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The Presumption of Innocence - Episode 85

Episode 85 • 26th May 2026 • Fox Rothschild: The Presumption of Innocence • Matt Adams & Matt Lee

Presumption of Innocence Ep 85 (Matt Adams & Hayley Cleary

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Speaker: The views expressed in this podcast are those of the participants and should not be considered the views of Fox Rothschild LLP or its attorneys. This podcast is for informational purposes only, is not legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship

Matt Adams: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to "The Presumption of Innocence," a podcast brought to you by the White Collar Criminal Defense & Government Investigations Practice at Fox Rothschild. We have long had a fascinating examination of the phenomenon of false confessions on this program.

In episode 52, we had a gut-wrenching discussion with Rodney Roberts, a man given 25 minutes to decide whether to plead guilty to lesser charges than he was facing, and who spent decades of his life behind bars before he was exonerated. In episode 57 of the program, we spoke to Jerry Lewis, a retired New Jersey State Police polygraph examiner and forensic interrogation lecturer.

He told us the police's side. Today, we're going to take a deep dive into the psychological dimensions that are ongoing during police interrogations that can lead to this horrific phenomenon of false confessions. And our guest on the program today is Virginia Commonwealth University Professor Dr. Hayley Cleary. She is with the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, and her expertise ranges from police interrogation with an emphasis on juveniles and adolescents, and she is really a renowned and recognized expert in police interviewing techniques and tactics. Professor, welcome to the program.

There is so much that I want to unpack with you because this, this phenomenon of the false confession is something that as a criminal defense practitioner I grapple with every day, because it's really difficult to understand how somebody could possibly say they did something that they didn't do. So welcome to the program, and hopefully at the conclusion of our time together today, our audience will have a little bit more into the psychological dimensions there.

But let's start a little bit on your background. You studied psychology and Russian studies as your undergraduate and moved on to a more public policy, and ultimately your PhD in developmental psychology. But what brought you to this topic of false confessions a- and police interrogation tactics as really your life's work, when it i- when it is such a difficult issue for most people to get their arms around?

Hayley Cleary: Well, I mean, that, that very reason is part of what drove me to study this topic as a young graduate student. So, you know, I had a couple of psychology and law classes as an undergraduate that sort of piqued my interest in how psychology and the criminal legal system interface. And, you know, I kind of was thinking about next steps and directions as one does as a, you know, 22-year-old undergraduate and thought, "Do I want to go to law school?

Do I want to go into foreign service? Do I want to pursue a PhD in psychology?" And that's ultimately what I ended up doing, a dual degree program in developmental psychology and public policy, which is really important to me because I'm very interested in applied work as a psychologist. Not all psychologists do applied research, but to me the, the application, both the policy context and to, you know, real world cases of documented false confessions is, is what lights me up.

Matt Adams: And most of your scholarship, if you look down your publications, is really about how law enforcement can engage in interrogation, which they have that fills a, a valid societal purpose in trying to investigate criminality, but do so in a way where we don't get jammed up with these horrific stories like that of our guest on episode 52, Rodney Roberts, who, who, who spends decades of his life behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.

If you give us the sort of 30-second cocktail party answer to how people confess to things they don't do, and I know it's pretty difficult to say that in 30 seconds, so I'm not holding you. There's no timer. But what, what is it? I know, I know a lot of your work focuses on juveniles and we're going to get to that.

But at, at its core, what compels a person to say, "You know what? Yeah, I did that," just to bring some level of finality to their situation, as opposed to what many in society think is the, the natural reaction to, to dig in and fight?

Hayley Cleary: The 30-second answer to what compels people to make that decision in that moment is the cost-benefit calculus has changed.

It has usually been changed for them by the situational pressures of the interrogation environment, of the tactics that interrogators use, and how those tactics sometimes interact with individual vulnerabilities that the person may have walking into the interrogation room. So, you know, absent sort of unusual kind of what we call voluntary false confessions, most false confessions occur because it's this pressure cooker of individual vulnerabilities and/or, or both/and situational pressures.

Many of my clients that have impacts with the criminal justice system are often, almost universally anyone that's engaged with law enforcement, has some form of this reaction, surprised if not shocked that law enforcement can actually lie to a subject that they're interviewing and get away with it.

USC: 1001

I mean, that's a pretty loaded question, so we'll have to unpack that a little bit.

