Identification and Review of the Case
The State of Florida v Butler case inspired the production of a documentary titled Murder on a Sunday Morning. The producers of the documentary followed the attorneys assigned to the defendant in a case involving a fifteen-year old, Brenton Butler. According to the facts of the case, the accused had been charged with murder in the first degree as well as robbery following the incidents that had led to the death of Mary Ann Stephens before the eyes of her husband ( Cheikh, 2017 ). The deceased had been shot her in the head while she and her husband strolled down a street in Jacksonville, Florida. The police then presented Butler before her husband who then witnessed that he had shot at his wife and made away with a purse that turned out to be having only $1200 ( Cheikh, 2017 ).
The prosecution raised the charges and pushed for the accused to be prosecuted because the single eye witnesses in the case had witnessed that Butler was guilty of the account and that he had confessed to the murder to detectives during the investigation. However, the accused’s attorneys managed to prove to the court that their client was innocent and that the prosecution had failed in their investigative capacities to identify the real killer who was later identified as one Juan Curtis several months after Butler had been acquitted of the charges brought against him. In its ruling, the Supreme Court found that neither of the charges raised against Butler were confirmed during the trial and resulted in the introduction of voice recording during police interrogations, especially of minors and other changes within the police department.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
The chosen case study relates to the topic of forensic psychology for the fact that it concerns the importance of police investigative procedures. As the defense attorneys managed to describe, the police had been inadequate in their interrogations, which included failing to capture the required levels of evidence that would be enough to identify Butler as the criminal behind the death of Mrs. Stephens. In specificity, the prosecution turned out to have forced the accused into confessing to the murder of the deceased and had recorded a false statement that would suit the needs of the plaintiff ( Cheikh, 2017 ). It was mentioned that the police, having failed to determine the correct killer, had resorted to Butler since the plaintiff had indicated that the killer was a Black young man. Therefore, in trying to justify that the killer was arrested, the evidence put forward by the investigation team and the prosecution had been made such that they suited the statement that had been recorded. The police did not follow the correct procedures of arrest and interrogation. For instance, they took Butler away for questioning without notifying his parents despite the law being clear on such a requirement for minors. The police also coerced the accused into conceding that he had shot the deceased for her purse, using physical force in doing so ( Cheikh, 2017 ). The investigating officer who wrote the statement also did so to suit his mission, writing it for the accused despite the fact that Butler was able to read and write at fifteen years. Therefore, the process of investigating the facts of the case was manipulated, which is one of the issues concerning forensic investigations.
Identification and Review of Three Empirical Research Articles
The issue of false evidence and its implications has been studied widely in literature. For instance, Costanzo, Shaked‐Schroer, & Vinson (2010) studied the beliefs of jurors of the police investigations and false confessions. In their work, the investigators acknowledged the fact that a lot of research had been completed concerning the false confessions and interrogations of the police, but found that only so much had been done in the field concerning the juror perceptions. Therefore, the objective of their study was to determine the probable false confession rates for different crimes, the capacity to determine true from falsified confessions, the beliefs of the jurors concerning false confessions, beliefs concerning permissible tactics of interrogations as well as the perceptions of expert testimony on police investigations (Costanzo, Shaked‐Schroer, & Vinson, 2010) . In this study, the investigators identified that police investigators were more likely to be believed by the jury more than unprofessional ones. The research findings suggests that accused persons are more likely to be executed in the event that police officers give evidence against them since the courts have a tendency of trusting the role that they play.
The strength of the findings is the fact the hypothesis was tested using a large sample of 400 respondents who had the potential to work as jury in most of the states in the US (Costanzo, Shaked‐Schroer, & Vinson, 2010). Therefore, the results avoided the possibilities of bias since they were informed from a large sample of respondents. The article’s connection to the case of Butler and the murder case is also strong since the facts indicate that the police considered their believability by the court in the drafting of evidence against the accused. In this line of thought, therefore, it would be imaginable that the investigating officers drafted the police statement and used the eyewitness narrative since they considered that they would be believed in court and that the defense attorneys would have a difficult time changing the perception of the court of the credibility of their evidence.
