God's Jury: Exploring Inquisitions, then and now

The word "Inquisition" harkens back to medieval Europe - Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Catholic Church. But in Cullen Murphy's frightening account, that repressive past was only prologue: The self-propagating bureaucracies of the modern world contain the seeds of inquisitions potentially far vaster and more destructive than anything wrought by the Catholic Church. 

Murphy seamlessly traces the 700-year history of successive Catholic Inquisitions to expose their underlying mechanisms, and highlight the fundamental similarities between then and now. The "enhanced interrogation" practiced at Guantanamo is not so different from the Roman rigoros esamine (rigorous examination), he explains. Indeed, modern interrogation methods as outlined in a U.S. Army manual eerily parallel to the sophisticated techniques first outlined in an inquisition manual from the 1300s.

Inquisition waterboarding

Murphy, himself a Catholic, encourages us to broaden our historical lens to see that inquisitions need not necessarily be religious. They can occur any time members of a dominant group - whether religious, political, corporate or national - appoint themselves "God’s jury," believing that they alone are privy to the true and right path. The "inquisitorial impulse" springs directly from moral certainty. Think about the inquisitions over the last century alone, just in the United States: The Palmer Raids (an early Red Scare led by the young J. Edgar Hoover), The Japanese internment, Cointelpro, the Patriot Act. The McCarthy Era alone was more far-reaching than any church inquisition, he argues.

But inquisitions require certain tangible assets, and it is these that the modern world possesses in abundance:  

• A bureaucratic machinery: Bureaucracies are self-perpetuating and expansionistic. They require no evil conspiracy at the helm. Take the Transportation Security Administration, whose methods since 9/11 have grown ever more "invasive, mindless, and routine": A single "credible tip" can get one's name added to the 440,000 on a secret terrorism watch list; but people are not allowed to find out if their names are on that official list. Shades of the inquisition? Repressive regimes are, at base, record-keeping regimes.

• Surveillance: As far back as 1796, philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte noted that "the chief principle of a well-regulated police state" was the ability to identify its citizens and keep track of their activities and whereabouts. Murphy shows how the modern surveillance state has expanded to new heights in the wake of 9/11, especially in the United States and in England. As a British surveillance leader justifies it, "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear." The game of surveillance, says Murphy, ratchets forever upward, so that what was heretofore unimaginable is constantly becoming the new normal. 

• Censorship: Just as the Vatican has its catalogues of banned books (which Murphy spent time examining), the Internet has its "choke points" that can be manipulated to deny the public access to information.  Less obvious but no less sinister are today's "mobious strips of the like-minded," creating an "epistemic closure" in which people are able to avoid exposure to information that might challenge their assumed realities.

Whereas both the targets of an inquisition and the motives of the inquisitors can shift with time and place, these tangible underpinnings - proof of identity, efficient record-keeping, a network of informers, surveillance, denunciations, interrogations - remain constant. And they are all ubiquitous in the modern world. 

 

The history lessons Murphy is able to impart in God's Jury owe in part to the Vatican's decision to open its archives (although only up to 1939) to outside scrutiny, an unprecedented boon to scholars. Murphy is a fluid writer, and his descriptions of the archives and their contents  contain so many riveting nuggets that the book's pages fairly turn themselves. 

Forensic psychologists may be especially interested in his description of interrogations and false confessions, so parallel in many ways to what we witness today in style, if not in content. Armed with a manual on witchcraft, Mallens Maleficarum (which Murphy describes as a cross between Monty Python and Mein Kampf), inquisitors sallied far and wide in search of purported witches, whom they coerced through now-familiar techniques of shaping to admit to such things as having sex with the devil. 

God's Jury is unsettling. But Murphy does offer a ray of hope. Just as the inquisitions of yester-year were extinguished by the Enlightenment ("the intellectual equivalent of habitat destruction"),  Murphy maintains that there is a remedy for contemporary inquisitions. He does not believe they can be legislated away, although more power to those who are valiantly trying to place legal limits on repression. Rather, he believes that "the most effective ally" against inquisitionism is the "seventh virtue" of humility. Inquisitions can only occur, he argues, when those in power insist with absolute certainty that they hold the one and only absolute truth, and that everyone else is wrong. 

If you found this review worthwhile, I would greatly appreciate your taking just a moment to go to my Amazon review (click HERE), and click on the "YES" button at the bottom (this review was helpful). This will help boost the review's ranking. Thanks in advance.  

