Jennifer Lackey - False Confessions and Evidence Swamping

The Royal Institute of Philosophy London Lecture Series: How Do We Know? The Social Dimension of Knowledge.
In this talk, Jennifer Lackey takes a close look at the role confessions play in the United States criminal justice system. She will show how the phenomenon of testimonial injustice can help explain why confession evidence often swamps all other evidence, even in the face of the prevalence of false confessions.
Jennifer Lackey is the Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University and the Director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program. Most of her research is in the area of social epistemology, with a recent focus on issues involving credibility and false confessions, the epistemology of groups, and testimonial injustice.
This lecture was given on January 17, 2020.