Deception and coercion are not necessarily the same thing. They often overlap sort of in the Venn diagram of problematic practices inside the interrogation room. In terms of why we allow it to happen, that's a fine question you're going to have to ask the courts, and you're going to have to ask law enforcement leadership.

That's what I do every opportunity I get. The winds are changing, I will say. Um, so we're now up to, I believe it is 11 states, if not more, that have passed legislation in the last five years prohibiting law enforcement officers from using deception, at least with juvenile suspects.

So, you know, if we want to talk about deception and ways around it, and sort of the impetus for it and reform, there's a lot of different ways to go about that, but there are these sort of top-down policy approaches. I think there's also... It's really important to talk about bottom-up approaches, changing kind of hearts and minds of law enforcement officers themselves. And we see that happening too in, in sort of different places across the country.

There are a lot of individual officers and agencies who don't believe deception is the way to go, and they elect not to use it as a matter of either individual preference or departmental policy.

Matt Adams: What is the most frequent response that you get to your efforts at sort of trying to reform this deception paradigm that's currently permissible, at least in some places?

Hayley Cleary: I mean, it depends on who I'm talking to. So I - I often get the same response when I'm talking to the public. Let's say I'm giving a public lecture, and they're like, "Wait a minute. Why, why do we need these laws? I didn't realize police were legally allowed to lie." And so we have that conversation, that education conversation, and we explain how, you know, Frazier v. Cupp basically sanctioned police use of deception in the US. We talk about how other countries around the world have abandoned this practice long ago. So US, while not singular in its approach, is unusual in its permissiveness of deceptive practices. So we have the education conversation. And then, you know, the response from law enforcement is, is really kind of all over the place, and I work with law enforcement a lot.

I value that. I think it's really, really important that academics and law enforcement practitioners partner. You know, we are not opponents. You know, we're on the same team. So when I talk with law enforcement officers, I get a range of responses. Some, many officers are eager for better alternatives, for evidence-based practices, which do exist, that enable them to elicit information in criminal investigative interviews in a reliable and non-coercive way.

I also get a lot of resistance, um, from folks who have only known one way to question suspects. They're motivated by eliciting a confession more so than, you know, actionable information. And there's really kind of a, a strong adherence to these legacy techniques, and a resistance to change. So, the responses really run the gamut.

It depends on kind of who you're talking to.

Matt Adams: If you had one reform that you could implement nationally, would it be the elimination of deception, or would it be something even more basic than that?

Hayley Cleary: Well, you're talking to a developmental psychologist here, right? So my heart is with, my heart and my mind and my intellectual work is focused on young people who are, you know, in this situation.

And so, I think mandatory assistance of counsel for young people, even though there are unintended consequences to that kind of policy, would sort of part and parcel be our best bet in sort of preventing false confessions from occurring. But that's a really hard question, right? Um, we could even back up even further and say, "Well, we need to record interrogations," right?

We, we still have nearly half of the states in this country that don't require police agencies to record interrogations. And so if we don't have a transparent record of what happened inside that room, then we got a lot bigger problems.

Matt Adams: So when you say, Dr. Cleary, evidence-based practices, what do you mean by that? Explain that to our audience.

Hayley Cleary: Sure. So, in the last couple of decades, psychologists who study police interrogations and confessions, including false confessions, have kind of focused their efforts on developing, training and evaluating investigative interviewing techniques that are geared toward the elicitation of cooperation and information, right?

So shifting the goal of interrogation from being confession-focused to being focused on and measured as successful with cooperation and information. So we refer to these just broadly as science-based interviewing techniques, and there are specific models. So there's, you know, the cognitive interview.

There's what we call the strategic use of evidence. But broadly defined these are strategies for using open-ended, non-leading, non-accusatory techniques to first establish rapport and trust with the suspect, or the interviewee would be a better word, right? so once you have a genuine rapport, not, you know, a feigned empathy or, you know, posing as someone's friend, but establishing genuine rapport based on, you know, mutual disclosure and sort of setting the ground rules for an interview, then you can move on to use these science-based investigative interviewing techniques that allow individuals space to provide a narrative account of events in a self-directed way, right?

And these types of science-based interviewing techniques don't preclude investigators from presenting suspects with incriminating evidence if they have that information, but there's essentially a time and a place to do it. So this is really different from kind of the old way of doing things where interrogators come in, you know, right out of the gate, directly confront someone, "You're guilty. I know you did it. I'm absolutely convinced. All I want to know is why," right? Very different approach to the process.

