George Costanza
A Friendly Liberal
If you honestly think innocent people are never intimidated or threatened into giving a false confession ... well you have a lot to learn.
i'm sure innocent people confess to murder all the time
December 2007, Page 30
The Problem of False Confession in America
By Richard A. Leo
In 1998 two young boys in Chicago – ages seven and eight – were charged with murdering an eleven-year-old girl named Ryan Harris. She had been badly beaten around the head, her underpants had been stuffed into her mouth, and she appeared to have been sexually assaulted. After an unrecorded interrogation, the two boys “confessed” to hitting Harris in the head with a brick (and then stuffing leaves and grass in her nose) in order to steal her bicycle. Largely because of the boys’ ages, the case attracted national media attention. The country was horrified that two prepubescent boys were capable of committing so savage a crime. Although the evidence pointed to an adult sex crime, the police insisted that the two boys were not too young to have done it, and that they knew details that could only be known to the detectives or the perpetrators.
Months later, however, the Illinois State Crime Laboratory discovered semen on Ryan Harris’ underpants – evidence that the crime could not have been committed by suspects as young as seven and eight – and prosecutors dismissed the charges. The collected DNA was later shown to match the DNA of Floyd Durr, an adult already charged with sexually assaulting three other young girls in the same neighborhood. Durr subsequently admitted being present and committing a sex act over Harris’ body.1
The Ryan Harris case is not an isolated one. Nor are false confessions limited to children or teenagers. In recent years, police have elicited a substantial number of demonstrably false confessions from adults.2 Many of these false confessions have led to erroneous prosecutions, and some have led to wrongful convictions and incarceration.3 Some of the wrongfully convicted false confessors have spent many years unjustly incarcerated before being exonerated and released; others remain behind bars.4 A number of exonerated false confessors were convicted of capital crimes and sentenced to death.5 One false confessor, Earl Washington, spent almost ten of his more than seventeen years of imprisonment on Virginia’s death row and came within nine days of being executed before being exonerated in 2001.6 Researchers and activists believe that several other innocent confessors have been executed – Edward Earl Johnson in 1987,7 Barry Lee Fairchild in 1995,8 Leo Jones in 1998,9 and Dobie Gillis Williams in 1999.10
Throughout American history, police-induced false confessions have been among the leading causes of wrongful conviction.11 It is easy to understand how beatings, torture, sleep deprivation, and threats of violence may lead an innocent suspect to falsely confess. Yet with psychological interrogation methods, the idea that an innocent person would confess to a crime he did not commit – particularly to a felony that carries the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence or even the death penalty – is highly counter-intuitive.12
The Problem of False Confession in America
FYI - the author of the linked article, Richard Leo, is a personal friend of mine. He has testified for me in three cases, one of them an extremely difficult murder case (which ended in a not guilty verdict). I atteneded a seminar where he was one of the cheif speakers about three weeks ago.
Richard Leo is truly the guru of false confessions. I congratulate you on locating and citing one of his articles.