Of related interest: NPR's "The inquisition: A model for modern interrogators," which includes a downloadable podcast and an excerpt from God's Jury

Jury Expert: Timely focus on false confessions

"Why on earth would anyone, anywhere, ever confess to a serious crime they did not commit? Especially something like murder? Seriously? Mock jurors find this hard to believe." In the latest issue of the Jury Expert, two trial consultants present the research on why people falsely confess and the cascade of errors that follow a false confession.

The release of the documentary The Central Park Five makes Douglas Keene and Rita Handrich's overview, "Only the Guilty Would Confess to Crimes": Understanding the Mystery of False Confessions, especially timely. The consultants provide a concise summary of current research findings and references, making it an excellent resource for criminal attorneys, investigators, judges, law enforcement officials, students of law and public policy and, of course, forensic professionals. It is followed by commentaries from widely renowned false confession expert Saul Kassin and three others, including your blogger.

My essay, "Disputed confessions: The many hats of the expert witness," may be of special interest to this blog's readers, as it details the role of the expert witness in cases involving disputed confessions. I discuss the distinctions between "pure" academic research and clinical assessment, and the role of the forensic expert in evaluating both psychological vulnerabilities that might contribute to an unreliable confession and the separate issue of a suspect's comprehension of the mandatory Miranda rights waiver.

In an accompanying feature in the November/December issue, jury consultant Diane Wiley of the National Jury Project provides a supplemental jury questionnaire covering the issues attorneys need to address in a false confessions case.

And there's even more on the confessions topic in the new issue, hot off the press today: Rita Handrich reviews the 2010 volume, Police Interrogations and False Confessions: Current Research, Practice, and Policy Recommendations, edited by well-known scholars Daniel Lassiter and Christian Meissner.

The main feature (with accompanying essays) is HERE; my essay is HERE, and the entire current issue and back issues of the always-excellent Jury Expert can be accessed HERE. For you tweeters, the Jury Expert's Twitter feed is HERE.

The taint of a false confession

Ripple effects bias parties, contaminate "independent" evidence 

Michael Crowe, age 14, falsely confessing to murdering his sister

With the recent tidal wave of scholarly research into false confessions, informed forensic psychologists are by now tuned in to the phenomenon. We know, for example, that they played a role in one out of four DNA exoneration cases. We are aware of their compelling nature, and can cite examples such as the Central Park Jogger case in which they produced profound miscarriages of justice.

But let's take it one step further. What if, once police elicit a false confession from a suspect, it contaminates everything and everyone in touches -- from the prosecutor, the judge, and even the suspect's own attorney all the way to the fingerprint identification and even, perhaps, the DNA match?

That is the troubling thesis raised by Saul Kassin, a pioneer in the psychological study of false confessions, in an article in the current issue of the American Psychologist.

  

"Corroboration inflation"

Research shows us that such a contaminating effect is plausible. For example:

• Fingerprint experts who were told the suspect had confessed were more likely to change their opinion and make an incorrect match, as compared with experts who were told the suspect was already in custody at the time of the crime. (1)

• Polygraph examiners were significantly more likely to opine that an inconclusive chart showed deception when they were told the suspect had confessed. (2)

Bizarre case of multiple false confessions and prosecutions

Such findings may extend to other forensic science that requires subjective judgments, Kassin argues, including comparative analyses of ballistics, hair and fiber, shoeprints, tire tracks, handwriting and even DNA. Although CSI-style TV shows portray such evidence as infallible, a 2009 study by the National Academy of Sciences found widespread errors and bias in the collection and analysis of evidence.

That's not to mention egregious cases of intentional fraud in forensic laboratories that pop up with alarming regularity, such as a case in Boston, Massachusetts currently garnering headlines. There, a lab worker with allegedly bogus credentials as a chemist intentionally fabricated positive drug test results. Over a 9-year period, Annie Dookhan tested an estimated 60,000 drug samples confiscated from about 34,000 criminal defendants. Dookhan reportedly admitted writing reports listing samples as positive for illicit drugs even though she had never tested them; sometimes, "if a sample tested negative, she would take known cocaine from another sample and add it to the negative sample to make it test positive for cocaine," according to the Huffington Post's account. Dookhan has been arrested and the lab is temporarily shuttered.

Kassin points to an archival study conducted by he and two colleagues which found that, in DNA exoneration cases, false confessions were often accompanied by other errors, including improper forensic science, mistaken eyewitness identifications and/or the testimony of dishonest informants. Importantly, the confession preceded the other case errors in two-thirds of cases, suggesting it may have had a corrupting influence.

