Guilty Until Proven Innocent

In the article False Confessions, they talk about how sleep deprivation is a key component to people falsely accusing themselves in crimes they didn’t commit, this happens in 15-25% of cases. This leads to a lot of innocent people been convicted and either spending a lot of time incarcerated or put to death for crimes they didn’t commit.

The study consisted of 88 students from Michigan State University who completed 3 laboratory sessions. In the first session they gave their basic information and they were given the instructions on how to go about the procedure, specifically the importance of not pressing the Escape Key on the keyboard. The button was located on the top left corner making it pretty hard to press. During the second session (7 days later) where the participants rated their sleepiness and were shown the warning again then half of the participants slept for 8 hours in the lab and others stayed awake. Then they completed another set of procedures and questionnaires. This took place a 3^rd day, after all the testing was complete the participants were asked to sign a statement which accused them of pressing the escape key some signed the form the first time but some took until the second time to sign the statement.

The experimenters found that sleep-deprived participants reported increased sleepiness and an increase in positive and negative effects than the rested participants, meaning that the sleep-deprived participants were more likely to sign the statement then the rested participants.

This study is can greatly affect the general public specifically law enforcement. If they decided to change the way they interrogate suspects in a different setting as well as during a different time of day and not for as many hours, then they would probably less people that would admit to crimes and less people losing years of the lives in jail.