Similarly, Perillo & Kassin (2011) researched the tactics of interrogation that drive people into giving false evidence. They hypothesized that the stronger the tactic is the more likely it is to induce people into giving false evidence (Perillo & Kassin, 2011). In their research, they tested different investigative tactics and found that bluff tactic is more likely to convince people into giving falsified evidence compared to the rest of the tactics. According to the study, the authors indicate that the bluff tactic entails the pretense by an investigating officer that they hold critical information concerning a suspect that would have critical implications on the nature of a case (Perillo & Kassin, 2011). This way, the detective is more likely to affect the capacity of the suspect to give the correct information for the case for the fear of the repercussions of their confession. The fact that study used tested tools to determine study the hypothesis points at the credibility of the findings posited . In relation to the facts of the case study, the study and its findings are strongly applicable to each other. Specifically, at one time in the documentary, the defense attorney notes that the police went to the accused claiming that they knew what he had done, forcing him into confessing to the murder at one time (Perillo & Kassin, 2011). In application, the bluff tactic had caused Butler into thinking that he would be in trouble if he did not agree to the plot by the police. Of an additional relevance to the case study is the fact that the study found that African Americans were more likely to succumb to the bluff tactic compared to the rest of the races, which is also mentioned in the documentary. In the narration, the defense attorney indicated that Butler had been implicated primarily because he was Black.
Even while they researched a different topic, Gudjonsson et al. (2006)’s study focused on an element with an indirect relationship with the cases study. In specificity, the researchers investigated the relationship between histories of false evidence with the perceived parenting methods. The researchers hypothesized that a lack of connection and warm relationships between parents and children caused them to develop tendencies of lying, especially to the police during interrogations (Gudjonsson et al., 2006). They tested the hypothesis using a sample of 840 respondents from Iceland, and found that false confessions were related to antisocial behavior. The relevance of the findings to the case study relates to the manner in which the prosecutor questioned the accused’s mother. For instance, during the interrogations in court, the prosecutor’s questions were designed such that they would capture the fact that the accused’s mother was not as close to her son as she claimed to have reported. Such a lack of closeness, as the prosecutor had anticipated, would not have allowed Butler to tell his mother of his absence from home at the time the crime occurred. For such reasons, the investigation team had manipulated their testimony to fit the period that the defense team had put up in court to argue for the innocence of their client. They argued that Butler’s mother might had lost contact with her son from 7:30 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. when he had left to fill a job application at blockbuster film in Jacksonville.
Summary about Research and Applied Forensic Psychology in Interrogations and Confessions
The three articles inform the applied forensics area in three ways. They first indicate that the methods of investigation that the police use have implications on the rates of false confession. Specifically, it is found that the harder the methods of interrogation, the more likely the victims are likely to give in to confessing crimes they did not commit. For such reasons, forensic scientists must always strive to understand the methods of interrogations that the police use for the fact that it might result in wrongful prosecutions and executions. The second issue that the researches inform concerns the role of parenting styles in fact finding for criminal cases. Specifically, the forensic scientists must learn that criminals from detached families have a higher tendency of giving false confessions compared to those from integrated ones. Therefore, it is the role of the investigators to understand the family backgrounds of suspects before linking them to any criminal activities. The last implication is the fact that the courts tend to believe forensic scientists with the highest credentials and work experience. It means, therefore, that the more credible the investigator is, the more likely their evidence is admissible in courts. In such a case, the forensic scientists must always strive to remain as professional as possible in their handling of suspects and the information that they obtain from them. In cases were the experts miss the procedures set by the law concerning investigations, the credibility of their evidence presented in court becomes doubtful as it did for the case of prosecution team in the case study of Butler and the State of Florida.
References
Cheikh, W. (2017). Murder on A Sunday Morning - Documentary 2001 . Retrieved 14 January 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apus12x-lQ8
Costanzo, M., Shaked‐Schroer, N., & Vinson, K. (2010). Juror beliefs about police interrogations, false confessions, and expert testimony. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies , 7 (2), 231-247.
Gudjonsson, G. H., Sigurdsson, J. F., Finnbogadottir, H., & Smari, U. J. (2006). The relationship between false confessions and perceptions of parental rearing practices. Scandinavian journal of psychology , 47 (5), 361-368.
Perillo, J. T., & Kassin, S. M. (2011). Inside interrogation: The lie, the bluff, and false confessions. Law and Human Behavior , 35 (4), 327-337.