Such findings suggest that the legal system's longstanding assumption that independent sources of evidence provide confirmation of a suspect’s guilt may be wrong. Rather, Kassin writes, "confessions can spawn other incriminating evidence, creating an illusion of corroboration":

Amanda Knox, wrongly convicted in Italy

"Supported by 100-plus years of basic psychology and the research reviewed herein, confession-induced corroboration inflation challenges a core premise in law. Both pretrial corroboration requirements and a harmless error analysis on appeal rest on the assumption that the corroborating evidence on record is nonredundant and independent of the confession. It now appears that this assumption is often incorrect, that the other evidence may be tainted by confession, and that the appearances of corroboration at pretrial and the sufficiency of evidence on appeal may be more illusory than real."

"Hollywood productions"

Especially pernicious is the frequent situation in which police -- either intentionally or inadvertently -- feed an innocent suspect information that only a guilty party should know. Taking on the aura of a carefully scripted movie production with the confession as the central plot device, the confession is carefully drawn out of the suspect over hours and even days until in its final version it includes vivid details and plausible motivations.

Such an account proves virtually impossible for a judge or a jury to discount. The scripted confession thus becomes the be-all, end-all of the case, contaminating the minds of all who are exposed to it:

• POLICE close the investigation, deem the case solved, and overlook exculpatory information, even when (as Richard Leo and his colleagues have shown) the confession is internally inconsistent or contradicted by independent evidence.

• PROSECUTORS stubbornly cling to false confession cases, refusing to admit the possibility of their falsity even when DNA testing unequivocally excludes the confessor. (The New York Times Magazine has more on this phenomenon, describing -- in an article titled "The prosecution's case against DNA" -- the improbable arguments manufactured by prosecutors to explain away negative DNA findings.)

• Perhaps most dangerously, even DEFENSE ATTORNEYS succumb to the allure. Individuals who falsely confess are much more likely to be pressured into accepting a guilty plea, which bars future appeals. In an archival study conducted by Kassin and a colleague of 273 DNA exoneration cases, those based on false confessions were three times as likely to involve bad lawyering.

Matias Reyes, the actual rapist
in the Central Park Five jogger
wrongful conviction case

"Taken together," Kassin concludes, "research suggests that judges, juries, and others are doomed to believe the false confessions of innocent people not only because the phenomenon strongly violates common sense but because of corroboration inflation -- a tendency for confessions to produce an illusion of support from other evidence."

All of this suggests that it is essential for courts to allow the testimony of forensic experts who can explain the mechanisms of false confessions, including both what types of police practices are more likely to generate them, and what types of individual vulnerabilities make a person especially prone to cave in under such pressure.

More broadly, this line of analysis suggests the need for changes in police practices, for example an end to the routine practice of lying to suspects about incriminating evidence, and greater government oversight and regulation of police interrogations. Moreover, safeguards on the analysis of supposedly independent evidence, such as evidence technicians being blind to a suspect's confession status, must be implemented in order to ensure that corroborating evidence truly is independent.

The article is: "Why confessions trump innocence." Members of the American Psychological Association may download it for free as part of their member benefits; others may request a copy from the author (HERE).

Related blog posts:

• Police interrogations: AP-LS issues landmark white paper (March 14, 2010)

• Clueless'science' (guest essay by Jennifer L. Mnookin, Feb. 19, 2009)

• Historical review of false confessions (Nov. 8, 2010)

• Damning reconstruction of notorious false confession case of Central Park Five (March 29, 2012)

• Canada: How false confessions occur (Nov. 27, 2007)

• New study on background factors in false confessions (Aug. 25, 2007)

• Guest report: Interrogations and Confessions Conference, El Paso, Texas (Oct. 4, 2007)

For a complete list of my many other posts on the topic of confessions and interrogations, click HERE.

References:

(1)   Dror, I. E., and Charlton, D. (2006). Why experts make errors. Journal of Forensic Identification, 56, 600–616.

(2)   Elaad, E., Ginton, A., and Ben-Shakhar, G. (1994). The effects of prior expectations and outcome knowledge on polygraph examiners' decisions. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 7, 279–292.

Hat tip: Tim Derning

Groundbreaking research: One out of every 10 rape convictions wrong?

