Confessing to a crime you didn't commit

Imagine police are interrogating you over a crime you didn't commit. If you're innocent, you're safe, right? Wrong. Sometimes, being innocent can make you more likely to confess. How is that possible? In part two of our four-part series, Forensic https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/allinthemind/forensic-all-in-the-mind-series/106647236, we learn about the police interviewing techniques that make false confessions more likely, and the bizarre cases in which people come to believe they really, truly did commit a crime – despite being innocent. Guests: Saul KassinDistinguished Professor Emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor Emeritus at Williams College Lisanne Adam Lecturer in Law, RMIT University School of Law Celine van GoldeAssociate Professor in Legal Psychology, University of Sydney Credits: Presenter/producer: Sana QadarSenior producer: James BullenProducer: Rose KerrSound engineer: Roi HubermanYou can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  Why do humans hold on to stuff, oddments we don't use and yet can't quite throw out? It's not just you and me. Australia's oldest library is crammed with stuff that isn't books. Terrible paintings, old menus, human hair. Is this history or hoarding? I'm Annabelle Crabb. Come and have a rummage through the story of us told by our stuff. Search for the History or Hoarding podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  In the late 1970s, Saul Casson was a graduate psychology student at the University of Kansas, and he got involved in research looking at jury trials and confession evidence.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  I'm looking through the law school book in evidence and there's a chapter on confession evidence and a footnote to that chapter. And the footnote was to the leading manual of interrogations and how it is that police interrogate suspects to get confessions.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Saul was intrigued. So he took the book out of the library and then he read it cover to cover.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  And I was horrified. I was horrified. The social psychologist in me who studies social influence, who studies compliance and obedience to authority. I looked at those tactics that police are trained to use to get confessions and my first reaction was, I hope everybody they bring in to this process is the criminal because otherwise they will get innocent people to confess.

• 1:40Speaker 03

  It just, it launched me into this curiosity. I asked Larry Reitzman, my mentor, would it be okay, I was there on his money to study juries, if we tilted a bit and also studied confessions? And I made a, I made a strong presentation and he said, hey, that's a great idea. Let's go to it. And that was the start of it. The first publication on confession evidence came in 1980.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  That paper was the start of a new field of psychological research into false confessions.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  From ABC Radio National, this is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. And false confessions are the focus of today's episode, part two of our special series, Forensic, all about the psychological tools used to crack cases and the surprising ways they can go wrong.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  In episode one, we covered criminal profiling with a wild story about a bomber loose in New York City and the psychiatrist who worked backwards, based on certain clues and nailed the description of who the culprit would be. So if you missed that one, you should definitely go back and listen. Today, though, we are diving into false confessions, how often they happen, why they happen, and the investigative tactics that can make them more likely.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  When an innocent person confesses to a crime, it's a false confession. That's straightforward enough. But there are actually two main types of false confessions. Let's deal with the rarer version first. That's voluntary false confessions.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Often, it happens in high-profile crimes that are in the newspapers and people seeking attention, seeking self-punishment. Somebody volunteers a false confession to police that I committed this crime.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  This is Sol Casson again. These days, he's a distinguished professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a professor emeritus of psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  When you look back over the pages of history involving voluntary false confessions, often it's individuals who are just, um... Their sense of reality is so distorted that when they read the newspapers, they insert themselves into the story.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Possibly because they want attention or just to be part of the story. But there can be more rational reasons for a voluntary false confession as well. Someone might confess because they are trying to protect someone else.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  So they may go in there because they feel that they're at less risk than a loved one and they basically sacrifice themselves in that way.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Sol doesn't actually spend much time researching voluntary false confessions because they're rare and, funnily enough, police don't trust them.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  When somebody walks into the station and volunteers a confession without any pressure... Police look with an eye of suspicion and their first question is usually something like, "Oh, really? Well, tell me about that crime. What do you know about the details?" And unless that person, unless that voluntary confessor can produce details about the crime that they couldn't have picked up in the newspapers, police tend to not believe them and send them home. I call that ironic because when police produce a confession after 20 hours of interrogation, they trust it. Somebody volunteers it, they don't.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  To that point, more problematic and more common are forced false confessions. Now, I'm gonna go a layer deeper in definitions because there are actually two types of coerced false confessions. One is compliant and the other is internalized.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Coerced compliant false confession is kind of easy for people to understand. Begin with the assumption that everybody has a breaking point. Everybody has a breaking point. And when you are charged with a crime, brought into the police station, you're alone. If you're a youth and you don't have your parents with you, that's stressful. And so you're not quite aware of what's about to happen. And the stress and pressure start to build. And suddenly, the police are making accusations. And suddenly, the police are claiming to have evidence they didn't already have. And suddenly, the police are letting you know that it's in your best interest to confess. And this can go on for hours. So, everybody

