this Ted Talk Features psychologist Lindsay Malloy recorded live at Ted X F I. U 2016. Support for Ted is Brought to you by Wells Fargo. This is a commitment to better banking. This is Wells Fargo,

Tyler Edmonds, Bobby Johnson, Devante Sanford, Marty Tankleff, Jeffrey Deskovic, Anthony Caravella and Travis Hayes. You probably don't recognize their faces together. They served 89 years for murders that they didn't commit murders that they falsely confessed to committee when they were teenagers. I'm a forensic developmental psychologist, and I study these types of cases as a researcher, a professor and a new parent. My goal is to conduct scientific research that helps us understand how kids function in the legal system that was designed for adults. In March of 2006 police interrogated Brendan Dassey, a 16 year old high school student with an I Q around 70 putting him in the range of intellectual disability. So here's just a brief snippet of his four hour interrogation.

Be ized. I told you before, that's a 1,000,000 fans gonna help you. We already know what happened. Okay, we don't get honesty here. I'm your friend right now, but I believe in you and I don't believe in you. I can't go to bat for you, okay? You're not. Tell us what happened. Your mom said you'd be honest with us, and she's behind you. Percent there. What happened here? That's what she said.

She thinks you know where to. We're in your corner. We already know what happened. Tell us exactly. Don't lie.

They told Brendan that honesty would set him free, but they were completely convinced of his guilt at that point. So by honesty, they meant to confession. And his confession would definitely not end up setting him free. They eventually got a confession from Brendan that didn't really make sense, didn't match much of the physical evidence of the crime and is widely believed to be false. Still, it was enough to convict Brendan and sentence him to life in prison for murder and sexual assault in 2007. There was no physical evidence against Brendan at all. It was nothing more than his own words that sent him to prison for nearly a decade until a judge overturned his conviction just a few months ago. The Desi case is unique because it made its way into a Netflix series called Making a Murderer, which I'm sure many of you saw, and if you haven't you should definitely watch it. The Desi case is also unique because it led to such intense public outrage. People were very angry about how Brendan was questioned, and many assumed that his interrogation had to have been illegal.

It wasn't illegal, a someone who is a researcher in this area and is familiar with police interrogation training manuals. I wasn't really surprised by what I saw. The fact is, Daddy's interrogation itself is actually not all that unique. And to be honest with you, I've seen worse. So I understand the public outcry about injustice and Brendan Dassey's individual case. But let's not forget that approximately one million or so of his peers are arrested every year in the United States and may be subjected to similar interrogation techniques. Techniques that we know increase the risk for false confession. And I know many people are gonna struggle with that term false confession and with believing that false confessions actually occur, and I get that it's very shocking and counterintuitive. Why would someone confess and even give gruesome details about ah horrifying crime like rape or murder. If they hadn't actually done it, it makes no sense. And the fact is,

we can never know precisely how often false confessions occur. But what we do know is that false confessions or admissions were present in approximately 25% of wrongful convictions ofpeople later exonerated by DNA evidence. Turns out they were innocent. These cases are crystal clear because we have the DNA, so they didn't do the crime, and yet 1/4 of them confessed to it anyway. And at this point from countless research studies, we have a pretty good sense of why people falsely confess and why some people like Brendan Dassey are at greater risk for doing so. So we know that youth are especially vulnerable to providing false confessions. In one study of exonerations, for example, only 8% of adults had falsely confessed, But 42% of juvenile's have done so. Of course, if we're just looking at, you know,

wrongful convictions and exonerations were only getting part of the story. Left out, for instance, are the many cases that are resolved by guilty pleas, not trials from TV and news headlines. You may think that trials are the norm in our legal system. But the reality is that 97% of legal cases in the U. S. R. Results by please not trials 97%. Also left out will be confessions to more minor types of crimes that don't typically involve D n A evidence and aren't usually reviewed or appealed following a conviction. So for this reason, many refer to the false confessions we actually do know about as the tip of a much larger iceberg. In our research, we found alarming rates of false confession among teenagers. We interviewed almost 200 incarcerated 14 to 17 year olds,

and 17% of them reported that they had made at least one false confession to police. What's also shocking to most is that interrogation in the US please are allowed to interrogate juvenile's just like adults so they can lie to them. It's blatant lies like we have your fingerprints. We have your DNA. Your friend is down the hall saying that, you know, this was all your idea. Lying to suspects is banned in the UK, for example, but legal here in the U. S. Even with intellectually impaired teams like Brendan Dassey. In our research, most of the incarcerated teams that we interviewed reported experiencing high pressure police interrogation Sze without lawyers or parents present. More than 80% described having been threatened by the police, including with the possibility of being raped or killed in jail or being tried as an adult.