As a young man, Michael Jones pleaded guilty to back-to-back attempted molestations of two girl strangers. However, he adamantly maintained his innocence while in prison and on parole. He said his lawyer had coerced him into pleading guilty by threatening him with life in prison if he went to trial. Michael was one of a handful of Black people in a rural white community; both of the little girls were white. He was identified when police brought him to the station and showed him to the girls. There was no lineup procedure with foils; he was the only choice the girls were given. On the basis of his two convictions, government evaluators diagnosed Michael with pedophilia and recommended civil commitment.

As a teenager, Paul Smith tried to molest a younger boy. He was arrested at the scene and confessed. He disputed only one point in the victim’s statement: that he had threatened the younger boy with a gun. Police searched his home and found no gun. Pre-conviction polygraph testing indicated he was being truthful when he denied having a gun. Over the ensuing years, however, clinicians in sex offender treatment programs hammered at him to admit that he had used a gun. Government evaluators said Paul’s “denial” and “minimization” of his gun use influenced their recommendation for civil commitment.

In cases such as these, I am consistently struck by the naïveté of clinicians and forensic evaluators alike, who accept police reports and especially victim accounts as the gospel truth. From my former career as a criminal investigator, I can attest to the fact that even impartial observers with no conscious motivation to distort are never 100 percent accurate in describing events they have witnessed. As Daniel Schachter so clearly articulates in Seven Sins of Memory, distortion is the nature of the human animal. It is even more likely to occur in situations involving high levels of stress, fear and emotionality.

So I was happy to see that the issue of false convictions for sex offenses is getting some much-needed and long-overdue attention. Or, let me qualify that: Happy about the empirical research, but less than thrilled with a theoretical article on the psychological dynamics underlying false accusations. Let me take those up one at a time.

Dredging old cases for DNA matches

The most methodologically rigorous study to date, released in June, suggests that somewhere between 8 and 18 percent of men convicted of sexual assault may be innocent. The federally funded research project randomly sampled convictions in Virginia between 1973 and 1987, before DNA testing was widely available, and compared preserved physical evidence with the DNA profiles of convicted men.

After poring through more than half a million cases, researchers found 422 sexual assault cases in which DNA evidence was preserved. In 8 percent (33) of those cases, the DNA evidence was exculpatory and supported exoneration. Because many of the DNA comparisons were inconclusive, this amounted to 18 percent of the cases in which it was possible to make a definitive determination one way or the other based on DNA analysis. (The data and the analyses are complex and not without flaws, so I recommend reading the study itself before relying on these numbers.) Noted the researchers:

"Even our most conservative estimate suggests that 8 percent (or more) of sexual assault convictions in a 15-year period may have been wrongful. That means hundreds, if not more than a thousand, convicted offenders may have been wrongfully convicted. That also means hundreds (if not more) victims have not received the just result, as previously believed. Therefore, whether the true rate of potential wrongful conviction is 8 percent or 15 percent in sexual assaults in Virginia between 1973 and 1987 is not as important as the finding that these results require a strong and coordinated policy response."

Bennett Barbour. Photo credit: 

Joe Mahoney, Times-Dispatch

Unfortunately, the researchers ran out of money before they could do more exhaustive analyses of the cases in which innocence was suggested. In the project’s wake, the government is battling with false confession activists who want access to the data, reports the Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch. Police and prosecutors want to restrict access; exoneration activists argue that people have a right to know when their DNA does not match that collected in the crime for which they were convicted.

The project has led to the exoneration of at least four men. Putting a face to them is Bennett S. Barbour, who served a prison sentence for a 1978 rape. He had moved and did not receive the 2010 letter notifying him that the DNA specimen cleared him and matched a convicted rapist instead. A volunteer lawyer finally tracked him down and broke the good news by phone 18 months later.

Research into wrongful convictions has pinpointed several leading causes. These include:

Top sources of wrongful convictions. The Innocence Project

• False witness testimony (including mistaken identification and lying codefendants) 
• Faulty forensic evidence (especially comparisons of hair and bite marks) 
• False confessions 
• Police being influenced by prior knowledge of a suspect 
• Brief jury deliberations 

These problems are compounded by racial bias both in the criminal justice system and in society more broadly. African American men make up far more than their share of those who were convicted and later exonerated based on DNA evidence.

False accusations: A role for psychology?

