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victims cry
 Posted:
Sun Dec 10, 2006 5:18 pm |
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False Confessions
| Quote: | All interrogations should be videotaped, thereby providing an objective record. This is not only feasible, it has been made law throughout Alaska, Minnesota, and the United Kingdom.
The Innocence Project has encouraged law enforcement officials to adopt the practice of videotaping custodial interrogations as a way of preventing and identifying false confessions. Thomas Sullivan — former U.S. Attorney and Co-Chair of former Illinois Governor Ryan's Death Penalty Commission — surveyed over 200 law enforcement departments that practice videotaping custodial interrogations, to measure their response to the reform. Below is a link to his results, published Summer 2004, which indicate that law enforcement agencies that practice video recording of custodial interrogations overwhelmingly embrace the measure as good law enforcement whose time has come.
Read the report: Police Experiences With Recording Custodial Interrogations
In a disturbing number of DNA exoneration cases, defendants have made incriminating statements or delivered outright confessions. These cases demonstrate that a confession or admission is not always prompted by internal knowledge or guilt, but may be motivated by external influences. Many factors arise from interrogation that may lead to a false confession, including: duress, coercion, intoxication, diminished capacity, ignorance of the law, mental impairment. Fear of violence (threatened or performed) and threats of extreme sentences have also led innocent people to confess to crimes they did not perpetrate. Given the extremely powerful impact a confession has on case outcome, it is incredibly important to understand the origin of the incriminating statement(s). Legislation requiring videotaping of interrogations aims to prevent and identify false confessions. Legislative action that seeks to prevent false confessions reaffirms a commitment to the search for truth and justice in a criminal case.
A false confession to any crime is counterintuitive and self-destructive; therefore, it requires a valid explanation. Some false confessions can be explained by the mental state of the confessor. Confessions obtained from juveniles are often unreliable, as children are easy to manipulate through positive and negative feedback and, because of their age, are not always fully cognizant of the situation. Juveniles in particular may believe that they can "go home" as soon as they admit guilt. Confessions obtained from persons with mental disabilities are often unreliable because being accommodating and agreeable, especially to authority figures, is often a survival method for such persons. Further, many law interrogators are not given any special training on questioning suspects with mental disabilities. An impaired mental state due to mental illness, drugs, or alcohol may also elicit incorrect admissions of guilt.
Even absent those factors, adults also give false confessions due to a variety of factors like the length of interrogation, exhaustion, or a belief that they can be released after confessing and prove their innocence afterward. Though law enforcement must at times employ tactics to extract the truth from uncooperative suspects, police officers, convinced of a suspect's guilt, may occasionally use interrogation tactics so persuasive that an innocent person feels compelled to confess to a crime. In convincing the suspect that the evidence against him is overwhelming, law enforcement may push an innocent suspect to the point where he believes that his fate is sealed with or without a confession. The suspect realizes the injustice inherent in the situation but decides to cooperate, resigned to the notion that a confession will be more beneficial than continuing to claim innocence. The perceived benefits of a false confession may include protection of family members, a more lenient sentence or avoidance of capital punishment, promised deferential treatment by the police or prosecutors, or, in extreme circumstances, avoidance or cessation of physical harm or discomfort. Another inducement to confess may be permission to leave the interrogation room itself, as it is often implied that a suspect is not actually allowed to leave the room until a confession is produced.
The most effective way to prevent erroneous convictions based on false confessions is to require video recordings of both the entire custodial interrogation and the confession itself. Taping the confession without taping the hours of interrogation preceding it is inadequate. The video may contain or lack certain details that undermine or enhance confidence in the confession. Such a record will improve the credibility and reliability of confessions, while protecting the rights of innocent suspects. Without an objective record of the custodial interrogation, it is difficult to gauge the reliability of the confession, e.g. whether or not the details of the crime were inadvertently communicated to a suspect.
For police officers, videotaping interrogations can lead to the identification of false confessions and an improvement of interrogation methods. For the small number of police officers who may use illegal tactics to secure a confession, videotaping could dissuade them from these methods and identify officers who continue to taint the integrity of law enforcement.
Videotaping custodial interrogations is not only feasible, it is being used in an increasing number of jurisdictions as a way to protect the innocent and ensure the conviction of the guilty:
– The Supreme Courts of Alaska and Minnesota have declared that, under their state constitutions, defendants are entitled as a matter of due process to have their custodial interrogations recorded.
– In Spring 2003, the Illinois General Assembly overwhelmingly passed landmark legislation requiring the electronic recording of police interrogations of suspects in homicide cases, making it the first state to legislate the practice.
