According to the Innocence Project, there could be a multitude of reasons, and that is why they feel all interrogations should be monitored. It has been proven that there are less false confessions or guilty pleas if interrogations are electronically monitored. It goes to show that confessions are not always prompted by internal knowledge or actual guilt, but are sometimes motivated by external influences.
Some false confessions can be explained by the mental state of the confessor. Children, for instance, are easy to manipulate and they do not always completely understand the situation they find themselves in. People with mental disabilities have often confessed because many law enforcement interrogators are not given any special training on questioning suspects with mental disabilities.
Even mentally capable adults sometimes give false confessions due to exhaustion that sets in during lengthy interrogations. At some stage they come to believe that, if they confessed, they will be left alone and can prove their innocence later.