Flat-out false accusations of rape -- like that depicted in To Kill A Mockingbird -- are rarely the cause of exonerations. But they do occur. Now, a prominent forensic psychology professor and his student propose 11 pathways to false allegations, and suggest that psychology could play a role in helping to sort reliable from unreliable reports. Write Jessica Engle and William O'Donohue in the Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice:

"[W]e suggest that some psychological disorders may increase the likelihood of believing a sexual assault occurred when it did not. Additionally, some psychological disorders may be related to an increase in motivation to fabricate an allegation of sexual assault in an effort to achieve what may be believed are the positive consequences of a false report…. [P]sychological evaluations may inform forensic evaluators of psychological processes by which a person may either intentionally or unintentionally file a false allegation of sexual assault."

The motivational and information processing pathways they propose lean heavily on psychiatric disorders -- including antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, psychotic disorders and intellectual disability -- as causes of false allegations. For example, here’s how they suggest that a histrionic personality style could lead to a false allegation:

"[A] person who is histrionic may, after a co-worker complements her clothing and accidentally bumps into her during the day, construe these actions as intentional communications of sexual interest. This misperception can lead her to feel that if the individual had touched her chest while bumping into her, it was an intentional action of unwanted assault. Thus, a pathway to false allegations of sexual assault may be through individuals with a diagnosis of histrionic personality disorder who for reasons of attention and misinterpretation may knowingly or unknowingly make a false allegation of sexual assault."

Okay, I’m not saying that people don’t lie, or make mistakes. Other research suggests that anywhere from 2 to 10 percent of all sexual assault reports may be false. But some of the examples provided in this article stretch credulity, and reek of sexism. I don’t know too many women, histrionic or not, who don't know the difference between an innocent compliment and a sexual assault.

A classification system based largely on pathologizing women runs the risk of reifying the mythology of so-called “rape myths,” in which only “good,” virtuous women can be raped. It seems especially problematic to disbelieve women with psychiatric problems when -- as the authors acknowledge -- they are the ones most likely to be sexually victimized.

More broadly, it is improper for clinicians to wade into the waters of truth-telling or lie detection. We weren’t there, and we don’t know what happened. It's problematic enough when we use character traits to predict the future. Stating that people (read: women) with this or that disorder are more likely to be lying or distorting reality opens the door for yet more improper use of psychiatric diagnosis in court.

Rather, as suggested by the Virginia data, we need to be skeptical at all times, and to keep our minds open to competing hypotheses based not on psychiatric stereotyping, but on the individual case facts. Maybe an assault happened, maybe it didn’t. Maybe the witnesses have their facts straight, maybe they don’t. Maybe the person who was convicted is the real culprit, and maybe he isn’t.

It’s clear that false convictions and false allegations are two separate beasts. And if that’s not complicated enough, there are true cases that are falsely recanted! For example, in a recent Welsh case, “Sarah” was repeatedly raped and forced into prostitution by her husband. When she recanted her report, she was convicted for perverting justice.

So, did Michael Jones (top of post) try to molest the two little girls? Maybe. Maybe not. The point is that we will never know for sure, and we should embrace -- rather than avoid -- that uncertainty. Present the competing scenarios, and analyze the case both ways, so that the trier of fact has all of the information.

The complexities in understanding sexual assault patterns are mind-boggling, and can make your head spin. False convictions, false accusations, false retractions. And then there's the other end of the spectrum: A vast proportion of sexual assaults – probably somewhere between 85 and 95 percent – are still going unreported altogether. And when victims do come forward, prosecution is rare, and convictions even rarer.

It's one gigantic mess, all around.

The U.S. Department of justice Study is: Post-Conviction DNA Testing and Wrongful Conviction by John Roman, Kelly Walsh, Pamela Lachman and Jennifer Yahner.

California training to feature confession expert

Dr. Richard Leo, Associate Law Professor at USF and a leading scholar in the area of false confessions, will be the keynote speaker at next month's conference of the Forensic Mental Health Association of California. His presentation is titled False Confessions: Causes, Characteristics and Solutions.*

The conference, "Mental Health and the Law: An In-Depth Look at the Evidence," will be March 23-25 in Seaside (just outside of picturesque Monterey).

The FMHAC has scored some other big names, too, including Richard Rogers and Robert Hare. Topics of interest include the effect of high-profile crimes on SVP laws in California, competency restoration treatment in county jails, malingering assessment, and lots more.

*My review of Dr. Leo's book, Police Interrogation and American Justice, is HERE.

Historical review of false confessions

If you are looking for more information on false confessions but don't want to read an entire book, last month's New York magazine has a nice historical overview. Contributing editor Robert Kolker goes into depth about the science of interrogation tactics and false-confession psychology, and also proposes some solutions. The fascinating piece, anchored around a 1988 murder case in a hamlet in upstate New York, would make a good reading assignment for students.