• 6:13Speaker 03

  has a breaking point. When you're under stress and that stress increases, and you have no access to friends, social support, family, and you're not quite certain what's happening, and you think it may be in your best interest to confess, because that's what police have led you to believe, after hours, some number of hours, you say, "Okay, where do I sign?"

• 6:34Speaker 02

  And something really weird that Sol has found in his research is being innocent can actually be dangerous because it could make you more likely to confess.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  This was perhaps the most mind numbing realization I've had over the years. I've always assumed innocence was the great deterrent. You're pressuring me to confess, but damn it, I didn't do it. I'm not going to say I did it. I'm innocent and I'm not going to confess. Innocence is what prevents us from false confessions. Then I came across a case that I worked on in which he finally broke and he signed a confession. And I asked him, because I worked on that case, I said, I don't, I don't get it. Why did you finally break? What broke you? He said, they told me they had evidence, blood evidence that we're going to send to the lab. I said, yeah. He said, well, the blood evidence is going to show I didn't do it.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  I said, wait, are you saying you confessed because you were innocent? He said, well, when you put it that way, yes. I confessed because I knew it would all work itself out in the end.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Sol went back and spoke to other people whose cases he had worked on, people who'd been freed after a past wrongful conviction.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Almost to a person, they all said something just like it. In the back of my mind, I figured, you know what? It's going to sort itself out when they do their investigation. What they didn't realize, what I realize is that once you confess, there is no investigation. Case closed. So in an odd, odd way, in addition to the pressure, the, the hours of interrogation, the threats, the promises, innocence is a risk factor, what I call the phenomenology of innocence. I know I didn't do it. And that makes you, in a funny way, complacent and naive. It enables you, in fact, we've done these studies now.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  People who are innocent and know they're innocent, they're more likely to waive their rights to a lawyer, more likely to waive their rights to silence. They think it's in their better interest because they didn't do anything wrong. They have nothing to hide. So innocence enables innocent people to confess, as crazy as that sounds.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Note to self: Never waive your rights. And for that matter, never confess to something you didn't do. Although, as we'll continue to hear, that can sometimes be easier said than done. But in terms of the examples Saul's been giving, those are mostly from the American context, but false confessions do happen in Australia as well. Like, in the case of Andrew Mallard.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  He was jailed for life after being found guilty of bludgeoning to death 45-year-old jeweler Pamela Lawrence.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Mallard was convicted in 1995 of the murder of a jewellery shopkeeper.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  Her body was found at the rear of her Mosman Park.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  But his conviction involved a false confession.

• 9:23Speaker 05

  It really shows us this case, the effects of aggressive, sometimes misleading, interview techniques during a police interview.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Dr Lisanne Adam is a lecturer in law at RMIT, and she's researched false confessions.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  There was a body found, and Mallard was also in the surroundings of that area around the time that the body was found. He was at that stage also in a very vulnerable state. So he was experiencing a hyper manic phase of bipolar disorder at the time, and he had a history of psychiatric hospitalisation, and he was showing signs of cannabis-induced psychosis. Now, these vulnerabilities made him very susceptible to pressure and suggestion as well.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Police saw him as a suspect, and he'd been in the area at the time of the crime. He wound up in hospital for psychiatric assessment.

