The Different Types of False Confessions and How Often They Occur

Whether prompted by stress, sleep deprivation, police coercion or a desire for attention, people frequently confess to crimes they didn’t commit. Advancements in DNA testing, time and again, have led to exonerations of innocent people who gave false confessions, sometimes after they spent years or decades behind bars.

False confessions can “ruin people’s lives and their family’s lives,” Richard Leo, a law and psychology professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and the author of Police Interrogation and American Justice, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “It may or may not be a low-probability event, but it is a high-consequence event—some people think it’s the worst event you could have in our criminal justice system.”

In 2024, 22 out of 147 exonerations in the United States—or 15%—involved false confessions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project that has tracked more than 3,700 known U.S. exonerations since 1989. While “hundreds and hundreds” of false confessions have been documented, Leo says coming up with precise historical numbers proves difficult. “There’s no database maintained by the government, by which we could randomly sample interrogations, figure out what percentage lead to confessions and then figure out what percentage of those confessions are true or false,” Leo says.

Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, tells A&E Crime and Investigation that false confessions are “frighteningly common, more so than people think.”

“It’s tricky to know because confessions look and sound real, and people can’t tell the difference by watching and listening between a true and false confession,” Duped: Why Innocent People Confess—and Why We Believe Their Confessions author Kassin says.

Kassin distinguishes between “voluntary” and “police-induced” false confessions. Voluntary confessions are less common and occur when people claim responsibility for crimes they didn’t commit—without prompting from investigators.

“That happens for a variety of reasons—some rational: maybe people protecting someone else, protecting a loved one or taking the blame for something someone else did,” Kassin says. “And sometimes, these are less rational: people seeking attention.”

That’s particularly true in high-profile cases. More than 200 people voluntarily confessed to the 1932 kidnapping of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. The man who was convicted of the crime did not.

In 2006, former schoolteacher John Mark Karr confessed to murdering 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey in December 1996 in her Colorado home. As the still unsolved crime generated national headlines, prosecutors dropped their case against Karr after DNA evidence failed to place him at the crime scene.

“When somebody volunteers a confession to police, the reaction is one of skepticism,” Kassin says. “You say you committed this crime? Prove it. Tell me what you know about this crime scene and victim and whatnot.”

The more troubling false confessions, according to Kassin, are those in which suspects initially deny wrongdoing but eventually “are converted from that statement of denial, often vehement and often repeated, to a confession.” 

“That’s not to say they are illegally coerced,” Kassin says. “It just means that here’s a person that came in, denied any involvement and then was transformed from denial to confession as a result of the process of interrogation. It’s a social influence process.”

Police-induced confessions fall into two categories. In internalized (or persuaded) false confessions, psychologically vulnerable suspects lose their grip on reality and come to believe that they committed crimes. In compliant false confessions, suspects falsely admit to crimes under pressure, often due to duress or sleep deprivation. Some suspects see their confessions as ways out of stressful situations and believe confessing will lead to implied or promised rewards—like lesser charges for themselves or loved ones, lighter sentences or the end of interrogations.

“In the case of interrogation, it’s accusatory, guilt-presumptive, confession-driven and it’s based on techniques of pressure and persuasion,” Leo says. “And these techniques can and sometimes do become psychologically coercive.”

Police are legally permitted to use deception during interrogations, which may involve lying about evidence or witness statements. They are also allowed to ask leading questions or subtly feed suspects information about cases in a process known as “contamination.” These tactics can confuse suspects and lead to false confessions. 

Experts say this outcome is most common when the suspects are vulnerable people, including teenagers and people with intellectual disabilities. “When you consider the contamination, and you consider the fact that confessions have a way of tainting other evidence, you can understand why they are so powerful and almost nothing else matters,” Kassin says. Some suspects rehearse false confession with investigators before providing their formal—oftentimes recorded—statements.

Kassin points to the case of Huwe Burton, who spent 19 years in prison after his mother was found stabbed to death in their Bronx, N.Y., apartment in 1989. A sleep-deprived 16-year-old, Burton gave a written and recorded confession, but later testified that police coerced him.

Burton was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. Kassin, who later worked with attorneys seeking to overturn Burton’s conviction, says the uninterrupted and detailed confession did not initially appear coerced. 

Kassin discovered that investigators convinced Burton to practice the confession before he gave it. A judge vacated Burton’s conviction in 2019 after Burton’s legal team uncovered new evidence and presented research on the psychology of false confessions.

Other convicted criminals have been exonerated via DNA testing, including cases for which it was previously unavailable or not used, thanks to organizations like the Innocence Project, Centurion and the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions.

“We’re better off now in the age of DNA testing than we once were,” Leo says. “But there are also some cases where DNA shows the person who confessed did not commit the crime, or could not have committed the crime in any sensical way. And that person nevertheless gets persecuted.”