Don’t miss Frontline's "The Confessions" airing Tuesday

The Norfolk Four sailors are out of prison, but they remain convicted sex offenders with all of the stigma and draconian restrictions that status entails. Now comes what some are calling the best program ever on the subject of why people falsely confess:

Why would four innocent men confess to a brutal crime they didn’t commit? FRONTLINE producer Ofra Bikel (Innocence Lost, An Ordinary Crime) investigates the conviction of four Navy sailors for the rape and murder of a Norfolk, Va., woman in 1997. In interviews with the sailors, Bikel learns of some of the high-pressure police interrogation techniques -- including the threat of the death penalty, sleep deprivation, and intimidation -- that led each of the “Norfolk Four” to confess, despite a lack of evidence linking them to the crime. All four sailors are now out of prison -- one served his sentence and the other three were granted conditional pardons last summer -- but the men were not exonerated as felons or sex offenders. The case raises disturbing questions about the actions of the police and prosecutors, who relied on the sailors’ often contradictory confessions for their convictions, and disregarded DNA evidence that pointed to a lone assailant who would later confess to the crime himself while serving prison time for another rape.

Airing this Tuesday night on PBS, The Confessions is incredibly timely. Two weeks ago, a federal jury convicted the lead homicide detective of extortion for taking bribes from criminals in exchange for favorable treatment in a series of unrelated cases.

But meanwhile, the four sailors from whom he extracted confessions continue to live "in a hellish limbo," writes Virginia journalist Margaret Edds, author of "An Expendable Man: The Near-Execution of Earl Washington Jr."

• In Michigan, Danial Williams wears an electronic ankle bracelet 24 hours a day. He cannot even work in the yard without permission.

• In Texas, Eric Wilson was denied admission to a school for electricians and cannot adopt his wife’s son because of his criminal record.

• In North Carolina, Derek Tice washes windows for a living, his dream of becoming a nurse forever barred.

• In Maryland, Joseph Dick fears taking his parents’ dogs for a walk because a school backs up to their property.

Having blogged about this case since 2007, I am excited to see this show finally airing. Hopefully, it will create enough public pressure to force Virginia's governor to at long last exonerate the four.

So, as a colleague said, "Tape it, burn it, TIVO it, watch it, have your family members watch it, have their friends watch it, have your students watch it, your teenage children watch it, tweet it, Facebook it, blog it."

Bottom line: Don't miss it.

Further resources:

PBS' website on The Confessions is HERE.

My reviews of The Wrong Guys by Tom Wells and Richard Leo are HERE (Amazon) and HERE (California Lawyer magazine).

Prior blog posts on the case:

• Another fascinating disputed confession case (Sept. 24, 2007)

• The Wrong Guys: New book explodes myth that innocent do not confess (Dec. 8, 2008)

Hat tip: Luis

Police interrogations: AP-LS issues landmark white paper

Boy's "psychological torture" points to need for reform

In 1998, the Crowe family in Escondido, California awakened to their worst nightmare. Twelve-year-old Stephanie was lying in a pool of blood on her bedroom floor, dead from multiple stab wounds. Police quickly zeroed in on a suspect -- Stephanie's 14-year-old brother Michael. After a series of grueling interrogations, Michael ultimately admitted he may have killed his sister. He and two friends were arrested for murder.

Only through serendipity were the boys' charges dismissed more than a year later, when DNA evidence proved that a mentally ill transient had committed the murder. That man, Richard Tuite, was ultimately convicted of manslaughter.

Now, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reinstituted the families' civil rights case against the police, dismissed by a federal judge several years ago. Writing for the three-judge panel, Justice Sidney R. Thomas described the shocking nature of the interrogations:

One need only read the transcripts of the boys' interrogations, or watch the videotapes, to understand how thoroughly the defendants' conduct in this case "shocks the conscience." Michael and Aaron [Houser] -- 14 and 15 years old, respectively -- were isolated and subjected to hours and hours of interrogation during which they were cajoled, threatened, lied to, and relentlessly pressured by teams of police officers. "Psychological torture" is not an inapt description.

"Psychological torture" and "brutal and inhumane" were descriptions given by a juror in the real killer's criminal trial after he viewed the videotaped interrogations. (I show the heartwrenching video, which is no longer available commercially, in my forensic courses.) Dr. Richard Leo, an expert in coerced confessions and author of Police Interrogation and American Justice (read my review HERE), echoed the juror's sentiments, describing Michael's interrogation as "the most psychologically brutal interrogation and tortured confession that I have ever observed." So did Dr. Calvin Colarusso, Director of Child Psychiatry Residence Training Program at the University of California, San Diego, who evaluated Michael and described the interrogation as "the most extreme form of emotional child abuse that I have ever observed in my nearly 40 years of observing and working with children and adolescents."

