Why you should always "lawyer up"

Read below for police may have forced an innocent man to confess. Remember, there is no upside to cooperation with law enforcement:

For 12 hours, they showed him photos from the bloody crime scene, screamed in his ears, threatened him with the death penalty, told him he failed a lie-detector test and even followed him into the bathroom, until Robert Caulley finally gave them what they wanted.

Told by detectives that if he confessed he could return home to his wife and young son to sort things out, Caulley buckled. On that day in December 1996, he told investigators that he had beaten his parents to death with a baseball bat nearly three years earlier in their Grove City home.

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Caulley said he believed that his "off-the-record" confession -- which was secretly taped -- was his only chance to meet with his wife and 5-year-old son and talk with a lawyer. At one point during the questioning, when Caulley kept insisting on a lawyer, the detectives put him on the phone with one -- an assistant county prosecutor, who urged him to cooperate.

Caulley's lawyers argued to keep his confession from being used as evidence at his trial, saying that it was coerced, but the trial judge allowed it. The appeals court agreed that there was nothing improper about the interrogation, ruling that "ploys to mislead a suspect" are common and Caulley could have walked out at any time.

Prosecutor Misconduct Almost Executes Innocent Man

Unfortunately this type of behavior is far too common and is rarely exposed. The NY Times details this inmates close call with death row. Interestingly, the legal "ethics" committee forbid a lawyer who know about this gross misconduct from discussing it for years:

“As he began to describe the positions of the individuals and the firing of the shots,” Mr. Smith said last month, referring to his client, a prosecutor “reached over and stopped the tape recorder.” According to Mr. Smith’s testimony and a memorandum he prepared soon after the debriefing, the prosecutor, Cathy E. Krinick, said, “Les, do you see we have a problem here?”

The problem was that Mr. Jones’s account did not match the physical evidence. “This isn’t going to do us any good,” Ms. Krinick said, according to Mr. Smith.

For 15 minutes, Mr. Smith said, prosecutors coaxed and coached Mr. Jones to produce testimony against Mr. Atkins that did match the evidence. They flipped over a table and pretended it was a truck. “We used a chair, or something like that, to simulate the open door,” Mr. Smith testified, “because only one of the doors on the truck would open.”

Interrogation Tricks Under Scrutiny After Ruling

Not a moment too soon. The NY Times has a good summary of the case and what Detective McCready did to coerce the confession.

In the case of Mr. Tankleff, who was 17 at the time of his parents’ murders and who quickly recanted his confession, one detective’s ruse had an especially dramatic flair. He faked a phone conversation with a hospital worker that Mr. Tankleff could hear, saying, “No kidding, he came out?” The detective then told Mr. Tankleff that his father had regained consciousness briefly and had identified his son as his attacker. The performance was so convincing that another detective testified that he believed the call was real.

Detectives also told Mr. Tankleff that his hair had been found in his mother’s hands after she was attacked, and that a “humidity test” had been taken in a shower to establish that Mr. Tankleff had used it to wash off his parents’ blood and bodily fluids. The hair was not found, nor was a test conducted on the shower.

One of the great things about the internet is how easy it is to go back to the original articles written at the time to see how perspectives change. Here is one from 1989 in Newsday where Det. McCready brags about how he tricked the 17 year old, whose parents had just been killed, into confessing:

The Innocence Project - Life After Release

Excellent feature in todays New York Times about the difficulties the innocent have adjusting to the real world after release. Once again there is a conspicuous lack of accountability on the part of the police and prosecutors who perpetrated this fraud. We have suggested previously that some of a prosecutors pension be based on keeping the innocent out of jail. Essentially a bit from each paycheck would be held in escrow and released over time. he prosecutor would be funding a reimbursement fund for his mistakes. Here are some interesting stats from the article:

At least 205 men and one woman nationwide have been exonerated through DNA evidence since 1989, including 53 who, like Mr. Deskovic, were convicted of murder.
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More than a quarter of all prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence had falsely confessed or made incriminating statements, according to the Innocence Project, the legal clinic that secured Mr. Deskovic’s release. Like many of those men, he had maintained his innocence since shortly after the confession, proclaiming at his sentencing hearing: “I didn’t do anything.”

Another False Confession Obtained Under Duress

The DNA doesn’t match, the story makes no sense, and another man has already confessed to the crime. Read the entire story here:

Two law professors who study the false-confession phenomenon, Steven Drizin and Richard Leo, claim that police detectives “typically close” an investigation once they obtain any confession, “even if the confession is internally inconsistent, contradicted by external evidence or the result of coercive interrogation.”