{"id":361172,"date":"2019-01-30T14:47:01","date_gmt":"2019-01-30T19:47:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=361172"},"modified":"2019-02-01T14:08:24","modified_gmt":"2019-02-01T19:08:24","slug":"false-confessions-philosopher-jennifer-lackey-humanities-center-361172","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/false-confessions-philosopher-jennifer-lackey-humanities-center-361172\/","title":{"rendered":"Philosopher Jennifer Lackey on why we\u2019re so apt to believe confessions"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"portrait
Jennifer Lackey, professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, the Director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

An action taken in a single moment can change a life. But what happens when that moment is one of false confession, claiming responsibility for a crime one didn\u2019t commit?<\/p>\n

Confessions are powerful\u2014they \u201coften swamp all other evidence in the United States criminal justice system,\u201d says Jennifer Lackey, the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University<\/a>. When people implicate themselves in a crime, the search for other suspects or evidence often ends. \u201cFrom an investigative standpoint, the case is virtually closed,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

But when confessors are taken at their word\u2014and trusted only<\/em> in the moment of confession\u2014a seeming breakthrough can become a miscarriage of justice. Lackey will explore the issue in a February 7 lecture titled \u201cExtracted Evidence: False Confessions and Testimonial Injustice.\u201d Her talk is part of the Humanities Center Public Lecture Series<\/a>, devoted this year to the theme of evidence and expertise.<\/p>\n

False confessions aren\u2019t rare or trivial. In the past 30 years, 353 people in the U.S. have been exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence; 28 percent of the exonerations involved false confessions, according to the Innocence Project<\/a>, an organization working to fight wrongful convictions. Another recent study examined 125 cases of proven false confessions in the U.S. between 1971 and 2002\u201481 percent of them were murder cases.<\/p>\n

Philosophers call the phenomenon of a person\u2019s words not carrying the weight they should \u201ctestimonial injustice.\u201d It\u2019s what happens when someone isn\u2019t believed because listeners are prejudiced against the speaker\u2019s social identity. \u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly fertile area of inquiry right now,\u201d Lackey says.<\/p>\n

\n

EVENTS<\/h2>\n

Jennifer Lackey<\/strong> will present \u201cExtracted Evidence: False Confessions and Testimonial Injustice,\u201d part of the Humanities Center\u2019s Public Lecture Series\u2014this year on the theme of evidence and expertise\u2014on February 7 at 5 p.m.<\/strong> in the Hawkins-Carlson Room at Rush Rhees Library.<\/p>\n

Lackey is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University, the Director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program, and the editor of Episteme<\/em> and Philosophical Studies<\/em>. Most of her research is in the area of social epistemology, with a recent focus on issues involving the rationality of punishment, credibility and false confessions, the epistemology of groups, and disagreement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

But she argues that the standard conception of testimonial injustice can\u2019t explain what happens in the case of false confessions. \u201cFalse confessions present a powerful problem case for the traditional conception of testimonial injustice, and here\u2019s why: across the board, testimonial injustice has been understood as people getting less credibility than they deserve. They\u2019re not believed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the case of false confessions, people are getting too much<\/em> credibility. They say, at one moment in time, \u2018Yes, I did it.\u2019 And then, even when they deny it afterward\u2014even when they say they were coerced or manipulated or deceived into confessing\u2014their confession is given a massive excess of credibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

The confession exerts what Lackey calls an \u201cillegitimate swamping effect.\u201d She says: \u201cIt just overpowers, it swamps all other evidence, including conflicting DNA evidence.\u201d The person confessing may have claimed guilt only once, and insisted upon innocence thousands of times, over years\u2014but in giving credence to the person at the moment of confession, the justice system thereby denies credibility to the person at all other times.<\/p>\n

It is a \u201cparticularly pernicious form of testimonial injustice\u201d and one that \u201ccries out\u201d to be addressed, she says. Her research brings empirical work in criminal law and psychology from the false confession literature to philosophical debate\u2014and turns a philosophical lens on questions about the criminal justice system.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m very interested in philosophy that connects up with urgent questions of practice interest,\u201d she says. She was drawn to the project through her work as director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program<\/a>. Teaching philosophy in prison, she discovered that one of her students there had, as a 15-year-old, confessed to a crime\u2014a confession he immediately recanted and continued to disown. But years later, when Lackey met him, he remained incarcerated.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut this question of false confessions and testimonial injustice, I think, was just starting me right in the face\u2014quite literally\u2014when I was teaching this student.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the latest Humanities Center lecture on evidence and expertise, the director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program discusses how a confession can turn into a miscarriage of justice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":361182,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[456],"tags":[14,25132],"class_list":["post-361172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society-culture","tag-events","tag-humanities-center"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPhilosopher Jennifer Lackey on why we\u2019re so apt to believe confessions<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program discusses how a confession can turn into a miscarriage of justice.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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