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Sleep-Deprived Detainees More Likely to Confess to Crime They Didn’t Commit

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A new study released on Monday found that sleep-deprived people are up to 4.5 times more likely to sign a false confession -- and the findings are being called a milestone which will be cited in future court cases.

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The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, or PNAS, is not going unquestioned however; subjects of the study did not face any real world punishment for a false confession, as they would in a criminal case. Researchers responded that adding consequences in a study would be unethical.

The study involved 88 participants who were made to complete computer tasks across multiple sessions while repeatedly receiving warnings that pressing the “Escape” key on their keyboard would cause the loss of study data. For the final session, participants either slept all night or stayed awake all night.

In the morning, the participants were asked to sign a laboratory activity summary statement which falsely alleged that they had pressed the Escape key during an earlier session.

“After a single request, the odds of signing were 4.5 times higher for the sleep-deprived participants than for the rested participants,” the study found. They found that 50% of the exhausted subjects signed on the first request, versus only 18% of the people who had a good night’s sleep.

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Similar previous research from other organizations aligns with their findings, such as a study from the Journal of Sleep Research, who published a report on subjects having impaired decision making after being awake for 49 hours. Research by Steven A. Drizin of the Northwestern University School of Law, Bluhm Legal Clinic and the Center on Wrongful Convictions also found that most false confessions take place after an interrogation lasts longer than 12 hours.

The authors of the study recommend recording interrogations so that the value of the resulting confession can be assessed by everyone in the legal process, as well as having suspects rate their sleepiness to help make it clear when a confession has been signed by a sleep-deprived suspect.

The Innocence Project, a nonprofit dedicated to obtaining freedom for people imprisoned for crimes that they did not commit asserts that false confessions play a role in up to 25% of wrongful convictions in the US.

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