Matt Adams: Makes for good TV, but destroys lives.

Hayley Cleary: And it's, you know, it, uh, you're exactly right, and i- in reality, it's not even like TV, right? This is, this... I talk to my students about this all the time.

I've watched many, many hundreds of interrogation videos at this point, and it is rarely like it is on TV. That's what makes it so hard, I think, to kind of wrap your head around. When jurors are shown an interrogation video, if we're fortunate enough to have one, it looks oftentimes quite mundane, and that's because it's, it's hard for folks to understand the situational pressures that are occurring inside that room.

It's hard for folks to understand how a suspect's, you know, developmental immaturity or mental illness or, you know, suggestible personality might shape the way that they, you know, experience this interaction, the way that they make judgments and decisions, even decisions against their own legal best interest.

Matt Adams: What is it about a juvenile that is uniquely perhaps magnifies the susceptibility to false confessions when it comes to this? We have seen in the history of our country some just absolutely horrifying examples of juvenile confessions. The Central Park Five is one that really comes to mind. What is it about the, the unique vulnerabilities of a adolescent or a juvenile who, who is confronted with this law enforcement interaction that makes this even more dangerous?

Hayley Cleary: Sure. So I think to answer that we should kind of zero in on something you said. You said an adolescent or a juvenile, and I'm, I'm glad that you put it that way because I want to unpack those two terms. They're not interchangeable in the way that I use them, so... And they're certainly not interchangeable kind of legally and scientifically.

So t- when I use the term juvenile I'm referring to someone who is a legal minor in criminal matters. Developmentally speaking, adolescence is this period in between childhood and adulthood in which the human brain is undergoing some pretty phenomenal changes. And-

Matt Adams: We've all been there.

Hayley Cleary: We have and we survived and lived to tell the tale, right?

Matt Adams: For sure.

Hayley Cleary: Most people do. But if you kind of look at the science of what's happening during this developmental phase, it's, it's really remarkable. Um, it's really transformative, and it, it is occurring throughout kind of our, you know, cognitive, emotional, emotional, social neurobiological systems.

So that process starts with the onset of puberty, right? Which in Western worlds these days is as young as 10 in a lot of kids, right, in developed nations. Adolescence ends. That's, it's a little bit harder to define kind of the end point, but generally we look at sort of neurobiological markers and also social markers.

So the brain's self-regulatory systems, the, the parts of our brain that help us make good decisions, that help us manage stress, that help us engage in deliberative decision-making, those parts of the brain aren't finished growing, refining, integrating with the brain's other systems until on average, the early to mid-20s, right?

Which also tends to be around the age when folks transition into adult social roles. So you're moving out of your parents' home, you're off their insurance, you've got a job, you might have a stable partner, et cetera. So we're looking at a d- a period of human development really between the ages of 10 to 25, and I think that's really important to emphasize because folks who are trained in the legal system are, are accustomed to thinking about age 18 as this sort of like magical dividing line, right?

Like you, as a lawyer, you probably literally go into a different court building, right? Juvenile court versus

Matt Adams: Absolutely.

Hayley Cleary: District court or whatever the case may be.

Matt Adams: Absolutely.

Hayley Cleary: But developmentally speaking, there is nothing magical about the number 18. And while there are individual differences, right, across from kid to kid to kid, when we look at patterns of humans, we're really talking about through the early and mid-20s as well.

And so to circle back to your question about what makes adolescents so vulnerable, it's because the parts of their brain that are in charge of impulse control, you know, rationalization, delayed gratification, you know, judgment, maturity of judgment, um, those parts of the brain are literally not finished developing at that age on average.

And so, they are walking into a situation where they are outmatched by someone who is older than they are, more legally experienced than they are, who is occupying a space and a role that is characterized by control and power, right? And so young people are outmatched in every sense of the word in this environment.

And so, you know, it's no, no surprise to anyone who does this work that rates of documented false confessions are higher among young people compared to adults.

Matt Adams: Well, without maybe naming names, what is the most appalling false confession that you've encountered in your study?

Hayley Cleary: I don't... You know, it's a fair question, but I don't think I can answer it because they're all so appalling in their own ways, right? Sometimes it's young people who were questioned for 11 to 12 hours overnight with no breaks. Sometimes it's young people who were maybe questioned for a handful of hours, but they were denied access to their mother, right?

