With pressure bearing down on him, Jesse caved in, pinning the murder on his brother. He supported his claims with vivid testimony about the crime. Stephen then confessed, describing in great detail how he had clubbed the man to death and then buried him. His ensuing tale about covering his tracks corroborated the circumstantial evidence: he had dug up Colvin’s remains, reburied them under a stable that later burned, and then tossed some of the charred bones in a river. He stashed the rest of the bones along with other objects in a hole under a stump. The jury quickly convicted both brothers and sentenced them to hang.

In a lucky twist of fate, the brothers’ lawyer managed to locate Russell Colvin, who was alive and well on a farm in New Jersey. The brothers’ lives were spared.

Why had the Boorns confessed to a crime they didn’t commit? Their confessions, it appears, had been cobbled together by their accusers—their neighbors. During the seven years since Colvin disappeared, Manchester villagers must have pieced together a murder story from remnants of bone and clothing and suspicious behavior by the Boorns. Collectively scripting the murder—ghostwriting it, in a sense—the villagers then pressured the Boorns to claim that the tale was theirs, confessing to a murder that never happened.

Scholars investigating historical records from other legal cases have much to learn from more recent events. Today, DNA evidence can exonerate suspects who make false confessions. Moreover, strict guidelines have been developed to regulate interrogations, in an earnest attempt to keep the justice system from running amok, as it did so miserably in the Boorns’ case. Even so, while guidelines do not permit physical torture of suspected criminals, they do allow psychological pressure. It is permissible, for instance, for interrogators to lie to suspects to pressure them to confess. Interrogation methods are designed to make suspects feel cornered, to feel that they have no alternative but to spill their story. Confessions, interrogation experts say, come from “cornered minds.” But how, you might ask, do suspects with cornered minds invent false confessions that are persuasive? How do they know what to say?

They listen to their interrogators, much as the Boorns listened to their neighbors. The interrogators know the general details of the crime and can imagine how the suspect did the deed. Their questions compose a script the cornered suspect echoes, piece by piece, until a coherent story emerges.

Consider a tape-recorded interrogation of a murder suspect in Florida in 1992. After insisting to seven interrogators for nine hours that he was innocent, the suspect gave two contradictory confessions. He pieced together his story from exchanges such as the following:

Interrogator: “O.K., think of [the victim] laying there on the floor. What—what is underneath him? Is there tile, carpet, or something else? Think about it. Close your eyes. I’ve got mine closed. There was something under him. I remember it.”

Suspect: “[I] wasn’t paying attention. I was scared.”

Interrogator: “Was it a blanket underneath that you remember or a…tarpaulin or something like that?”

Can you guess the right answer? The suspect’s cornered mind could, and he spent more than four years in jail awaiting trial on murder charges until his contradictory confessions—scripted by interrogators—were ruled inadmissible by an appellate court.

If interrogation in post-Miranda police stations produces cornered minds, imagine how torture raises the stakes for the accused to say what interrogators want to hear. A Human Rights Watch official recently commented, “Law enforcement professionals in this country understand that torture is a wonderful technique for getting confessions from innocent people and a lousy technique for getting the truth out of guilty people.”

So what does all this mean to historians? Certainly that scholars should approach archival materials with the skepticism of a well-informed juror in a criminal case. Historical documents from minds cornered by torture and intimidation are of special significance. Torture was vividly documented in witchcraft interrogations. Church officials believed that the truth of confessions roughly correlated with the severity of tortures. They carefully recorded victims’ testimony as torture escalated from beatings to burnings, thumbscrews, the rack, and worse. Attentive inquisitors noted the victims’ anguish, interpreting it as evidence that torture was working. After repeated torture, an accused witch in 16th-century Germany proclaimed that “she [wished] to God she could rip open her heart, so that [the inquisitors] could see it, she knows that she is innocent.” Her statement clearly called for more torture, her questioners concluded. Renewed punishment led her to doubt her innocence and admit to her inquisitors that “she could not believe anything, she did not know whether God was with her or not. She had done nothing, she just could not believe in Christ…she was damned, damned, damned.” This woman’s plea eloquently expresses the desperation of a cornered mind that twisted a true confession of innocence into a false confession of guilt under the influence of torture.

Torture was such a normal feature of slavery that it is seldom explicitly mentioned in the surviving documents of slave conspiracies. During slavery’s 250-year history in the United States, hundreds of slaves were executed for conspiring to rise up against their owners. Typically, the evidence against them came from confessions by one or more slave suspects who had been beaten until they decided to tell their interrogators what they wanted to hear. Such confessions were crucial in the prosecution of the largest and most ambitious slave conspiracy in American history, the Denmark Vesey plot in Charleston, S.C., in the summer of 1822. Confessions by a handful of cooperative slave witnesses—all of them cornered by the court’s threat of execution—sent 35 black men to the gallows, the deadliest civilian judicial proceeding in American history. One witness, a slave by the name of Monday Gell, spent 16 days in jail before admitting his role and identifying dozens of fellow conspirators. The court commuted his death sentence, imposing exile in exchange for his testimony.

Instead of taking those confessions at face value, a skeptical investigator today must assess how the interrogators might have scripted a story like the one told by the Boorn brothers—persuasive, but not true. In the case of Denmark Vesey and his so-called co-conspirators, the courts literally left a paper trail of their script. Shortly after the completion of more than 40 trials in June and July of 1822, the Charleston Court of Magistrates compiled all the testimonies into one record: An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes. In it the court summarized the case against Vesey and his cohorts. The problem, though, is that the so-called Official Report contains thousands of contradictions with the actual court transcript. While the report describes Vesey cross-examining the witnesses in his own trial, the court transcript indicates that the witnesses’ testimony took place before Vesey was in custody! The report is a fabrication that simply advocates the position of the prosecution. Historians have tended to use the Official Report rather than the actual court transcripts, unintentionally colluding with the entrapment of alleged slave insurrectionists. Thus in the miscarriage of justice, a historical script not only supported the execution of 35 defendants but also held historians captive for more than 170 years.

New conclusions about a cold case such as the Vesey plot have implications beyond guilt or innocence. Certainly this is not to say that confessions by alleged criminals are never accurate. And vindication of Vesey and 34 other defendants does not lead to the conclusion that slaves never resisted their oppressors. Finally, is Vesey no less of a hero? He might not have led an insurrection against slave masters, but he did insist on his innocence until the very end, despite the incriminating “evidence” of confessions from supposed conspirators.

Coerced confessions must be recognized for what they are: the creations of those seeking them. Cornered minds become scripted minds. One shudders to think of the masses of innocent people who have succumbed to such a fate—and the degree to which such horror stories persist to this day. From a human rights perspective, for those long gone, there is little that can be done. But perhaps a more skeptical reading of historical confessions can at least offer a small measure of justice for those who were compelled to say what their executioners wanted to hear.

Michael P. Johnson is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. He is the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington for the academic year 2004–5 and is conducting research for a book with the working title Conjuring Insurrection.