There’s a lovely case over at Simple Justice today. According to the news story, it went something like this:
A guy was murdered, and a man named Douglas Warney came forward to police saying he knew something about the victim. Police interrogated him, and he apparently confessed, providing eleven details about the murder that only the killer could have known. He was found guilty at trial and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Nine years later, DNA testing exonerated Warney and implicated another guy who was already in jail for another murder. This other guy confessed and said Warney was not involved. So Warney was released after serving nine years for a crime that he did not commit.
So why did Warney confess? The likely explanation is modern police interrogation methods–particularly the Reid technique–in which the police try to convince their suspect that the evidence against him is overwhelming. If the police don’t actually have an overwhelming case, they simply lie about it, making up forensic evidence, witnesses, and accusations by the suspect’s friends accomplices. If the technique works, the subject becomes convinced that he is doomed, that he has no chance of avoiding a long jail sentence.
Then the police throw him a lifeline: They suggest different reasons why the crime might not be as bad as it appears–perhaps it was self-defense, perhaps somebody put him up to it–and they make it clear that this is going to be the suspect’s last chance to explain what really happened. If he had a good reason for doing what he did, now’s the time to tell it.
What the suspect doesn’t realize is that any explanation he offers for his crime is sure to include a confession to the crime. And once the police have his statement, they’ll just pocket the confession and ignore the rest of the explanation. E.g. “I killed him in self-defense” is an admission to a killing. The prosecutor can indict on that and leave the self-defense angle for the other side to worry about. Besides, since the suspect was unprepared and unfamiliar with the law, his explanation is probably legally useless.
The problem with this technique is that the suspect faces the exact same choice regardless of whether he did the crime or not. If he’s innocent, and the police are lying to him about how good their case is, at the very least, he’s going to think he’s been framed. No matter how wrong it feels to confess to a crime he didn’t commit, once he thinks he’s doomed to be convicted, he’s likely to leap at any way out–any way to mitigate the damage–and inadvertently confess to a crime he had nothing to do with.
This is even more likely when the suspect has memory problems and can’t be entirely sure he didn’t do the crime. After all, the police say they have his prints on the gun, they have two eyewitnesses, and his best friend says he did it. Maybe he did do it. These memory problems could be caused by abuse of drugs or alcohol or–as was the case with Douglas Warney–he could have an IQ of 68 and be suffering from dementia. Really.
I have to admit, it seems plausible that police detectives of good will could, in their zeal to catch a murderer, accidentally pressure an innocent mentally incapacited man like Warney into making a false confession. But…what about those eleven details which only the murderer could know? If Warney wasn’t the murderer and had nothing to do with it, who told him about those secret details?
It has to be the cops.
I could even see how it might have happened unintentionally:
Q: How many times did you stab him?
A: Ten times.
Q: Are you sure it wasn’t a few more than that?
A: Fifteen times?
Q: Good. Moving on…
Detectives get tired. Detectives make mistakes. I could see the detectives doing something like that entirely by accident. Once. But eleven times? That’s just cheating.
This makes me furious. I’ve been on a jury. And if I had heard testimony that a guy confessed to a murder and knew eleven separate details about the crime that only the murderer could have known, I would have considered that very strong evidence of guilt. I probably would have voted to convict. And thus the detectives’ underhanded lies would have made an accomplice to an atrocity.
You know, I can understand why cops lie about Fourth Amendment issues: They’re catching bad guys. Sure, maybe they didn’t really see the gun sticking out from under the passenger seat, or maybe they didn’t really smell drugs wrapped in garbage bags in the trunk, but when they did their search, there was the gun, and there were the drugs. The defendent really did have them, and the cops aren’t about to let him get away on a few legal technicalities. I don’t condone these lies, but I can understand how a cop could justify it to himself.
What boggles my mind, however, is the cops who lie in a way that could frame an innocent man. Don’t they worry about what will happen to him? Don’t they worry that they’re letting the real killer get away with it?
Do they really believe they’re still the good guys?
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