The United States Constitution grants Americans the “right to a speedy and public trial,” with an assumption that the trial is impartial and fair. Recent data suggest a nontrivial number of cases fail to meet this standard. During interrogations, suspects can be presented with false evidence, long interrogations can undermine a suspect’s cognitive ability, and minimization tactics often mislead suspects into believing justice is on their side. These dynamics facilitate false confessions and wrongful convictions, which are common in the United States and globally. We argue the current approaches to understand and predict innocence in legal cases are insufficient and interdisciplinary research is required to prevent innocent people from going to jail. In this review, we cover research on wrongful convictions and false confessions, ending with The Truth Project (www.truth-project.io), a new global framework to connect scholars and facilitate research into behavioral patterns of innocence.
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