Police Interrogations and False Confessions

G. Daniel Lassiter, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Ohio University and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. He received his doctoral degree in 984 from the University of Virginia and held a visiting position at the University of Florida before arriving at Ohio University in 987.

For more than 25 years, he has conducted research on perceptual mechanisms in social judgment and decision making. During this same period, he developed one of the first theoretically driven programs of scholarship aimed at examining the effect of presentation format on how mock jurors evaluate confession evidence, which earned him the 2 Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Public Policy from the American Psychological Association.

His research on the camera perspective bias in videotaped confessions has influenced model legislation for a videotaping requirement developed by the Innocence Project and is noted prominently in the recent policy paper on interrogations and confessions endorsed by the American Psychology amp ndash Law Society Executive Committee.

Dr. Lassiter's research has been supported by funds from the National Science Foundation and has resulted in numerous articles in major professional publications. He is the editor of Interrogations, Confessions, and Entrapment (2 4) and is presently a consulting editor for the journals Law and Human Behavior, Legal and Criminological Psychology, and the Open Access Journal of Forensic Psychology.

Christian A. Meissner, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology and criminal justice at the University of Texas at El Paso. He holds a doctoral degree in cognitive and behavioral science from Florida State University (2 ) and conducts empirical studies on the psychological processes underlying investigative interviews, including issues surrounding eyewitness recall and identification, deception detection, and interrogations and confessions.

He has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense. He has served on advisory panels for the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and he currently serves on the editorial boards of several prominent academic journals, including Applied Cognitive Psychology, Law and Human Behavior, and Legal and Criminological Psychology.

He has also consulted on issues of eyewitness misidentification and false confession in numerous state and federal courts in the United States.