As a mom, that one just, you know, is a gut punch every time. Sometimes it's the young people who, you know, were, were, let's say a young 15-year-old Black boy who is questioned by an older white male detective using racial slurs and is asked, you know, "Which arm do you want the needle in when they give you the death penalty?"

So they're, they're all tragic in their own way, and it's, you know, it's difficult and, and unfair to kind of compare them because every case that involves a documented false confession is heartbreaking in its own way.

Matt Adams: If we stick on the theme of juvenile for a moment, one of the, one of the most gratifying and perhaps terrifying experiences in my young professional career was a clinical program I did in law school.

It was, it was called the juvenile justice clinic, and we would represent juveniles during their bail hearings.

Hayley Cleary: Mm-hmm.

Matt Adams: And these are juveniles that had been picked up, and this was pre-bail reform in the state of New Jersey. We would go into criminal court, and we would represent them as their advocates rather than the public defender's office for purposes of trying to get them released or whether they would be detained.

And a lot of that was about the nature of the alleged offense, and their circumstances, and their circumstances. But it had nothing to do with what you think of as the core determinants for pretrial release, which is the risk of flight and the danger to the community. Maybe a juvenile can be dangerous to the community, but rarely is a juvenile able to actually flee.

The ability of a juvenile to flee, in my experience, has just been not... They don't have access to money. They don't have access to the types of things that allow you to, to flee. But it, it, it was such an eye-opening experience to encounter these individuals. Maybe they stole a car. Maybe they went for a joyride.

Maybe they crashed the car. In one instance, I remember one of my clients in, in, in the-- at, sitting at counsel table with me had his arm in a sling. He had received medical treatment. And the judge said to him, before we could put our names on the record, "What happened to your arm, kid?" And his instinct was to say, "When the car crashed, I, I, I broke my arm."

And I, I almost broke his other arm because I kind of jostled him to just be quiet.

Hayley Cleary: Right.

Matt Adams: And there is this, this misconception among adolescents and children, a parent, I, I recognize this in my own children, that when an authority asks, they have to provide some answer.

Hayley Cleary: Right.

Matt Adams: This notion of remaining silent is so foreign to them.

Sometimes kids say the wildest things, and it is palpably untrue, but sometimes they just feel like they have to blurt something out. What's your experience been trying to examine the psychological dynamic that doesn't really allow a child to understand their constitutional right to remain silent, and how that is so critical to the functioning of our criminal justice system?

Hayley Cleary: Well, there's an important distinction between understanding your constitutional right to s- to silence and invoking it and acting on it, right? And mobilizing it. And, you know, think about, like, put your adolescent hat on for a minute. Like, kids are socialized to comply with requests from authority figures, or to put it more accurately, instructions from authority figures in virtually every facet of their lives, right?

Like, they wake up in the morning and, you know, parent says, "Get dressed, eat breakfast, head to school." They get to school and teacher says, you know, "Sit down, open your book to page 33. Let's get going." Then the bell rings. They go to the next class, right? The school is, is governed by a principal.

Everyone knows you have to obey the principal's rules. Like, rules f- that are created and maintained by adults, that is the world that young people live in. And so it-- to me, it's no surprise at all that you throw into that mix a police officer, maybe a police officer who is uniformed, who is armed, right?

Kids, we socialize kids, generally speaking, to obey police from a very, very young age. Just... Or either to obey them or fear them or both, right? And so, you know, it, it, it makes me laugh. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I'm in a suppression hearing or I'm, you know, talking to a judge or reviewing a case. Or, or talking to an officer and they say, "Well, you know, the door was open," right? "They didn't, they didn't have to stay," right? "We... It was just a conversation. The door was open." And I've got my adolescent hat on and I'm thinking to myself, "What 15-year-old, what 35-year-old is going to get up from the corner of that room, blow past the police officer, right, give him the finger on the way by and say, 'I'm outta here?"

Like, maybe it happens sometimes, but I, I really don't think it happens very often because the, the situational controls are so powerful, right? The power dynamic is so palpable, and it is so disadvantaged and stacked against the young person. And I think it's really important to point out, too, that this doesn't mean that individual officers who are conducting interviews are being overbearing or attempting to, you know, be authoritative.

