the criminal, thereby producing a false confession.

Attorney Ch'en Yü-ch'ing used the cases of Chang Chen-chung and Lu Cheng as examples to illustrate why presiding judges overlooked inconsistencies in forensic appraisal results after defendants confessed during the investigative process, and why the truthfulness of confessions was directly disregarded once a defendant confessed.

"Is confession the king of evidence?" I believe many people have heard this phrase. The truth is known only to the perpetrator; if a confession's content matches physical evidence, judicial investigative personnel generally consider obtaining a defendant's confession virtually equivalent to cracking the case amidst intricate investigative procedures. Yet, Paragraph 2 of Article 156 of the Code of Criminal Procedure explicitly states: "The confession of a defendant or an accomplice shall not serve as the sole evidence for a conviction; other necessary evidence must still be investigated to ascertain whether it conforms to facts." This reflects current evidentiary application issues within judicial adjudication proceedings. In the lecture, Attorney Wang Yen shared two cases, Chiou Ho-shun and Lo Ming-ts'un. Following a series of improper interrogations and retractions of statements by co-defendants, they were forced to utter confessions contrary to the facts and were consequently convicted. Yet these cases are merely the tip of the iceberg among numerous wrongful convictions.

During my internship at the JRF, I was fortunate to attend the JRF lecture series titled "Beyond the Abyss: The Journey of Wrongful Conviction Rescue," where false confessions constitute a crucial evaluation component in wrongful conviction rescues. Although the judicial litigation process and system have undergone multiple reforms, gradually becoming more complete and safeguarding people's fundamental rights—showing significant progress compared to the earlier judicial environment—there are still many innocent persons awaiting rescue today. This signifies that we still have a long way to go on the path of justice. Whether in the adjudication process or legislation, we bear an unshirkable duty, and we hope that innocent persons can find their way home as soon as possible.