The reality is that people give false confessions all the time. What they say can have little to do with the truth, even if they are trying to be honest. Coercion, or the torture that Hasenbosch was subject to, changes the outcome in meaningful ways. Let’s look more closely at the problems with confessions when they are obtained under duress.
What Hasenbosch’s Confession Looked Like
In 1724, the rules surrounding judicial proceedings while at sea differed greatly from what they are today. A confession was a mandatory part of a conviction. Thus, the ship’s officers were incentivized to obtain a confession by any means necessary; otherwise, they couldn’t take action against Leendert and the sailor with whom he allegedly had a relationship.
First, officers bound candles between Leendert’s fingers and lit them. As the candles burned down, the heat from the flame and the searing wax scorched his hands, but Leendert refused to confess. So the crew needed to think of something more convincing. They bound his head with canvas (the thick material used for sails) and dumped seawater into it. This collected the water in a funnel around Leendert’s head, and his only option was to drink it to keep himself from drowning.
He drank as much as he could, but eventually, Leendert cracked. He said he would talk, providing the confession the officers needed to hear as justification to leave him on Ascension Island, where he died some months later.
The Problem With Coerced Confessions
Leendert’s confession did not come from a desire to share the truth; in fact, most sources agree that his confession was not truthful at all. If the confession was necessary for conviction, then why did Leendert give the officers something that would only cause him more harm? The unreliability of coerced confessions comes down to biology just as much as psychology.
What happens in the brain
Underneath the logical, conscious decisions and attitudes of your brain, your body is working subconsciously. In the context of confessions, your amygdala is active alongside the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis; in other words, your body is assessing threats to see whether you are in danger. And if a confession is being tortured out of you, you probably are.
As a result, the body floods with cortisol (the stress hormone) in preparation for fight or flight. However, in a confession scenario, you likely have no means of doing either. So the cycle intensifies, with the body providing even more adrenaline in case that could help you escape. Combined with the mental strain of futility, lack of compassion by your captors, fear of the unknown, and more, an entire cascade of physiological and psychological distress surges through you on top of any torture you may experience.
Why would a person confess to something they didn’t do?
Given the physical, emotional, and psychological responses to coercion, it may be easier to see why a person might say they did something, even if they didn’t. Studies show that words spoken under extreme duress are among the least reliable a person can produce, because a brain under sufficient pressure will say anything to make the pain or suffering stop.
Even if no one is hurting you, relentless interrogation tactics can prompt a false confession. One landmark study, for instance, showed that 69% of people could be induced to confess if presented with false evidence and intense interpersonal pressure. Among those who confessed, some people even developed feelings of guilt over their actions and invented new memories to convince themselves they had done the thing of which they were accused, even though they were innocent.
This is likely the case with Leendert. When given the choice between drowning in seawater slowly while his hands burned beneath boiling candle wax or saying a few words to make it stop, the choice might have seemed clear.
Other real-world examples
As disconcerting as Leendert’s treatment was, it is important to remember that confession coercion is not a problem confined to history. Many famous, modern cases also relied on false confessions. Among them, few are as notorious as the Central Park Five.
In 1989, five teenagers were arrested for an assault and rape in Central Park. All five ended up providing detailed “confessions” for a crime they did not commit. However, it wasn’t until 2002 that Matias Reyes, a convicted serial killer, was tied to the crime. During the interim, these five innocent people suffered the consequences of their coerced confessions.
They were told they could go home if they confessed. Many were deceived into believing that their friends had already implicated them, so what was the use in continuing to withhold a confession? Interrogations went on for hours or even overnight. In these situations, each of the five eventually confessed.
The Innocence Project, a non-profit organization that focuses on helping innocent people fight their convictions, says that around 25% of their overturned convictions relate to cases in which DNA evidence disproves a coerced confession. We can never know exactly what happened with Leendert and whether his confession truly reflected his actions. But we can be sure that the information gathered, and the means by which it was gathered, could have significantly impacted what Leendert said, which led to his death.