Like, these are situational pressures that, that arise out of just the social world that kids move through. And so, yeah, I mean, it's, it's... It doesn't surprise me at all to hear about young people who-- a young person who wants to answer the judge's question because that is what we are supposed to do. We learn it from the day that we come into this world.

Matt Adams: Well, we'll have to have a sidebar case study on my personal life because my father was a police officer.

Here I am, a criminal defense lawyer. My brother is a criminal defense lawyer. So we could have, like, a whole, uh, you could write a whole case study on, on us. Yeah. Yeah. But let's segue a little bit away from the problem and talk a little bit about the solution because, you know, it's, it's one thing to acknowledge that there is a problem, and I think it's fair to say that a growing amount of our society recognizes that the type of accusation-based interrogation processes that may have been pervasive at another time in our society no longer have a role here.

You can be just as effective, perhaps more effective, if you go-

Hayley Cleary: Right.

Matt Adams: ... About this in the ways that you've described. And I know this is coming, this, we're recording this episode on the heels of some groundbreaking work that you are a part of, talking about risk factors and recommendations for police-based, police-induced confessions.

And I, I know based on reading the paper that you've now published along with your, co-researchers, that this is a groundbreaking area where we're trying to move towards uniformity. We're trying to make it no longer the exception that this is the way law enforcement engages with suspects and witnesses, and make this the rule.

So boil that down for us. Where should we be as a society heading if we are turning our back on that darker period in time when this accusation-based interrogation technique was so pervasive?

Hayley Cleary: Sure. So, you know, step number one, record the interrogation. Record it from start to finish, from the moment people walk into the room to the moment everyone has left the room uninterrupted.

That is step number one. We want to eliminate false presentations of evidence, right? So telling interviewees or even implying or hinting to interviewees that you have incriminating evidence that doesn't actually exist. Because even implying that you have incriminating evidence that doesn't actually exist can be as powerful as directly presenting it, right?

So that could be, saying your fingerprints were found on the murder weapon, or your co-defendant, your buddy is in the other room right now and he's rolling on you. It could be something like, "An eyewitness placed you at the scene of the crime." Abundant psychological research shows that instead of immediately rejecting that idea, if you know it's true and you're factually innocent, our brains sometimes actually take a step back and try to explain it, right?

We try to think about, well, is there any way that this could be true? Did I, did I black out? Did I... Was I there earlier in the day? this is where the disconnect happens between how people-- how we think people behave in interrogations and how people actually behave in interrogations. Like psychology and psychological research can explain a lot of that.

Step number three would be to eliminate minimization and promises that imply leniency. So this is a really, really powerful technique, that's sometimes subtly powerful, that kind of changes the cost-benefit calculus for people. So if an interviewer sort of implies that someone might get a lesser charge or that nothing bad is going to happen to them or, they'll be able to get help or support. Even if those things aren't directly promised, if the implication is there, if the implication is that things will go better for you if you confess, but things will be worse for you if you continue to deny, that's, you know, when the problem sets in.

essions that was published in: 2010

So it shows you how much the research has continued to explode even just in the last, you know, 10 or 15 years.

Matt Adams: If you had to change the law, the substantive criminal law, what types of reforms would you place in them that fuel the, the type of coercive, potentially suggestive interview tactics that we're talking about today?

What, what kind of substantive provisions in the law would you say actually foster or facilitate or breed that type of activity by law enforcement?

Hayley Cleary: I mean, it's hard to say because so much of law enforcement practice inside the interrogation room is not legally regulated, right? I mean, we have hard stops on explicit threats and explicit promises of leniency.

hich we, you know, started in: 2021

But beyond that, you know, police have so much latitude inside the interrogation room, and so much discretion. And you know, discretion, like every other context, can be beneficial and it can be incredibly detrimental. And so, you know, a lot of law enforcement officers are really resistant to changes in the law, to having legislators or, you know, academics like myself telling them how to do their job, so to speak, or that's how they perceive it.

When really my goal is, "Hey, we've learned all this stuff about how to get better information and to do it in a way that is less likely to, you know, trample people's rights, is less likely to elicit these horrible outcomes," right? Let me share that with you." Right? That, and that is, that is my, my goal and my attitude when I walk into any room and any conversation, whether it be with a state policymaker or a police chief or a room full of detectives.

It's like, I'm not telling you what to do, I'm sharing this information with you in hopes that these are, you know, tools that you can add to your toolbox or food for thought so that you can do your job better.