– As a matter of internal departmental policy, police departments in places like Broward County (Florida) and Santa Clara County (California) require their officers to videotape custodial interrogations in certain circumstances. |
http://www.innocenceproject.com/causes/falseconfessions.php
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| victims cry
Posted:
Sun Dec 10, 2006 5:21 pm |
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http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/PTO-20030430-000002.html
The False Confession
Why an innocent person will confess guilt. A recent review of one decade's worth of murder cases in a single Illinois county found 247 instances in which the defendants' self-incriminating statements were thrown out by the court or found by a jury to be insufficiently convincing for conviction.
Alexandra Perina
In criminal trials, a defendant's admission of guilt can trump even the proverbial smoking gun. A confession is the ideal civic solution: The perpetrator takes responsibility, and the public sleeps soundly. But it's not always the end of the story. In December, the convictions of five men who confessed to the 1989 rape and beating of a jogger in New York's Central Park were reversed after an imprisoned rapist took sole responsibility for the assault. And in January, Governor George Ryan commuted the sentences of Illinois' 150 death-row inmates to life in prison, due in part to concern about the role of false confessions in securing wrongful convictions.
Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the number of false confessions nationwide, a recent review of one decade's worth of murder cases in a single Illinois county found 247 instances in which the defendants' self-incriminating statements were thrown out by the court or found by a jury to be insufficiently convincing for conviction. (The Chicago Tribune conducted the investigation.)
Suspects with low IQs are particularly vulnerable to the pressures of police interrogation: They are less likely to understand the charges against them and the consequences of professing guilt. One of the suspects in the Central Park attack had an IQ of 87; another was aged 16 with a second-grade reading level.
But intelligence is by no means the decisive factor. Suspects with compliant or suggestible personalities and anxiety disorders may be hard-pressed to withstand an interrogation, according to Gisli Gudjonsson, Ph.D., a professor of forensic psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. Gudjonsson's suggestibility scale is used by courts around the world to evaluate self-incriminating statements. But he cautions against seeking only personality-driven explanations for confessions: "A drug addict may not be particularly suggestible but may have a strong desire to get back out on the street."
Self-incriminating statements are often the result of a kind of cost-benefit analysis. "False confession is an escape hatch. It becomes rational under the circumstances," says Saul Kassin, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts. The most common explanation given after the fact is that suspects "just wanted to go home."
This often indicates an inability to appreciate the consequences of a confession, a situation that police cultivate by communicating that a confession will be rewarded with lenient sentencing. Police may also offer mitigating factors--the crime was unintentional; the suspect was provoked.
The circumstances of interrogation are crucial. "Everybody has a breaking point. Nobody confesses falsely in an hour," says Kassin. The suspects in the Central Park case each spent between 14 and 30 hours under interrogation.
The use of false evidence (including statements such as, "Your fingerprints are on the gun") in interrogation is implicated in almost every false-confession case, but American courts have upheld the practice. This is not to say that police intentionally ensnare the innocent. Kassin notes that detectives are trained to believe they can make accurate judgments about a suspect's truthfulness, though "there's a level of overconfidence in the initial judgment, and they begin the interrogation with a presumption of guilt." Gudjonsson agrees: "Police officers need to know that they can elicit a false confession even if they don't intend to."
A particularly vulnerable defendant may begin to doubt his or her own memory when presented with false evidence. Children and the mentally handicapped, or people whose recollections are clouded by drugs or alcohol, are particularly susceptible. Interrogators may suggest that a suspect has repressed the memory. They then offer false evidence to fill in the gaps. After intense interrogation, these suspects become sufficiently convinced of their own guilt and accept an "internalized" false confession.
False confessions are generated in cell blocks as well as interrogation rooms, a fact not lost on detectives under fire for the Central Park jogger case. One month after those convictions were vacated, a chagrined New York City Police Department issued its own revisionist theory: The inmate who claims he alone attacked the jogger may have falsely confessed due to threats from other inmates or the desire to transfer to another prison.
Publication: Psychology Today Magazine
Publication Date: April 30, 2003
Last Reviewed: 4 Jan 2005
(Document ID: 2727)
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| victims cry
Posted:
Sun Dec 10, 2006 5:24 pm |
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Riley Fox case could spur changes to dna testing laws
Riley Fox case could spur change to DNA testing lawsJohn Garcia
June 27, 2005 - The Riley Fox murder case may bring changes to DNA testing laws in Illinois. Kevin Fox was arrested for the murder of his 3-year-old daughter, Riley. His family paid for DNA tests that led to his release two weeks ago. ing laws in Illinois. Kevin Fox was arrested for the murder of his 3-year-old daughter, Riley. His family paid for DNA tests that led to his release two weeks ago.
Riley Fox's father Kevin was in jail facing murder charges and a possible death penalty. His family maintained all along that he was innocent, but it took nearly a year before they could get DNA tests that backed up their claim. Now, they are hoping this proposed new law will help keep that from happening to another family.