The appellate victory will allow the families' federal civil rights case to move forward to a jury trial or a settlement. In an interesting angle, the justices also reinstated the claim against a psychologist whom police consulted during the interrogation. The plaintiffs allege that Dr. Lawrence "Deadlift" Blum, a police psychologist, conspired with Escondido police, helping them formulate a "tactical plan" that they followed in their interrogation. Blum admitted in a deposition that he told a police detective that 15-year-old Aaron Houser, Michael's friend, was a "Charlie Manson wannabe."

The ruling coincides with publication of a landmark article sponsored by the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS) on the scientific status of coerced interrogations and false confessions. The article, written by leading scholars Saul M. Kassin, Steven A. Drizin, Thomas Grisso, Gisli H. Gudjonsson, Richard A. Leo, and Allison D. Redlich and published in this month's Law & Human Behavior after an extensive process of vetting and review, is only the second such paper authorized by AP-LS in its 42-year history. The first was a 1998 white paper on eyewitness identification. As William C. Thompson, criminology and law professor at the University of California at Irvine, notes in the introduction to the special issue:

That paper (Wells, Small, Penrod, Malpass, Fulero, & Brimacombe, 1998) proved extremely influential in subsequent policy debates about line-ups and other eyewitness identification procedures. By providing an intellectual framework for analysis of systemic factors that affect eyewitness accuracy, and by distilling specific policy recommendations from a broad array of research, it set the agenda for policy discussion and channeled those discussions in productive directions. The paper was the foundation for a subsequent National Institute of Justice policy paper. Many of its recommendations, such as procedures for composing line-ups and instructing witnesses, are beginning to be implemented nationwide.

The AP-LS hopes the current review article will have a similar effect on the field. After methodically reviewing the state of the science, the authors make a number of critical recommendations for reform aimed at reducing the number of false and/or coerced confessions. These include:

• Mandatory electronic recording of interrogations, with the camera angle focused equally on the suspects and detectives
• Limits on the duration of interrogations
• Limits on the presentation of false information and evidence
• Special protections for vulnerable suspects, including juveniles and those with cognitive and/or psychiatric impairments
• Scrutiny of "minimization" tactics, in which police pursue "themes" that minimize suspects' perceived moral, psychological, and/or legal culpability
  

Michael Crowe's exoneration came about as a result of what author Edwin Borchard described in a 1932 tome on wrongful convictions as "sheer good luck." The scholars who collaborated on this white paper hope that their recommendations will reduce the role of such serendipity, by giving police, prosecutors, judges, and juries the scientific information necessary to reduce egregious injustices like the one in Escondido 12 years ago.

Images: (1) Michael Crowe's interrogation, (2) Richard Tuite, the real killer, (3) Michael Crowe with his sisters; Stephanie is on the left.

Hat tip: Adam Alban

Norfolk sailors receive partial pardons

Remember the case of the Norfolk 4, which I've blogged about before? That's the 1997 rape-murder case that has become an exemplar of wrongful convictions, the topic of a book by confession scholar Richard Leo and an upcoming screenplay by bestselling author John Grisham.

Yesterday, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine issued partial pardons to three of the four sailors, paving the way for their imminent releases. The fourth sailor was released in 2005. In his statement, the governor noted that the men's confessions contradicted forensic evidence, that no physical evidence linked the men to the crime scene, and that another man had confessed and asserted that he acted alone. That man's DNA matched evidence found at the scene.

The case was highly unusual in that even a group of former FBI agents was lobbying for the pardon.

But guess what? The pardons are only "partial" rather than full vindications. That means the men's convictions will stand, and they will be required to register as sex offenders. And all of you readers know what that means: Even though most intelligent people know they were innocent, they will have a hard time finding anywhere to live, and very few employers will have the courage to hire them.

The New York Times has the story.

Related blog resources:

• My book review of The Wrong Guys (Dec. 8, 2008)
• Another fascinating disputed confession case (Sept. 24, 2007)

Top confession expert barred from testifying

Over the past few decades, police have developed a set of sophisticated procedures to get suspects to confess to crimes. Most suspects who succumb to the so-called "Reid" tactics of manipulation and deception are actually guilty. But some minority -- the exact proportion is unknown -- are not.

