A confession is seen to be very powerful evidence of guilt, which is why false confessions can easily lead to wrongful convictions. People are unwilling to believe that someone would confess to a crime they did not commit.
The result of vast psychological and legal literature points to the idea that false confessions typically result from an array of factors, ranging from inappropriate and abusive police interrogation techniques to mental illness and incapacity. Often, a false confession is the result of a perfect storm of these factors, incriminating a vulnerable suspect for a crime they did not commit.
Despite this knowledge, no rules have been legislated which would create procedures for interviewing adults that would guard against false confessions. The only safeguard against having false confessions used in court by the prosecution is the judge, who has the power to refuse to allow the confession into evidence.
That being said, the Supreme Court of Canada has established a standard that all confessions must meet in order to be admissible in court, called the Confessions Rule – this is the standard of “voluntariness”. The court under this standard will only admit a confession as evidence if: there are no threats or promises, there is no police trickery or oppression, and the accused can be shown to have confessed on their own free will without any influence. The courts, however, have had the opportunity to mandate that all confessions must be videotaped or they would be inadmissible. But they did not take this opportunity, and instead established that while recording the confession was advisable, the confession would still be admissible if it met the standard of voluntariness.