• 10:12Speaker 05

  Now, while in the hospital, detectives actually questioned him about the murder. He denied involvement, and he was then questioned for another eight hours, which only 20 minutes of it was recorded.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 10:26Speaker 05

  And this was after his psychiatric assessment and after he was brought in to a more formal environment. Now, during this interview, police lied to him about eyewitness accounts that would have placed him on the scene, and he was repeatedly also pushed on inconsistencies in his story. Now, under all this pressure, he began to speculate hypothetically, so he spoke in the third person, about what might have happened to the victim. Now, at one point, he even told the police that he all made it up, and that he wanted a sergeant to get off his back. So, there was no physical evidence, and he had repeated retractions here as well, but these speculative statements, they were actually treated as confessions.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  So he was convicted and served 12 years in prison. And it took multiple appeals to reveal that the police withheld critical evidence and failed to follow up on other leads as well. Because the actual suspect of this murder was actually already in prison for another murder. So he was exonerated and released.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  That is incredibly flimsy evidence to convict someone and put them in prison for 12 years. Like, there was no DNA evidence, no weapon, no blood on him, and not even a proper confession. It was just speculative statements that they took as a confession?

• 11:43Speaker 05

  At that stage, yes.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  That's incredible. Is that, is this like totally outside the range of normal? Or is this kind of exemplary of how false confessions have nailed people previously?

• 11:54Speaker 05

  Well, once a confession is made, it's a very powerful piece of evidence in a prosecution. So once a confession is made, the chances of the case leading to a conviction can actually increase significantly. So a case can hinge on a confession and circumstantial evidence as long as we prove beyond reasonable doubt that this person is guilty of this offence. It's ultimately a subject for, of course, a jury who determines guilt in this case. But confessions are very persuasive as well to jurors. So we need to keep that in mind when we, particularly when we hear cases like this, to understand how it came about.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Okay, so that tells you a bit about how compliant coerced false confessions can happen. But remember, I said there were two types of coerced confessions. There's compliant and internalized. And internalized coerced false confessions are stranger, perhaps more problematic.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  This is the harder type of confession to explain to the average person. Because these are cases where the innocent person not only agrees to confess as an act of compliance, "I'll sign the paper," but they actually come to believe they committed the crime. And in some extraordinary sub-sample of those cases, they actually make up memories of how they did it. The first time I ever saw one of these cases was, there was a case in the 1970s in Connecticut, where an 18-year-old boy named Peter Riley came home on a Friday afternoon and found his mother on the floor, blood everywhere. She'd been beaten, stabbed. He calls 911, calls the

• 13:36Speaker 03

  police, and they come and for really no good reason, he has no history of troublemaking or violence, they create the idea that he's a suspect. Long story short, they investigate him for hours. At one point, they say, Peter, are you willing to take a polygraph, a lie detector test? And of course, he did what innocent people do. He said, sure. In fact, he figured they're not believing me, this'll help. And what the police did in this case, as they do in extraordinary numbers of cases, is they give him false feedback about the effect. Peter, we don't know how to tell you this, but the machine is telling us that

• 14:17Speaker 03

  you're lying. And Peter says, how can that be? I'm telling you exactly what happened. And he says, I'm just telling you, sometimes the machine tells us about a person and things about that person that even they don't remember.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Saul tracked down a transcript of this police interview, and he was mesmerized.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  He vehemently denies any involvement. And then, several pages later, he says, this is not a quote, but a paraphrase, "Your machine is starting to give me doubts right now." And then several pages later, he kind of breaks down and starts crying and says, wait, is it possible to do something like this and not remember? And the response from the polygraph examiner, the detective, was, oh yes, people repress unpleasant memories all the time. He breaks down in tears, and based on all the information they gave him about his mother's murder, he came up with a story about how he killed her. He not only