Matt Adams: We're talking with Dr. Hayley Cleary, PhD, of the Virginia Commonwealth University.

She is an expert in police interrogation of juveniles and is widely published on reforms to the police interrogation process to try to eliminate the risk of false confessions. I was struck by an argument presented in this paper that we're talking about, "Police-Induced Confessions 2.0: Risk Factors and Recommendations," where you and your co-authors were actually arguing that false confessions as a societal phenomenon actually decrease public safety.

It's so basic yet so complex because when you think about it, there's an attitude that let's just take the problem and put it over there, throw it in a jail, and it's out of sight, out of mind, and we'll clean up neighborhoods. And much of the '80s and the early '90s was really the law enforcement dynamic in this country was really built around that, and we're, I think, suffering the repercussions of it now.

Why, in a nutshell, do the risk of false confessions, this, really problematic area that you've dedicated your professional career to studying, make us less safe? Because that public policy argument, that-

Hayley Cleary: Mm-hmm

Matt Adams: ... public safety argument is, is really the, the most compelling as I see it.

Hayley Cleary: You know, I agree, and it's also the one that's less discussed.

And the short answer is when you lock up the wrong person, the actual perpetrator is still out there, right? So there is no justice for, you know, the victim of the original crime. There is certainly no justice for the individual who was wrongfully accused, falsely acc- confessed, and then wrongfully convicted, especially when if you look at patterns, you know, certain systematically disadvantaged groups are more likely to fall into that category, right?

People of color are vastly over-represented in cases of wrongful convictions. So all of those injustices are occurring, and the person who actually committed the crime has not been identified and brought to justice. And there have been, there was an interesting paper that actually attempted to quantify the public safety cost of wrongful convictions, and they did so by looking at cases of proven wrongful convictions in which the true perpetrator was later identified.

And they used public information records and other sources to essentially count and describe how many additional crimes those perpetrators went on to commit after the crime for which they were not convicted and a- another person was wrongfully convicted. So it's, you know, it, it's sort of like in the economics of crime, it's a way of quantifying the cost of, of wrongful convictions to society, right?

That is to say nothing of the in tremendous, enormous cost to the people who are wrongfully convicted.

Matt Adams: Well, the title of our podcast is "The Presumption of Innocence," so it would be remiss of me to not go into a recent study that you published involving virtual reality headsets and the idea of whether people would actually get up and leave in a police interrogation setting if being told they can freely leave.

Tell us about that because the idea of that being sort of taking a, a, an experimental subject and sort of ingesting them into a real-life interrogation through virtual reality is totally fascinating to me. So tell our audience about it.

Hayley Cleary: Sure, yeah. This is a project that I am just so unbelievably excited about.

I'll probably be doing this work for the rest of my career. So, in short, my research team has created a 360-video interrogation. So basically, we drafted a script based on a real case in which actual known problematic interrogation tactics were used, and we, uh, shortened it to about a 30-minute experience and we hired actors, trained stage actors, to portray a detective and a young suspect. Filmed it inside a real interrogation room in 360 video.

So 360 video is, like, this camera that has multiple lenses, and each lens films a different kind of part of the room and then the computer kind of stitches all those camera angles together and creates this virtual room such that when the research participant puts on the headset they're transported inside the interrogation room.

So they're physically sort of seated next to the, the suspect. And so, you know, one of the many exciting things about this project is that to a greater degree than we've been able to really do before, it puts people inside the interrogation room, which is really important from a psychological perspective because we know from other perceptual research that trying to imagine someone else's experience is really hard for us as humans sometimes.

And that's why we kind of fail to understand and appreciate the situational pressures. And we look-- we see this in, in research, for example, comparing someone who watches a video to someone who reads a transcript, right? It's just, it's a different way of experiencing an interaction. And so we're trying to create as lifelike of an interaction as we can within the boundaries of ethical scientific research.

So it's pretty amazing. You put this headset on, you look to your right, and you see this suspect who's being accused of homicide. I mean, you can see the tears that roll down his face, you know, late in the interrogation when, when the hopelessness is really starting to kick in. So our goals with this project are really twofold.

We want to understand two constructs that are really important to coercion and false confessions. The first one is perceptions of custody, and the second is perceptions of coercion. These are important because judges have to make decisions, right, in contested confessions about whether a person was in custody and therefore entitled to Miranda warnings, whether a confession was the product of coercion and therefore involuntary and should be suppressed, right?

