Steve Drizin

In most police and courtroom dramas, crimes are solved as soon as a character confesses. However, as a new book shows, a confession is sometimes only the beginning of the real story.

Routine police interrogation methods have elicited an outrageously high proportion of false confessions -- coerced confessions given by innocent suspects, especially children, who quickly recant.

I've seen police lie to children in all manner of ways, telling one child that his dead sister's blood was found in his bedroom and a different boy that his father had awakened from a coma and told police the boy was his assailant.