• 15:19Speaker 03

  agreed to sign a confession, he internalized the belief that he committed the crime and invented a way that explains it.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  The idea that someone could come to believe they remembered doing something that they had, in truth, never actually done, that was shocking to Saul. It's probably shocking to you, but the pattern has played out in many cases since.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  There are so many additional that have come up. Now, sometimes the internalization is temporary, and then as soon as the stress of the situation lifts, they say, wait a second, I didn't do this. But then sometimes it lasts. There's a case in Nebraska where six people confessed to murder. When they were finally absolved, years later, they were exonerated, absolved, pardoned, compensated. A couple of them are quoted as saying, oh my God, I guess I really didn't do it. And that was years later. The good news with the Peter Riley case, the original, he's my poster child for how I understood false

• 16:27Speaker 03

  internalized confessions, is within six months to a year, it became clear when a new prosecutor entered the office and went through the case file, that Peter had an alibi. He was somewhere else with a whole boatload of people who tested to it. So his conviction was dropped, and that was the only time he served. Peter and I are friends now. We are in communication 50 years later.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  From ABC Radio National, you're listening to All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. In the United States, the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that works to free prisoners it believes have been wrongfully convicted, analyzed people who'd had convictions overturned based on new DNA evidence between 1989 and 2020. In their analysis of 375 people who'd had their convictions quashed, almost a third of people had made a false confession, and many were younger than 18. In Australia, the data we have on false confessions isn't as solid, but experts say that it's a similar proportion of wrongful convictions, up to a third, that involve false confessions here.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  But I want to backtrack a bit and dig a bit more into these internalized false confessions because the science in this area is fascinating. It seems really hard to believe that you could end up confessing to something that you never did. But there are interview techniques that can really chip away at anybody's confidence.

• 18:04Speaker 06

  So when people truly start to believe something, like create a false memory about committing to crime, usually it comes because of a combination of factors.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  This is Celine Van Gold. She's an associate professor in legal and forensic psychology at the University of Sydney.

• 18:23Speaker 06

  So definitely it is interviewing techniques, very suggestive techniques that are being used. It is often extended interviews as well, so that go on for hours, a variety of techniques where suggestive questions are being used.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Like what?

• 18:36Speaker 06

  Well, it can be direct suggestions about like, well, you committed this crime, didn't you? It can be suggestions where they provide specific details of the actual crime. And then people that are innocent have no knowledge of the crime then start incorporating those details into their own memory and all of a sudden start to remember like, hey, wait a minute, did I actually do this? Because how would I remember that the victim was, for example, tied up before they were killed, rather than not knowing that at all?

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Right, without realizing that that detail came from the police question.

• 19:07Speaker 06

  From the actual, yes, from the investigation, from the police question. But it's also, it's not just, so it can be maximization techniques and minimization techniques. So really like emphasizing the severity if people don't confess, or really downplaying the outcomes if people will confess. So it's actually in your best interest to confess. You really create a situation where a person thinks, I'm never going to get out of this situation. The best way to go about it is now confessing to this crime. And then at the same time, there's also specific vulnerabilities because even though... In my opinion, you can get anyone to confess to a crime they didn't commit.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Anyone?

• 19:45Speaker 06

  Yes, given the right circumstances, I'm quite convinced. But to make people actually believe and internalize that confession, so believe that they've actually committed a crime, get a memory, like create a memory for that crime. There are specific vulnerabilities that we often see within these types of suspects during investigations. It can be things like age, so younger people are more likely to, are more suggestible, so more likely to incorporate specific details and come to internalize a crime. We can also see certain things like certain psychological disorders, which makes it difficult to make a distinction between reality and fantasy. And all of a sudden, that all then merges together and they create a memory. And even suggestibility in and on itself is a personality trait,

• 20:30Speaker 06

  can increase the chances of people incorporating these details or actually coming to believe and creating a memory.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  I have so many follow up questions. Let's start with what you just said, suggestibility being a personality trait.