So these constructs are really difficult to study, and judges don't have a lot of information about how people experience them because psychologists haven't been able to provide... I mean, we, we study this in a lot of ways, but we've been limited, methodologically. So my hope with this VR work is that it kind of bridges the existing body of research from cognitive and social psychology with what judges are really having to grapple with when they make these decisions in real cases.

Matt Adams: Yeah. It's really fascinating stuff. I commend you for, for doing that because the idea that people don't understand that they're free to leave is just something that people like me grapple with all the time. I, I've had prominent law firms in, in civil cases that have criminal tentacles try to suggest that things like the right to remain silent can be waived, and it's like these are inalienable rights.

These are constitutional principles that are at the bedrock of what makes our society and our, criminal justice system great. But unfortunately, when you put someone into that pressure cooker, that box, it, it, crazy, crazy things happen. In our waning moments, Dr. Cleary, I, I would love to just ask a question that I tend to ask of all my guests on this program, and that is, what I say is, you know, take out your crystal ball and project into the future.

I know it's impossible, but work with me here. Look into 25, 30 years from now, will there ever be a point in our nation where we are free of false confessions or the risk of false confessions because we have essentially cleaned up all of this stuff? Or is the human component of our criminal justice system destined to reinvent itself and always be something that we're grappling with?

Hayley Cleary: I mean, I think we can make a lot of progress, right? But systems are made up of people, and systems inherently carry bias, right? And I, I've, I struggle to find examples of systems in which they've been able to eliminate their own bias because systems are comprised of people. And so are we going to eliminate false confessions?

I'm highly doubtful. Are we going to dramatically reduce the number and frequency of false confessions? I sure hope so. And there's, there's, you know, there's reason to be hopeful. Other nations are exemplars in, in this respect, right? So, you know, the UK has not allowed police deception for decades. There are other ways, nonadversarial ways of administering justice and public safety that recognize systematic oppression and put in safeguards to, to guard against it, right?

Not eliminate, to guard against it. And so my hope is that with improved training protocols with, you know, top-down policy to the extent that we can make that happen at, at the state level, and with, you know, doing the groundwork to establish buy-in with law enforcement professionals who have really extraordinarily difficult jobs, right?

Investigating crimes, horrific crimes, and, you know, ensuring public safety, representing victims. These are important roles, but when we get it wrong, the consequences are catastrophic for people who are swept up by the system and have their lives taken away from them. And again, it's, it... The risk of that occurring is not equal for all of us.

Certain groups are systematically disadvantaged, and that's not okay. So, I'm hopeful, the word I'll use is progress. Eliminate, I'm a little more skeptical, I guess.

Matt Adams: When you started talking about the human element and the bias that'll inevitably creeps in, my mind went right to the, the umpires in baseball.

They're now being challenged.

Hayley Cleary: Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Matt Adams: The batter can tap their helmet, and the, the AI system says it was a ball or a strike and can overrule the umpire. And it'll be fascinating to see if we can put some checking forces into the human component that's in play in our criminal justice system.

Something where we have the, the ability to take someone's liberty away. That's akin to something so silly on the grand scheme, where whether something's a ball or strike is now subject to this review by the omnipotent ABS system that tells it how it is because it's tracking the ball and measuring the batter.

I, I don't know that we could ever get to such a cookie-cutter thing for the whole of society, but it'd be an interesting social experiment for sure if there is something-

Hayley Cleary: Well, I mean, yeah, we got to try, right? We got to try because, you know, every year I go to the Innocence Network Conference.

Sometimes I present and I share information. Sometimes I'm just there as a student and perpetual learner, and I'm surrounded by individuals, freed and exonerated individuals, who spent 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years in prison. Like, longer than I've been alive, in prison for a crime that they did not commit.

And so what I, what I tell my students, what I tell the public when I give lectures is these are not just systems. These are not just processes. These are not just ideas. They're real people, real people with real families and real lives. And, you know, that, that should always be top of mind with any kind of conversation we're having, any kind of reform we're considering.

Who is it going to affect and how? Who might be disproportionately disadvantaged or advantaged?

Matt Adams: Dr. Hayley Cleary, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. That's all the time we have on this episode of "The Presumption of Innocence." Till next time, we'll see you then. Take care. Bye-bye.

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