These maximization strategies are designed to make suspects feel like denials or pointless, and confession is the only option. So you may have heard of playing the role of good cop bad cop, right? Well, this is bad cop Juvenile's are Morse, US suggestible and susceptible to social influence. Like the intense pressure accusations and suggestions coming from authority figures in interrogation, Sze, more than 70% of the teens in our study said that the police had tried to befriend them or are indicated desire to help them out. During the interrogation. Thes are referred to his minimization strategies and they're designed to convey sympathy and understanding to the suspect, and they imply that a confession will result in more lenient treatment. So in the classic good cop bad cop over simplification of police interrogation, Sze This is good cop

honesty here. Brenda's thing that's gonna help you. Okay. No matter what you did, we can work through that. Okay? I can't make any promises, but we'll stand behind you no matter what you did. Okay,

No matter what you did, we can work through that. Hints of leniency like you just saw with Brendan are especially powerful among adolescents in part because they evaluate reward and risk differently than adults. D'oh confessing brings an immediate reward to the suspect. Right now, the stressful and pleasant interrogation is over. So confessing may seem like the best option to most teens who are less focused on that long term risk of conviction and punishment down the road. As a result of that confession, I think we can all agree that thoughtful long term planning is not a strength of most teenagers that we know. And by and large, the legal system seems to get that young victims and witnesses should be treated differently than adults. But when it comes to young suspects, it's like the kid gloves come off and treating juveniles as though they're adults and interrogation za za problem because literally hundreds of psychological and neuro scientific studies tell us that juvenile do not think like adults. They do not behave like adults, and they're not built like adults. Adolescent brains are different from adult brains, even anatomically so.

There are important changes happening in the structure and function of the brain during adolescence, especially in the prefrontal cortex in the limbic system. And these are areas that are crucial for things like self control, decision make a emotion processing and regulation and sensitivity to reward in risk. All of which can affect how you function in a stressful circumstance, like a police interrogation. We need to educate law enforcement attorneys, judges and jurors on juvenile development of limitations and how they can play out in a high stakes interrogation. In one national survey of police officers, 75% of them actually requested specialized training and how to talk to Children and adolescents. Most of them had had none. We also need to consider having special protections in place for juvenile's. In his 91 page decision to overturn Dassey's conviction earlier this year, the judge made a big deal about the fact that Daddy had no parents or other allied adult in the interrogation room with him. So here's a clip of Brendan talking to his mom after he confessed when it was obviously far too late for him.

What do you mean? Like, give your stories like differently? I don't know. Did you, huh? Not really. What do you mean, not really. You got to my head.

So he sums it up pretty beautifully. There, they got to my head. We don't know if the outcome would have been different for Brendan if his mom had been in an interrogation room with them, But it's certainly possible in our research. Only 7% of incarcerated teens, most of whom it had numerous encounters with police, had ever had a parent or attorney in the room with them when they were questioned as a suspect, if you had ever asked for a parent or attorney to be present and you see this in lower stakes situations too. So we did a mock interrogation experiment. Our lab here at F i u. With parent permission for all miners, of course, and all the appropriate ethical approvals. We falsely accused teens and adults of cheating on a study task. An academic dishonesty offence that we told them was a serious is cheating in a class. In reality,

participants had witnessed appeared Cheat someone who was actually part of our research team and was allegedly on academic probation, and we gave everyone a tough choice. You can lose your extra credit for participating in the study or accuser Pierre, who will probably be expelled because of his academic probation status. Of course, in reality, none of these consequences would have panned out, and we fully debriefed all participants afterward. But most teenagers, 59% of them, signed the confession statement, falsely taking responsibility for the cheating Onley three teens out of 74 or about 4% of them, as to talk to a parent when we accused him of cheating, despite the fact that for most of them their parent was literally sitting in the next room during the study. Of course, cheating is far from murder,

and I know that. But it's interesting that so many teens, significantly more teens than adults, sign the confession, saying that they cheated, they hadn't cheated. But they signed this form anyway, saying that they had rarely attempting to evolve a parent in this situation. Other studies tell the same story. Over 90% of juvenile's wave their Miranda rights and submit to police questioning without lawyers or parents present in England and Wales, Interrogation of juvenile's must be conducted in the presence of an appropriate adult, like a parent, guardian or social worker. And this isn't something you'd have to ask for, which is great because research shows that they won't. It's automatic.

No. Having an appropriate adult safeguard for juveniles here in the U. S. Would not be a a cure all for improving police questioning of youth. Unfortunately, parents often lack the knowledge and legal sophistication to appropriately advise their Children. You can just look at the case of the Central Park five five teenagers who falsely confessed to a brutal gang rape in 1989 with their parents by their sides, and it took over a decade to clear their names. So the appropriate adult really should be an attorney or perhaps a train child advocate. Overturning Daddy's conviction, the judge pointed out that there's no federal law requiring that the police even inform a juvenile's parent that the juvenile is being questioned or honor that juvenile's request to have a parent in the room. So if you think about all of this together for a second. As a country, we've decided the juvenile's cannot be trusted with things like voting, buying cigarettes, attending an R rated movie or driving.

But they can make the judgment. Call the wave their Miranda rights rights that we know from research. Most teens don't understand or appreciate and parents in the room, depending on the state that you live in your child can waive. These potentially wave these rights without your knowledge and without consulting any adult first. Now no one, and certainly not me wants to prevent police from doing the very important investigative work that they do every day. But we need to make sure that they have appropriate training for talking to youth as a parent and as a researcher, I think we can do better. I think we can take steps to prevent another Brendan Dassey while still getting the crucial information that we need from Children and teens to solve crimes. Thank you

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