False confessions play a big role in wrongful convictions. One photographer's lens examines how they happen 

Research shows that innocent people can make false confessions when they reach a breaking point during interrogations, often assuming the justice system will work and eventually prove their innocence.

Robin Dahlberg, a former lawyer, said most people in the U.S. think it would never happen to them.

"Unless you know the psychology of false confessions, it's really difficult to understand why someone would have done that," she said.

Steven Paneccasio

Dahlberg recently published "Breaking Point," a new book of photography that explores wrongful convictions and the interrogation techniques that often lead to false confessions.

About 30% of people exonerated through DNA evidence made a false confession.

Eddie Lowery was one of them.

"I was so emotionally drained from going through all this interrogation after two days, that I just wanted out of the interrogation room. So I was willing to tell them anything they wanted to hear," Lowery said.

Robin Dahlberg

In 1982, Lowery, then 22, was convicted of a sexual assault he didn't commit. He was exonerated through DNA evidence 21 years later — after enduring years in prison.

During his interrogation, officers repeatedly lied to him and brought up traumatic family history.

In Dahlberg's book, a still from his interrogation video shows him slumped over the table.

"I didn't know what else to do but just put my head down and just kind of give up," Lowery said.

Advocates said Lowery's case shows the impact of harsh interrogation techniques. University of San Diego law professor Justin Brooks co-founded the California Innocence Project in 1999. The organization investigates and works to exonerate people who have been wrongly convicted.

"In a lot of cases, people confess because they're angry and they just want to get out of the room and they stop caring about what they're saying. So they're just sort of, 'OK, I did it. Whatever, I did it.' And they're thinking it's all going to be cleared up later on. And that's the problem with innocence cases — innocent people don't believe they're going to be convicted," Brooks said.

He said interrogators often practice the Reid Method, which he said focuses on completing a narrative that officers already believe, rather than finding the truth.

"That method is not focused on getting the truth. It's focused on getting the suspect to agree to the narrative the police officer already has in their head and that's a very different thing than finding the truth," Brooks said. "That is literally how police officers have been trained for decades how to conduct these investigations. And so, if it's not about getting the truth, if that's not the ultimate goal, then we're going to have wrongful convictions.”

Steven Paneccasio

While advocates stress that a false confession could happen to anyone, Dahlberg said there are risk factors that increase the likelihood of false confessions in interrogations, including youth, neurodivergence or, simply, a personality type that respects authority.

Astonishingly, another of those risk factors is innocence.

"People who are innocent, when they're being interrogated actually talk more. Because they feel that if they just keep talking, if they just keep explaining themselves, then someone will finally believe what they're saying," Dahlberg said. "I'm sure we've all been in this situation where we try to get ourselves out of, you know, where we've said something that we didn't mean to say and we try to get ourselves out of it by just explaining ourselves more and more and what we actually end up doing is digging the hole deeper and deeper."

Advocates said that these confessions can be impossible to unravel. And when juries hear there was a confession, they generally convict.

"Research shows that a false confession — or a confession — really affects every single step of the criminal proceeding immediately after the confession is given," Dahlberg said.

Robin Dahlberg

“Breaking Point” is striking and sparse, with handwritten memories, transcripts, newspaper clippings and powerful black-and-white photography.

Dahlberg photographed and interviewed six people who had been wrongfully convicted and later exonerated, including Lowery. Other exonerees in the book are Jeffrey Deskovic, Vanessa Gatheres, Byron Halsey, Christopher Ochoa and Raymond Santana.

For one series, they revisited their interrogations by dressing and acting as their interrogators. The viewer then becomes the exoneree.

"For me being on the other side of the camera, I was really struck by how terrifying having someone yell at you at close distance was — it took my breath away," Dahlberg said. She said it made her think more critically about how she might respond if she were in their situation.

Steven Paneccasio

Dahlberg wanted to bring readers into the experience through the perspectives of the exonerees themselves.

"And through portraiture and text try to give you an idea of what they experienced while they were there," she said. "I think that there's a universality about art and photography that makes it more accessible to a wider audience. Nobody's going to read a legal brief besides the judge, you know."

Because the public is, by design, excluded from the police interrogation room, Dahlberg wanted her work to remind us that wrongful conviction and false confessions could happen to anyone.

Robin Dahlberg

"I think part of the book is designed to show that people like Eddie just happened to be on the wrong street on the wrong day at the wrong time and gets picked up by the cops," Dahlberg said. "And that's why it's so important that the criminal justice system be a functional system that produces justice."

Raising awareness is also why exonerees like Lowery keep sharing their stories.

"I just want to use what happened to me in a positive way, in an encouraging way — fill people with the information they need so that this doesn't happen to anybody else," Lowery said. "This has taught me a lot about survival and not giving up."