DNA evidence was available in the murder of Riley Fox last June, but it required sophisticated testing, and the Fox family ultimately had to pay for the testing. That's why the results that freed Kevin Fox from jail after eight months were not immediately available. That's also why the Fox family is firmly behind a proposed law that would provide money for immediate DNA testing in child murder cases.
"We wouldn't be where we're at today. Kevin wouldn't have been wrongfully accused, and we'd have a better chance, likely, to have the killer in custody," said Chad Fox, Kevin's brother.
State lawmakers and some state's attorneys are proposing the law. They say the backlog of cases in the state crime lab prevents results from being returned quickly, and the state lab is also unable to find results in some cases where private labs have more advanced technology available. Lawmakers say child homicide cases should be a top priority.
"Child murders do affect us in a very special way, so we concluded we should ask for this. It is not a huge amount of money," said Dick Devine, Cook County state's attorney.
The bill provides a $100,000 state fund to pay for testing. A single DNA sample costs an average of $1,500 to test.
The Fox family and their attorney, Kathleen Zellner, have filed suit against the Will County investigators who falsely accused Kevin Fox of his daughter's murder. According to Zellner, the investigators had no physical evidence implicating Fox, and they failed to push for the DNA testing that ultimately produced a profile of the killer. Zellner proposed calling the bill Riley's law.
"To save someone's life and to catch the killer, and to prevent civil litigation, and to prevent hundreds of hours of wasted man-hours that could be spent on other crimes, it's just a drop in the bucket. Who would not do that?" said Kathleen Zellner, Fox attorney.
The proposed law would make private DNA testing available in all child murder cases, but officials say it would not help in every case. In 2003, there were 39 murders of children under the age of 16 in the state.
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=News&id=3198956
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| victims cry
Posted:
Sun Dec 10, 2006 5:32 pm |
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Steve Huff on the Riley Fox 'confession' and case
| Quote: | The Bizarre Railroading of Kevin Fox
I have been accused at least once of being the weblogging equivalent of the lovely Nancy Grace, of CNN’s Headline News. Grace is a Macon, Georgia native who had a strikingly successful career as a prosecutor here in Georgia before moving on to legal punditry for Court TV and CNN.
Grace is famously pro-prosecution, no matter what, and I must confess, she even gets on my nerves on occasion, in spite of the fact I usually tend to agree with her assessments of certain high-profile crimes in the news. I still find her gratingly adversarial while interviewing others at times, and sometimes her cynicism about whatever case she’s discussing on her show borders on a kind of paranoid ranting. For a more emotionally neutral approach to reporting this stuff, give me Greta Van Susteren any day.
I bring up Nancy Grace and the accusation of trying to convict a suspect in a high-profile crime in the news before they go to trial because of the article I read today about Kevin Fox. In this entry about other possible victims of Joseph Edward Duncan III, the man accused of killing, Brenda, Slade, and Dylan Groene, Brenda Groene’s boyfriend Mark McKenzie, as well as raping both Dylan and Shasta Groene before Shasta was rescued after being spotted with Duncan in Coeur d’Alene at the beginning of July, 2005, I mentioned the fact that Kevin Fox was originally accused of raping and then murdering his 3-year-old daughter Riley on June 6, 2004. Kevin Fox allegedly confessed, and he was to ultimately spend 7 months behind bars before DNA testing exonerated the man. In the blog entry where I mentioned Riley I had to wonder, since Mr. Fox was cleared, where Joseph Duncan was, after all, on June 6, 2004, no matter what he wrote in his blog.
Kevin Fox’s ordeal is one of the best examples I can think of to demonstrate the fact that I am fully aware gross injustices do occur. What happened to the man is perhaps the worst kind of father’s nightmare — first your child disappears, is found dead, murdered, then somehow you end up being the accused party, looking out from behind bars.
Yet, I admit — I still wondered at why Kevin Fox would confess, if he did not commit this remarkably sick crime. Was it a bizarrely suicidal impulse on his part, because he was the parent at home when Riley was abducted? He felt so terrible, so guilty in that way that many parents of murdered or victimized children must feel, even if they rationally could have done nothing to protect the kid, that he just said he did it and sat behind bars waiting for conviction?
I’m still a little puzzled about that, still have trouble seeing how a man could be forced into saying he did something so awful if he didn’t, but the following article published today in the Chicago Sun-Times helped me move closer into seeing inside the story of what may have happened to Kevin Fox. The article is titled; Suit: State’s attorney tricked Riley’s dad into confessing, and it outlines a story worthy of Franz Kafka’s nightmares if true in any respect. From the article, by Sun-Times staff reporter Dan Rozek:
The revised federal lawsuit contends (Former Will County, Illinois State’s Attorney Jeff) Tomczak — locked in a tight political race — worked in the final days before the Nov. 2, 2004 election with nine Will County sheriff’s department officers to pry a confession from Kevin Fox.
