12/05/2021
Police Oracle
Work with offenders on new research into the institutional pressure put on minors to admit criminal guilt
A new article by Rebecca Helm of Exeter University has found that children need protection from being pressured or incentivised into pleading guilty to crimes they have not committed.
Dr Helm, as well as being a Senior Lecturer at Exeter, is a qualified solicitor in England and Wales and Attorney in New York state in the US. Her paper, which is published in the latest edition of the Journal of Law and Society, investigates our legal system which, like many others, actively encourages guilty pleas for reasons of expediency and time and money-savings. In 2019, more than six out of 10 child defendants in the Crown Court (61%) pleaded guilty with 58% pleading guilty at their first hearing; and almost half of child defendants in the youth court (47%) pleaded guilty at their first hearing.
Dr Helm sets out the existing research on guilty pleas which generally suggests that in the current system innocent as well as guilty defendants plead guilty, and that decisions to plead guilty are often not straightforward, but are made as the result of complex considerations and pressures. This complexity is at least partly due to the fact that the system actively incentivises people to self-incriminate through pleading guilty, and to do so as early in the prosecution process as possible. Just as in adult courts, children who plead guilty at the earliest opportunity receive a very substantial (one-third) reduction in any subsequent custodial sentence.
There is very little research on guilty pleas by children in England and Wales and Dr Helm bases her argument of psychological research (mainly conducted in the USA) that suggests that as a result of their immaturity and the fact that their brains are still developing, children are more susceptible to pressures to plead guilty, even when innocent. She has examined “a significant body of research across multiple jurisdictions showing that children have a particular developmental susceptibility to false confession” as well as research that shows children may unadvisedly plead guilty in return for relatively minor sentence reductions.
In a fascinating article, Dr Helm develops a model of guilty plea decision-making which is based on “fuzzy-trace theory”, a psychological theory of memory and decision making that has been utilized in a number of applied contexts, including legal and medical decision making. She utilises this model to identify specific vulnerabilities of child defendants that may lead to decision making that results in wrongful convictions, most importantly when they plead guilty despite being innocent.
Recommendations
Dr Helm concludes that so many children plead guilty inappropriately that the criminal justice system needs to develop a pro-active approach to protect young defendants’ rights. She argues for three main elements of reform:
Firstly, she argues that the incentives offered to children to encourage guilty pleas should be tailored to the child defendant population and based on an understanding of underlying developmental psychology. This is to counteract the research that children are more likely to “trade” a guilty plea for a relatively minor sentence reduction.
Secondly, she argues against “Goodyear” hearings for children appearing in Crown Court; these hearings enable a defendant to request an indication of the maximum likely sentence they will receive if they plead guilty BEFORE entering a plea of guilt.
Finally, the current system gives the maximum sentence reduction for defendants who plead guilty at the earliest possible opportunity. Research on vulnerable defendants has found that this time pressure increases the risk of an individual making a false confession.
This research is intended to kick-start a conversation into this question across the criminal justice system with Dr Helm saying that we need much more research into guilty pleas entered by children, particularly at youth courts where the vast majority of cases are heard. In the meantime, she suggests there may be a role for independent intermediaries with a specialism in communication skills and an understanding of child psychology to facilitate effective communication between a child and their legal representative.