Why they Confess

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 533, 10 December 1928, Page 13

Why they Confess

Murderers Sometimes Prompted by Vanity “MINDS SOAKED IN FANTASY” The first session ot the British Royal Commission on Police Powers elicited the curious tact that criminals when arrested often make voluntary confessions of their crimes to the police —the instance before the commission being that of murder. The fact provoked the comment of the chairman, Lord Lee, that “it seems a little odd there should be so many criminals anxious to hang themselves,” Writes F. Aveling, reader in psychology at the London University, in the “Daily Mail.” Why do so many murderers act in this “odd” way? The answer given to the commission was that by such voluntary confessions the prisoner hoped to secure a mitigation of tile charge from murder, say, to manslaughter. But is this always so? Or are there reasons other than the calculating cunning of the criminal which drive him to confess when driven to bay? | What of the confessions of those who give themselves up to the police with never hue nor cry against them? * Notoriety More Than Life There are at least three other explanations. The really criminal mind is a peculiar thing, not always entirely abnormal but usually abnormal in kinks, emphasising almost out of recognition some one or other of the perfectly normal tendencies of every one of us. In the first place, there is egoism, a sentiment never absent from the human make-up. In his own secret mind the murderer is generally a yery fine fellow indeed. He has asserted himself against the social order even to the taking of life; and in his inner being he is proud of it. His confession in this case is a vainglorious boast, an act of supreme selfassertion, raising him above the common herd. Notoriety is more to him than life, and he risks his life to attain it. There are people who have “confessed” to murders they never committed in order to satisfy their insatiable egoism. But the criminal mind, mote than any other except that of the insane, is also soaked in fantasy. It moves j in a land of unreal dreams, grotesque i distortions of the day-dreaming of the I ordinary man and woman. | These dreams are far more real for jit than the real world Itself. The I sense of proportion is altogether lack- ] ing; the real and the dream are in- | extricably woven together. Driven By Egoism ; The fantasy-confession Is a tissue | of truth and falsehood, of fact and dream elaboration. These are the con- | fessions often supposed to be in mitigation of the capital charge. Driven by egoism or by the intolerable secret to confess, such criminals distort and invent as they relate the spurious history*of their crime. Lastly—and as a rule this enters into all confessions as a fundamental impulse-—there is the cathartic longing. LTnconscious though it may be, there is the drive to purge the soul, to “cleanse the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart” by communicating it to others, ; and so, by a process of magic, to de- | stroy it. This instinctive drive is well-nigh universal in the human race. What , wonder that the criminal, in a burst of ’ fantastic egoism, and mock humility, should lay his conscience bare —as all do—to authority: even if the authority jhe chooses to confess to weaves the strands of the rope that will hang ; him: