False confessions

From a judicial point of view, confessions - both in and out of court - are considered to be circumstantial evidence, since past experience has shown that a large part of all confessions are false. False confessions may be made in order to... 

Under such anti-law circumstances, the most that any defendant could do was to try to minimize his role in the crime and to deflect at least some of the attack by incriminating others. The incrimination of third parties is a sure way to make friends of the prosecution and the Court, which latter is always willing to make concessions in return for confessions and cooperation in the discovery of further putative criminals - a court technique that will induce false confessions if the crime per se is not open to debate. 

Witnesses or defendants who denied the crime itself or their involvement in it were persecuted and punished all more severely for their stubborn lies, since obviously they were not willing to admit their satanic deeds, to repent and to renounce their satanic practices. In time, every accused realized that admitting guilt was his only hope for leniency from the Court, so that false confessions were made even in cases where torture was no longer practiced. The incrimination of third parties was a device commonly used in attempts to cooperate with the Court in order to obtain a more lenient sentence or even freedom. 

False confessions are also studied in forensic psychology. Many crimes are solved based on confessions however, there is documentation that people give false confessions. For instance, there have been cases where people have confessed, with intricate detail, to murders, but then the victim was found alive, or there is no evidence of that person at the scene. Forensic psychologists also study why someone would confess to a crime they did not commit. 

You should confess that you have lent credence too readily to false and spurious books that you have thought too much of yourselves, and entered this castle to which no one invited you. If perhaps the majority of you simply wanted to slip in here in order to live more grandly and pleasurably, you have egged one another on to such outrage and effrontery that you have well deserved to suffer condign punishment. 

Of course all this does not necessarily mean that the thousands of eyewitness reports and confessions regarding the Holocaust are false. But our justice system knows from centuries of experience that eyewitness testimony is the least valuable evidence, being the most unreliable kind. Therefore it... 

The rhetoric of modern psychiatry is displayed here in its finest form. Alexander and Selesnick omit any reference to the tortures used to extract confessions from alleged witches. Indeed, they go so far as to compare the confessions of accused witches with the false claims to being criminals advanced by persons accused of nothing and laboring only under the influence of their own personal needs and stories printed in newspapers. The immorality of... 

---