As described in greater detail here, Professor Robert Weisberg of Stanford Law School will be delivering our annual Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law at 12:15 on Thursday. In anticipation of his visit, I’ve been reading a few of his recent law review articles. Here are my reflections on these works:
Weisberg on Dan Kahan (our 2008 Boden Lecturer)
Weisberg on restorative justice
Weisberg on proposed reforms for the sentencing provisions of the Model Penal Code
The Federal Circuit and a few other counterexamples notwithstanding, American courts are not substantively specialized. By and large, the American judge is thus a generalist. For better or worse, our judiciary seems to be holding out against the pressures toward specialization that have so marked the contemporary legal and medical professions.
Is this a good thing? In the law review literature, there are plenty of calls for the creation of this or that new specialized court. Certainly, specialization leads to quicker and more efficient decisionmaking. But should we expect the specialized judge also to render decisions that are substantively better?
This is the question that lies at the heart of Chad Oldfather’s new article, “Judging, Expertise, and the Rule of Law.”
Why do suspects confess to the police? Researchers Allison Redlich, Richard Kulish, and Henry Steadman set out to answer this question by interviewing 65 jail inmates who had confessed, slightly more than half of whom claimed to have falsely confessed. The results are reported in their new article “Comparing True and False Confessions Among Persons With Serious Mental Illness,” 17 Psych., Pub. Pol’y, & L. 394 (2011). As the title indicates, the researchers were particularly interested in individuals with serious mental illness, which is a group that has been identified in the literature as especially likely to confess.
What I found most intriguing about the results was the importance of “internal pressure” as a motivation for confessing. This refers to feelings of guilt about the crime, a desire to “get it off one’s chest,” and a belief in the importance of honesty. Among the “true confessors,” guilt/honesty-type answers were the most common when the interviewer asked the open-ended question, “Tell me in your own words, why you confessed?” (403) (Not surprisingly, almost none of the ”false confessors” cited such reasons.) By contrast, “external pressure” (e.g., bullying by the police) was rarely cited by either true or false confessors. (The most common reason given for false confessions was a desire to protect someone else.)
Similarly, when subjects were asked to rate various suggested motivations on a seven-point scale (1 was “not at all” a reason to confess, and 7 was “very much so”), the true confessors rated guilty feelings as among the more important, with an average score of 3.52. (407)