proving someone guilty derived, DNA research for example. Yet, even after centuries, the confession is still considered as ‘the Queen of Evidence’.

Imagine a suspect being interrogated. There is a lot of evidence against him, and he seems nervous all the time. It is a powerful confirmation when that person, after having denied for hours, will confess the crime. But is a confession always that reliable? A recent study shows that around half of the confessions which eventually were proved to be false, had led to a conviction (Howitt, 2006). Not only does this mean that innocent people have been imprisoned, but also that the actual criminals are still on the loose.
False confession
Making false confessions can be the result of multiple reasons, but the most important ones for this essay are the coerced confessions. Coerced confessions can be divided in two subgroups: coerced-compliant false confessions and coerced-internalized false confessions. The first category is when one is under such pressure that he will do anything to get out of this stressful situation, even if this means that he has to confess something he didn’t do. This could be the case with physical torture, but it also occurs with just being under a lot of psychological pressure. The second possibility is that the suspect starts to believe the police who keep blaming the suspect without giving the chance to defend himself. Showing fabricated evidence is legal in some countries and this can make the suspect consider the fact that the police may be right and that he indeed did commit the crime, but he simply doesn’t remember it because of a blackout. From these two, making a coerced-compliant confession is more common: people tend to just accept an accusation rather than also believing they did something wrong (Klaver, Lee, & Rose, 2008).
Methods of interrogation
The idea of making a false confession on purpose in order to avoid the situation arises during the investigation. This means that the problem lies beneath the method of questioning, but also individual factors and the psychological condition of the suspect contribute to whether or not the person will make a false confession (Wright, 2007; Klaver, et al., 2008). For example the presentation of false evidence is a trigger for people with high suggestibility: the panic results in overthin