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Abstract:
This amicus curiae brief was filed in support of the appeal by Lionel Tate of his conviction of felony murder. Lionel, at age 12, crushed his six year old cousin while imitating World Wrestling Federation moves. Tried as an adult, he was sentenced by a Broward County Florida criminal court to life in prison without parole. The amicus brief argues that it was both bad law and bad public policy to charge a 12 year old with murder utilizing the underlying felony of "aggravated child abuse." Issues discussed include the child's capacity to understand his acts, doctrines of merger, and the history and interpretation of child abuse laws.

Abstract:
Confessions are among the most powerful forms of evidence introduced in a court of law, even when they are contradicted by other case evidence and contain significant errors. Police, prosecutors, judges, jurors, and the media all tend to view confessions as self-authenticating and see them as dispositive evidence of guilt. This article uses the Central Park Jogger case as a primary example of how defendants are vulnerable to erroneous convictions based almost entirely on their false confessions.

This article points out the failures of the legal tests governing admissibility of confessions, examining voluntariness jurisprudence and corroboration rules. The article also analyzes the social science research of the past twenty years and the nature and scope of the problem of false confessions in the post-DNA era. The authors argue that recording the entire custodial interrogation of suspects should be a prerequisite of any new legal test inquiring into the reliability of a confession. The article also urges policy makers to require judges to hold pretrial reliability hearings separate from pretrial voluntariness hearings and proposes a new standard for judges to apply when assessing whether a confession is reliable.

Criminal procedure, false confessions, DNA testing, interrogations, law enforcement, electronic recording, voluntariness jurisprudence, corroboration rules, Central Park Jogger case

Abstract:
In recent years, numerous individuals who confessed to and were convicted of serious felony crimes have been released from prison - some after many years of incarceration - and declared factually innocent. Often, these individuals are freed as a result of DNA tests that were not possible at the time of arrest, prosecution, and conviction. DNA testing has also exonerated numerous individuals who confessed to serious crimes before their cases went to trial. In this article, we analyze 125 recent cases of proven interrogation-induced false confessions (i.e., cases in which indisputably innocent individuals confessed to crimes they did not commit) and how these cases were treated by officials in the criminal justice system.

This article has three goals. First, we provide and analyze basic demographic, legal, and case-specific descriptive data from these 125 cases. This is significant because this is the largest cohort of interrogation-induced false confession cases ever identified and studied in the research literature.

Second, we analyze the role that (false) confession evidence played in these cases and how the defendants in these cases were treated by the criminal justice system. In particular, this article focuses on how criminal justice officials and triers-of-fact respond to confession evidence, whether it biases their evaluations and overwhelms other evidence (particularly evidence of innocence), and how likely false confessions are to lead to the wrongful arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of the innocent. Analysis of the aforementioned questions leads to the conclusion that the problem of interrogation-induced false confession in the American criminal justice system is far more significant than previously supposed. Furthermore, the problem of interrogation-induced false confessions has profound implications for the study of miscarriages of justice as well as the proper administration of justice.

Third, and finally, this article suggests that several promising policy reforms, particularly mandatory electronic recording of police interrogations, will minimize the number of false confessions and thereby inject a much needed dose of justice into the American criminal justice system.

Criminal procedure, false confessions, DNA testing, law enforcement, interrogations, taping, recording, wrongful arrest, wrongful conviction

Abstract:
Recent DNA exonerations have shed light on the problem that people sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit. Drawing on police practices, laws concerning the admissibility of confession evidence, core principles of psychology, and forensic studies involving multiple methodologies, this White Paper summarizes what is known about police-induced confessions. In this review, we identify suspect characteristics (e.g., adolescence; intellectual disability; mental illness; and certain personality traits), interrogation tactics (e.g., excessive interrogation time; presentations of false evidence; and minimization), and the phenomenology of innocence (e.g., the tendency to waive Miranda rights) that influence confessions as well as their effects on judges and juries. This article concludes with a strong recommendation for the mandatory electronic recording of interrogations and considers other possibilities for the reform of interrogation practices and the protection of vulnerable suspect populations.

police interviews, interrogations, false confessions