“Defendant Tomczak’s quest for power led him to abuse the power he already possessed,'’ Fox contends in his lawsuit.
Following 141/2 hours of questioning, Fox on Oct. 27, 2004, gave investigators a 20-minute videotaped statement in which he said he accidentally killed Riley. Fox contends he was coerced into making the statement after being promised he wouldn’t face first-degree murder charges…
Rozek goes on to explain that Tomczak allegedly fooled Kevin Fox into saying that Riley’s death was an accident, Fox apparently thinking that the worst in store for him then might be an involuntary manslaughter charge. Instead, Fox was charged with first-degree murder and Tomczak later publicly stated he would be seeking the death penalty. Fortunately for Kevin Fox, Republican Tomczak lost his bid for re-election to Democrat James Glasgow. Glasgow ordered DNA testing after he took office, and it was this testing that cleared Fox of suspicion. Tomczak, you see, while still in office prior to Glasgow’s swearing-in, allegedly ordered investigators to halt any testing of Fox’s DNA.
Now Fox is suing, as anyone would. During his interrogation he was threatened with prison rape, detectives telling him he’d end up a punk if he didn’t cooperate. Fox’s son Tyler, age 6, was allegedly so traumatized by a “forensic interview” around the same time that he pulled his sweatshirt hood over his head and cried for his Mom and Dad. Further details like these can be found in this Chicago Tribune article about Tomczak’s being added to the suit; Tomczak added to federal lawsuit.
I couldn’t help but feel that if all this happened to Kevin Fox, then a lawsuit isn’t enough. If Jeff Tomczak truly coerced Fox into confessing, for the reasons alleged in the suit, then there should be disbarment and jail time in his future. Because if Kevin Fox was really railroaded as part of an effort to maintain a politician’s hold on power, that politician and the police did more than emotionally brutalize the Fox family. If the lawsuit is founded, and Kevin Fox was simply, in his mind, trying to get out of the situation alive, even while struggling with his own grief over Riley’s death, then not only did Tomczak and cops working Kevin Fox for that fake confession nearly destroy the life of an already egregiously wounded family, they permitted the real killer to sit back comfortably and watch the news secure in the knowledge for 7 months, at least, that no one was looking for him any more.
And now, isn’t the trail hopelessly cold? If DNA was enough to conclusively eliminate Kevin Fox as a suspect in his daughter’s murder, then there may still be someone out there capable of stealthily entering the Fox home, kidnapping, raping, and cruelly leaving Riley in the water to die from drowning.
I am interested, perhaps even gratified to know Mr. Fox is taking the step of the suit — when anyone in the government at any level errs so egregiously, abuses their power, they must be called to account. But I am also wondering why that’s the only news about Riley’s murder I have read lately.
If Kevin Fox is cleared, then isn’t anyone still hunting for a predator capable of the act described above? I’ve described in the entry I linked of my own earlier one idea, and at the moment, it is still a reach, predicated on the idea that if Joseph Edward Duncan is guilty of the murders in Idaho, he could have committed similar crimes in the past. I could be wrong.
If I am wrong about any Duncan connection, and Kevin Fox is innocent… then how soon will former District Attorney Jeff Tomczak owe another northern Illinois family an apology? How soon will another little girl disappear in the night there, and that DNA that didn’t match Kevin Fox show up again? While Tomczak and the police allegedly delayed testing that DNA, convinced they had their killer, someone else was out there, relaxing as each day passed. I’d contend that predators capable of such acts don’t just stop.
I would hate to be in that part of Illinois right now, knowing Kevin Fox has been cleared, and wondering whose child will vanish next, possibly still free because a politician was more concerned with preserving his hold on power than arresting the right man.
At the site that was formerly kevinfoxisinnocent.com, linked earlier in this entry, they’ve overhauled everything and changed the name to JusticeForRiley.com. Perhaps the statement on the site’s main page from Kevin and Melissa Fox, Riley’s mother, says it better than I could:
We have redone our website to focus on our number one goal - the capture of Riley’s killer. We do not want another family to go through the horrible nightmare that has been our life for the last 13 months(…)
(…)We trust that Mr. (James) Glasgow will shift his focus from our families, who have been cleared by DNA tests, polygraphs and alibis, to catching the person who’s (sic) genetic profile has been obtained by one of the best DNA labs in this country. We are willing to trust again for Riley’s sake and for all the children that may be at risk from this killer… |
http://huffcrimeblog.com/?p=228
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| tulsad
Posted:
Fri Jan 19, 2007 10:43 pm |
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| Tardanderten41 wrote: | hot! 
regards, Tardanderten41 |
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