Most of us believe we would never confess to a crime we didn’t commit. But by our best estimates, there are upwards of 5,000 innocent people locked up in our prison system who falsely confessed. What is happening inside interrogation rooms to break the will of so many innocent people?

To answer this question, we’re speaking to world’s foremost experts in the psychology of false confessions and police interrogation methods, as well as the innocent people, like Amanda, who’ve found themselves in the unimaginable position of confessing to something they didn’t do. And to begin, we’re going back to the seed out of which modern interrogations grew, the brutal third degree treatment that stretches back to the Inquisition.

This is part 1 of False Confessions, a six-part miniseries.