False confessions and thoughts on interrogation

NPR had a story on this morning about Richard Lapointe, a brain-damaged man who confessed to a gruesome rape and murder in 1989 ("Brain-Damaged Man Wins New Trial in Two-Decades-Old Killing").

The story cited an interesting fact that the Innocence Project turned up in analyzing the 300 cases of DNA-based exoneration** in the United States:

When the Innocence Project reviewed those cases, it found that in 1 out of 4, a defendant later proven innocent had at one point given a self-incriminating...