From: Science
Feeling sleepy? You may confess to a crime you didn’t commit
Science:
Didn’t get your 40 winks last night? Better not get yourself arrested, or you may admit to a crime you didn’t commit. False confessions are surprisingly easy to extract from people simply by keeping them awake, according to a new study of sleep deprivation. It puts hard numbers to a problem that criminal law reformers have worried about for decades.
The “crime” in question took place in a sleep lab run by Kimberly Fenn at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Together, she and Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist at the University of California (UC), Irvine, and two of their Ph.D. students recruited 88 Michigan State students to take part in an experiment.
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So should all suspects and witnesses be given a full night’s sleep before giving a statement to the police? Letting suspects sleep will protect the innocent but may also let more criminals off the hook by helping them resist interrogation, says John Wixted, a psychologist at UC San Diego who recently published a study on the vulnerability of eyewitnesses to false accusation.
Read the whole story: Science
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