True Stories of False Confessions

In most police and courtroom dramas, crimes are solved as soon as a character confesses. However, as a new book edited by Rob Warden and Steve Drizin of the Center on Wrongful Convictions shows, a confession is sometimes only the beginning of the real story.

In True Stories of False Confessions, Warden and Drizin have collected 39 actual cases, written by authors like John Grisham and Alex Kotlowitz, in which people said they were responsible for crimes they did not commit.

Some of these stories are what you might expect. It's not hard to imagine, for example, a person falsely confessing to a crime because police tortured or threatened him or her with death.

Take the case of Chris Ochoa. His interrogators said they were going to charge him with the death penalty if he refused to implicate himself and his friend, Richard Danzinger, in a murder and rape they did not commit. Faced with what felt like an impossible choice, Ochoa confessed and was sentenced with Danzinger to life in prison. Almost 12 years later, the two were exonerated by DNA evidence.

The fact that law enforcement had to threaten Ochoa's life to make him confess likely fits most people's preconceptions of the kinds of circumstances that lead to false confessions. That's probably why courts prohibit and throw out confessions that are obtained by such coercive tactics.

But how do we understand what turns out to be the more common, counter-intuitive scenario -- when police use standard interrogation techniques, but still end up eliciting a false confession?

This is what happened to Beverly Monroe, a single, middle-aged mother of three. In 1992, Monroe discovered her boyfriend's body at his home. He was on his couch with a bullet in his forehead, fired from his revolver that was found beside him. All of the evidence pointed to a suicide, but police investigator Dave Riley was certain that Monroe had shot her boyfriend.

Riley wanted to talk to Monroe. She agreed to cooperate and made the mistake of not immediately requesting a lawyer. Over the course of several interrogations, Riley accused Monroe of being involved in her boyfriend's death. Monroe insisted he was wrong, but the interrogations slowly eroded the confidence she had in her own innocence.

Through a combination of lies and manipulation, Riley convinced Monroe into believing she had played a role in her boyfriend's death, but it was so traumatic that she had erased it from her memory. Ultimately, Monroe signed a statement that affirmed Riley's theory, even though she was miles away from her boyfriend's house when he died. Later Monroe tried to recant her statement, but it didn't matter. The prosecution used her words to convict her of murder. Monroe spent the next 11 years in prison until she was finally exonerated in 2003.

When Senior U.S. District Court Judge Richard L. Williams reviewed Monroe's case and threw out her conviction, he called the police interviews "deceitful and manipulative" -- but as readers of True Stories of False Confessions will find, these are common interrogation techniques used by law enforcement agents across the country.

Through the stories they have compiled, Warden and Drizin show that our criminal justice interrogation system is broken.

At the end of their book, Warden and Drizin include a series of specific reforms that they believe will help prevent false confessions, including electronically recording all interrogations, particularly of juvenile suspects and witnesses who are more likely to give false confessions than adults.

But just as important as any particular policy reform is the need to change the mindset of ordinary citizens, who may be selected as jury members to decide the next false confession case.

Despite what we see on television or even what our intuition may tell us, "a confession is just a piece of evidence like any other evidence," said Drizin in a recent interview. "It's only as valuable as the other evidence that corroborates it. View it with suspicion. That's what we hope to happen here. Because the system breaks down when there's a confession, and it shouldn't."

To learn more about false confessions, listen to Rob Warden and Steven Drizin talk about True Stories of False Confessions on the podcast Innocence Speaks.

Visit the website for True Stories of False Confessions. Buy the book from Amazon. All royalties will go to the Center on Wrongful Convictions.

Follow John Maki on Twitter: www.twitter.com/innocencespeaks

Comments

[mamalisa38]

It should be mandatory that all interrogations are recorded. In this day and age it's a simple thing to do. This is also why we shouldn't have the death penalty.

Also, it shouldn't be so hard to exonerate once innocence has been established. There have been many cases where the innocent have been told that it's too late.

[bnewmiller]

When someone is interrogated by authorities, the social context is one of lop-sided power. The authorities hold all the cards. They control everything from lighting and temperature to the constructed reality that can drive the person being interrogated to make choices that from the outside seem illogical.

I learned a long time ago, when I underwent interrogation as a part of the survival training given to Air Force pilots that skilled interrogators can get someone to say whatever is wanted. It doesn't take torture, just some psychological finesse. The irony is that it is easier to get someone to lie in what they believe to be their self-interest at the time than it is to extract the truth from them.

We know that in scientific research--­especially in social science research--it's essential to run double-blind studies. That's because the expectations of investigators will otherwise drive the results. Why should we be surprised that police interrogations, where interrogators often hold preliminary hunches or "theories," produce statements that support expectations? A peer-reviewed journal would never publish research gained through such methods, but our justice system routinely treats such "evidence" as unassailable.

[John Maki - Huffpost Blogger]

This is a very important point. It shows that we already know how to fix some of the flaws in our criminal interrogation system. I think the bigger problem is not how do we fix these problems--but why haven't we done so already?.

[rafael esparza]

This is a great start to fixing an overall problem. It goes to the old addage that "No one in jail is guilty, they're just found guilty." People are quick to assume that just because you get a trial that it means you got a fair trial. When cases are based on tainted evidence the facts become distorted and the innocent get convicted. We need to overhaul the entire legal system from the bottom to the top, the human factor will always be present and lets not forget that. As long as people are doing the work and investigating the crimes let us be aware that their is always a chance that mistakes may have been made and corners may have been cut.

[John Maki - Huffpost Blogger]

Thanks for reading this post and your comment. I think you're absolutely right when you say that in any criminal prosecution there is "always a chance that mistakes may have been made and corners may have been cut." This is not to villainize law enforcement--it's just to say they are subject to the flaws that all human beings are subject to. We need a criminal interrogation system that recognizes that.