If the police arrest you and bring you down to the station, but you know that you haven't committed a crime, do you think it's going to be easy to state your case? Most people do, imagining that they'll just have to repeat that they've done nothing wrong until they are released. While this may work out, a study showed that people can actually be convinced that they were involved in crimes that are imaginary. Not only did they not commit those crimes, but the crimes never happened in the first place.
It does not take as long as you may think. In most cases, the authorities only had to talk to people for around three hours before they thought they'd done something wrong.
Moreover, it was stressed during the study that the people had to be put into a friendly environment for the interview. In other words, the police didn't just come in and threaten them. This has been shown to produce false confessions because people will admit to things just to get the treatment to stop, because they are scared. In this study, though, fear was not used and people really believed they'd done wrong.
The study raises a lot of questions about memory, how accurate it is, and how easy it is for an expert to manipulate a person's memories so that he or she will say and believe things that are not true. It's important to keep this in mind if you are facing charges, and you also need to know all of your rights to defend yourself in Ontario.
Source: Psychological Science, "People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened," accessed May 20, 2016
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