This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, June 25th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's unthinkable to most of us that we would confess to police that we'd committed a crime when we really hadn't.

But it happens a lot and it speaks to the ways in which police investigate crimes.

Marissa Boyers-Blustin is an assistant director of the Quatron Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University

of Pennsylvania Law School.

We talked about false confessions and how harsh and underhanded interrogation methods can

damage trust between cops and communities.

There is a big misconception about confessions when people confess to crimes,

and that is no innocent person would ever do that.

Give us a sense of how true that statement is.

Sadly, it's not true.

I've seen personally myself working with people who were convicted of crimes that did not commit.

The anguish that actually confessing to a crime has caused them personally. I've seen how it makes police go in the wrong direction

for an investigation. Crimes don't get solved. But it's a very common perception,

because I think most of us can't think of

a set of circumstances under which we would confess

to something we did not do.

All right, so going through how police get confessions or, you know, as they're doing

investigative work trying to solve a crime or at least make or at least make an arrest in a crime?

What are the technicals that police make use of in order to get to yes so to speak with respect to somebody who's

they're interrogating. Well I'd like to say that physical abuse no longer

happens I can't. It does. It's rare, but we do know that that happens,

...