POV: FORCED CONFESSIONS

Within hours of the news that a seven- year- old student of Ryan International School, Pradyuman Thakur, had been killed, the Gurugram police reported that it had cracked the case and arrested the murderer— Ashok Kumar, bus conductor at the school. The police claimed that Kumar had ‘ confessed’ to murdering Pradyuman. More significantly, they claimed he led them to the murder weapon— in legal speak, the murder weapon was ‘ recovered’ on a ‘ disclosure’ by Kumar.

In the great majority of cases of such a nature, Kumar’s arrest would have signalled the end of media interest in the murder. His applications for bail would have then been denied because bail will be denied in serious offences unless the accused is able to establish that there is no reasonable connection between him and the offence— a reversal of the presumption of innocence that Kumar’s ‘ confession’ would have made impossible to surmount. His family would then have exhausted their resources in the first years of his incarceration on expensive private counsel and ever more desperate bail applications.

By the time of his first real chance to challenge the prosecution’s version in court— perhaps two, maybe three or even four years after his arrest— he would have been left with the services of an overworked and underpaid ‘ legal- aid’ counsel appointed for him by the court. He would have then had to— with representation by the aforementioned legalaid counsel— dispel the common sense that he must be the murderer because it was he who led the police to the murder weapon; knowing that courts routinely convict on such evidence.

All of this even as Indian law deems confessions to the police inadmissible as evidence.

Luckily for Kumar, not only were Pradyuman’s parents unwilling to accept the police version, they also had the resources to petition the Supreme Court. As importantly, parents of other students in the school threw their weight behind Pradyuman’s parents; there were protests outside the school, and a nearby liquor vend was torched. Faced with mounting pressure, the state government transferred the investigation to the CBI, which then gave Kumar a clean chit and pinned the blame on a juvenile from the school.

Confessions are particularly dangerous bec ause there is a powerful common sense to them— most people believe they would not confess to a crime they did not commit; a belief held with little knowledge of police interrogation techniques and other real- world factors that cause false confessions.

Internationally, there is growing scholarship on the baneful effects of false confessions. In the US, the Innocence Project notes that one in every four ‘ wrongful convictions’ is the product of false confessions. Studies have shown that faced with a confession, the police often close investigations and overlook important evidence contrary to the confession. In 2010, the Centre on Wrongful Convictions ( USA) reported several cases where a confessor was tried and convicted despite DNA evidence exculpating him. Studies also show that confessions tend to corrupt other evidence, triggering confirmation bias in forensic experts and lay witnesses alike. Scholars have called this the “corruptive confessions” hypothesis.

It is a known fact that in a large majority of cases, confessions are procured by torture, under duress, or by trickery. There has been growing scholarship on the role interrogation techniques and other situational factors play in producing false confessions, even where the more egregious forms of torture are absent. But the most important developments in criminology in so far as investigation into the Pradyuman murder is concerned is the role ‘ adolescence’ and ‘ mental illness’ play in the production of false confessions. Because the CBI today claims that a juvenile with a reported history of borderline mental health issues has ‘ confessed’ to the crime. As of news reports today, the juvenile has retracted his confession saying he was tortured and that the confession was not a true record of what he said. It is of crucial importance that the latest ‘ prime suspect’ is also assured treatment that is substantively, as well as procedurally, just.

Studies have shown that confessions tend to corrupt other evidence, triggering confirmation bias in both forensic experts and lay witnesses