Why Did Chris Confess?

Why did Chris confess?

This is the number one question people ask when they hear this story.

Many people cannot imagine why a person would confess to a crime they didn’t commit. The average person can understand why a person would commit suicide, but they can not understand why anyone would give a false confession. However, false confessions happen more often than you think. According to the Innocent Project, “Astonishingly, more than 1 out of 4 people wrongfully convicted but later exonerated by DNA evidence made a false confession or incriminating statement.”

There are many reasons why someone would give a false confession, but for Chris, it was the harsh interrogation tactics that caused him to break down and confess to the accusations that the police were making against him.

Chris received a phone call that morning while he was at work saying that his daughter Adeline was taken to the hospital and they didn’t think she was going to make it. He rushed into the hospital as fast as he could, even leaving his truck door open in the parking lot. He ran into the hospital to not only find that his daughter had died, but that the authorities wanted to take him in for questioning. He obliged and was taken by a friend to the police station. Immediately they began questioning Chris and his wife trying to figure out what happened. Chris had never been questioned by the police. He did not realize that the police would make these accusations against him or that he should wait for a lawyer. He also didn’t know about the methods that the detectives would use to get him to confess.

False confession expert Saul Kassin, in an interview with Evan Nesterak on the Psych Report, talks about how false confessions can be coerced by the methods law enforcement officers use to get someone to confess to a crime. Detectives use a process called the Reid method which is a two-step process where in the first step they determine whether a suspect is innocent or guilty based on their verbal and nonverbal behavioral cues, and can usually determine this within the first five minutes of questioning. However, they are not always right when determining if the suspect is guilty or not which makes this method risky.

For Chris, they determined he was guilty because he was calm and polite and respectful. He was raised to respect the authorities and thought that if he cooperated it would end better for him and he could quickly get out of there to go be with his wife and grieve for his daughter. They accused him of being too calm after losing a child. But how would anyone respond initially in such a tragedy? Who is to say how one is supposed to act after loosing a child? No one knows how they will respond in such a situation until they are in it themselves. Chris was in shock. Obviously, it still didn’t seem real to him. It seemed more like a really bad dream that he couldn’t wait to wake up from. He could not wrap his head around losing a child that quickly.

So the police determined that he was guilty and proceeded to the next step of interrogation with accusations and presumptions that he was guilty. They told Chris things like, “we know you did this”, “why did you do it?”, “you’re lying, you know what happened to your daughter”, “no one is going to believe you, they are going to make up their own theory”, and even threatened that “the people after me aren’t going to be as nice as me”.

Saul Kassin says, “The process of the Reid interrogation therefore is strictly presumptive of guilt. Once you understand that, you understand the very relentless nature of so many interrogations that have produced false confessions. Sometimes you want to rip your hair out watching a suspect say 60,70, 80 times I didn’t do this, and with every denial he or she is called a liar. You wonder if there is anything at all that this person can do to convince this interrogator of his innocence.”

During the interrogation process they put Chris in isolation, even leaving him in the small enclosed windowless examination room for 5 whole hours by himself. They held him for close to 20 hours with no food or water. When Chris would try to deny the accusations they would interrupt him and cut him off. They even lied about evidence that they didn’t have in order to break him. In the United States, police officers are actually allowed to lie. They told Chris several lies about the evidence that they claimed to have. They made him think these things had to be true even though he did not remember ever harming his baby girl. Their goal is to disorient a person and bring them to a state of despair.

They also, at the same time of making these accusations, try to show false sympathy in order to further disorient their victims. The police say things like, ‘I know you did this but I think you are a good person’, or ‘I don’t think you did this on purpose’. They tried to make Chris feel as though it would be better for him to confess and it would minimize the costs for him. He thought that if he confessed, it would make it easier for his wife to get their other daughter back. The detectives spoon fed him the entire confession, they told him exactly what to say as though they knew exactly what happened. Chris could see no other way out but to do what they said. They played tricks on his mind forcing him to give the confession that they had already invented in their sick minds. They broke Chris.

He truly thought that his innocence would set him free when the investigation was over. However, many people have been convicted in court based solely on a confession alone without any evidence. Now Chris is waiting for a trial in which he is facing the death penalty. There is a strong chance that Chris will be convicted and sentenced to death not based on forensic evidence but based solely on his spoon-fed confession.

Chris is seeking for justice. His name has been smeared, he has lost his family, his position in the army, his reputation, everything he owned, and now he awaits a trial to determine his fate. His heart is broken, he faces anxiety daily about what awaits him, and he prays constantly that God would do a work to clear his name and make the truth known.

Our desire is to make people aware of the truth behind American police interrogation methods. The Reid method is immoral to say the least. We, as citizens, need to stand up and demand that police interrogation methods be changed. We also should demand that our courts hand down verdicts based on actual evidence, not based on “confessions”.

For more information, we encourage you to read about coerced false confessions here from Saul Kassin and an example of 5 men who were convicted based solely on their confessions only later to prove with DNA that they were innocent.

**UPDATE: Read the conclusions of the psychiatric evaluation from Doctor Stephen A. Montgomery here.