• 20:43Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Can you explain that? We've talked about a lot of personality traits on the show, but we haven't ever focused on that.

• 20:48Speaker 06

  It is a specific trait that people have. And there are researchers, originally from Iceland, Gudjohnson. And he actually developed the Gudjohnson suggestibility interrogative suggestibility scale. So it's specifically measuring suggestibility during interrogative situations.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 21:07Speaker 06

  And you see that there's quite a big spread with people. So some people are more likely to take on suggestions and incorporate it into their own memories during investigative interviews, while other people are less likely to do it. What we see is with age, suggestibility normally decreases. Children are a lot more suggestible than adults are. And we see it actually increasing a little bit again in older adults. But in general, suggestibility decreases with age, but everybody stays suggestible. We just see massive, like, individual differences.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  So like, how skeptical you are versus how gullible?

• 21:42Speaker 06

  I think gullible might be a better thing than skeptical.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 21:48Speaker 06

  Because it's not necessarily that it is skepticism that you take it on. Because suggestibility and a suggestive question isn't always obvious. If we look at a lot of the research into the effects of suggestive questions, we see that it can be like tiny little words that can completely change your interpretation and your memory of a specific situation. A very classic study that was done was by Elizabeth Loftus, and she showed her participants videos of cars crashing into each other.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Elizabeth Loftus is a famous, sometimes controversial, American psychologist who pioneered research into false memories. She's become controversial in more recent years, not so much for her research, but her involvement in the defense of high-profile cases like Harvey Weinstein's. But her work on memory, and specifically this car crash study, remains seminal.

• 22:39Speaker 06

  She showed her participants videos of cars crashing into each other. And then she interviewed her participants by asking them either how fast were the cars going, when they crashed into each other, when they hit each other, when they bumped each other. And depending on the verb that she used, people gave different estimates. Everybody saw exactly the same video. And what she also found is that if she then, a week later, asked people, "Did you see any broken glass?", people that were asked the question, "How fast were the cars going when they crashed into each other", were more likely to report seeing broken glass than, for example, people that were asked how fast were they going when they bumped into each other, hit each other. Well, in fact, there was no broken glass. So they created this false memory for this broken glass.

• 23:24Speaker 06

  I think it's important to understand that suggestion isn't always obvious. It can be like a well-intended words that is like included in a sentence. It can even be like a mistake that an interviewer makes. But as soon as it's put in there, the interviewee can take it on and actually incorporate it into their memory.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Right, and so just to link that to the personality trait.

• 23:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Is it the case that with that kind of subtle suggestibility or suggestion, anyone, no matter where you fall? On the scale of suggestibility could fall for that or?

• 23:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, but we see still that some people are more likely to to actually be impacted by it. But anyway, anyone can technically fall for it.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Yes, that Loftus study is so fascinating.

• 24:05Speaker 06

  Right?

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 06

  There are some issues with like replications that they try later on, but they see like the effects were less.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Pronounced?

• 24:14Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 24:15Speaker 06

  But in general.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  The crux of it holds?

• 24:17Speaker 06

  Yes, it hundred percent does. And like anything with misinformation and these types of suggestions has like stuck through time. And we see it every single time again.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Okay, what does pressure and stress actually do to memories and like memory integration? Like, why is that more likely to lead to false confession?

• 24:33Speaker 06

  In general, what we see with this type of stuff is that you are going to be less accurate when you try to recall something. When you're very stressed, when you're trying to recall something than if you are very relaxed. We ourselves are currently running some studies at the university where we've also investigating retrieval stress. And we are inducing retrieval stress by the virtue of being in a police interview.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  By retrieval, Celine means retrieving memories, recalling something that you experienced earlier.

• 25:04Speaker 06

  So we make participants experience a stressful event and then a week later they're being interviewed about it. But the interview is conducted in quite a serious way. An interview in and on itself is very stressful because it's an unfamiliar situation. You are forced to think about something that wasn't pleasant.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  And what are you seeing so far?

• 25:21Speaker 06

  It is not so good. So we see that if we are stressed, people are less accurate and actually will recall less details. Now, if we try to put this within then an investigative type of situation where you are a suspect. Somebody is actually like intentionally really upping that stress. If we know that you'll remember less details and you're also going to be less accurate amongst the details. It means you've got a lot more gaps in your memory, of course. Distress is interfering with your ability to recall specific details. But of course, the role of you is also different, being a suspect than a witness. Because maybe, even though you haven't committed a crime, like, there's nothing for you to tell.

• 26:05Speaker 06

  Like, they're asking you questions about an event that you haven't done, that you might not even have been there. So how are you going to recall any details about something that you've never actually witnessed or perpetrated? So when people then start to include all these suggestions to you, and you're very stressed and, like, you don't even have a memory for it, of course, it becomes more likely that, well, I'll just take on these suggestions. And we see with some other research that has been done looking at witnesses and stress and if they become more suggestible. And we see that the increase in cortisol levels, or the stress hormone, actually increases suggestibility in people as well.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  In the last couple of decades, in light of all this evidence around coercion, false confessions, suggestibility, there's been a concerted push to change police and court practices to safeguard against false confessions.

• 27:03Speaker 06

  We see that a lot of different states have tried to incorporate certain techniques or certain guidelines to prevent these from happening.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  One of the main things they've done is to move away from an interrogative style of interviewing and instead adopt something called the PEACE model of interviewing.

• 27:20Speaker 06

  Which has been developed in the UK as a response to a lot of false confessions and wrongful convictions based on those false confessions. Australian Police Forces, I think all of them now say they're using the PEACE model of interviewing.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  The PEACE model focuses on rapport building, and it has five stages. The acronym stands for preparation and planning, engage and explain, account or challenge, and then closure and evaluation. This is also sometimes called science-based investigative interviewing.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  In England, they had several false confession cases, high-profile, in the 1970s and 80s.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  This is Sol Cason again.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  And so they brought together a tribunal of academics and police and lawyers, and they created an alternative to that confrontational approach to interrogation.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Another safeguard that's been introduced is recording audio and video of formal interviews. Australian police forces have been doing this since the late 90s.

• 28:18Speaker 06

  She can actually see if there are specific coercive techniques being used. So we see that our justice system absolutely has incorporated specific safeguards.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  And in the UK at least, Saul says.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Over the years, the UK reported no change in their ability to close cases. There's been very few, if any, reports of false confessions since then. So they were ahead of the curve in starting to implement some of these changes. But now you can find them in many countries.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  As for whether false confessions are down in Australia, on the data we have, it's hard to tell. But by reducing the conditions in which we know false confessions can happen, the pressure, the length of interrogation, the sometimes misleading tactics, researchers are hopeful we've turned a corner. But Saul also credits another factor in all of this, a generational change in police forces worldwide.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  The old timers who have done it their way, the confrontational approach, I'm not sure they have ever changed ways. But individuals being trained in law enforcement today, who grew up in the shadow of an innocence project, who have alternatives to turn to, whose departments have alternatives to turn to, they're finding those alternatives. And so I'm coming across more and more opportunities for police to learn better ways to do this. So I am hopeful, and I think part of it is simply a change in generation.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  That is it for All in the Mind this week. Thanks to Saul Kasten, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts, Dr. Lysan Adam, lecturer in law at RMIT in Melbourne, and Celine Van Gold, Associate Professor in Legal and Forensic Psychology at the University of Sydney. Thanks also to producer Rose Kerr and senior producer James Bullen, as well as sound engineer Roi Huberman. Next week, it's part three of our four-part series, Forensic, and we're going deeper into the fallibility of memory and finding out just how reliable eyewitness testimony is.

• 30:36Speaker 07

  Are distracted or focusing on their day to day tasks. Even things that are seemingly obvious might not be interpreted as as crimes, like abduction or kidnapping.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  That is next week on All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time.

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