How can judges and jurors tell the difference?

The short answer is, they generally cannot. False confessions can look amazingly real. In the Central Park jogger case, for example, juveniles who falsely confessed to gang-raping a woman energetically demonstrated their (false) actions on videotape. Five juveniles were convicted on the basis of the false videotaped confessions, despite no physical evidence linking them to the crime. It wasn't until years later that the true culprit (a lone sexual predator) was identified.

To jurors, judges, police, and other members of the public, confession evidence is overwhelmingly powerful evidence of guilt. After all, it goes against common sense to think that someone would confess to a crime he did not commit.

Luckily, researchers have laboriously combed through confessions that later turned out to be false, and have found markers of unreliability. Among the markers are lengthy and intense interrogations, "contamination" through police feeding of crime facts to suspects, and a lack of guilty knowledge on the part of the suspect. Certain individual factors (such as youth, low intelligence, naivete, and acquiescence to authority) also put some suspects at heightened risk.

A leading expert in this area is Richard Leo, a law professor at the University of San Francisco and author of Police Interrogation and American Justice. Because laypeople lack the expertise to tease out telltale markers of unreliability, Leo has educated jurors and judges about this science.

That is just what he was slated to do in the Michigan case of Jerome Kowalski, who confessed on videotape to the 2008 shooting deaths of his brother and sister-in-law. Leo was prepared to testify about how Kowalski might have come to believe he committed the crime despite having no recollection of it.

Typically, expert witnesses are allowed to testify when they can provide information that is beyond the common knowledge of jurors, and will assist such "fact-finders" in arriving at the truth. Leo believed his testimony could "be important at trial to help the jury understand police interrogation methods and 'how some methods can lead to a false confession,' " according to a report in today's Livingston Daily Press and Argus.

But, in a ruling that shocked the defense attorneys and has created some hubbub among forensic psychologists around the country, a judge barred both Leo and a clinical psychologist from testifying, saying jurors can use their common sense to determine whether the confession is valid.

"We have no defense at this point," attorney Walter Piszczatowski told a newspaper reporter after the hearing. He asked Judge Theresa Brennan to put the case on hold while he appeals, but she denied that request too. The trial is set to start in October.

Further resources:

" 'I'd know a false confession if I saw one': A comparative study of college students and police investigators," by Saul M. Kassin, Christian A. Meissner, and Rebecca J. Norwick, Law & Human Behavior (2005).

Livingston Daily Press and Argus coverage of this case is HERE.
My review of Leo's Police Interrogation and American Justice is HERE.
A related blog post, "Canada: How false confessions occur," is HERE.

A book with chapters by psychologists Sol Fulero and Bruce Frumkin on the admissibility of this type of confession testimony is expected out later this year from the American Psychological Association press. The book, Interrogations and confessions: Research, practice, and policy, is being edited by Christian Meissner and G. Daniel Lassiter, both of whom have extensive expertise in this field.

New book explodes myth that innocent do not confess

Innocent people do not confess. Especially to rape and murder.

That is the belief of most people, including jurors, judges, attorneys, and even the very police detectives who induce false confessions. The Norfolk Four case is the perfect vehicle to challenge our misguided faith. And Tom Wells and Richard Leo are the ideal storytellers: Wells followed the case for seven years; Leo is a leading expert on the social psychology of police interrogation. The book is meticulously researched, through primary source documents and dozens of interviews.

The Wrong Guys: Murder, False Confessions, and the Norfolk Four reads like a Stephen King novel but provides a step-by-step deconstruction of the bizarre case of the Norfolk Four, explaining the individual, situational, and systemic factors that converge in a typical false confession case.

More on the Norfolk Four case is online here; the publisher's web page is here. My longer review is forthcoming from California Lawyer magazine.

Treating therapist as police interrogator

For all you psychologists, here's a quick ethics vignette:

You live and work in a small town, population 13,000. Like many psychologists, you have a diverse practice. You treat patients at a local mental health clinic. You serve on professional boards. You work part-time as a consultant to the local sheriff's department.

One day, the sheriff asks you to come down and help with some interrogations in a cold case of sexual assault and murder. Among the suspects being questioned are Deb and Ada, two young women you treated in your private practice.

What do you do?

If you are Wayne R. Price, Ph.D. of Beatrice, Nebraska, you see no problem in interrogating the young women despite having been their therapist:

"What I find, I find. It makes no difference to me," Price testified at a pretrial hearing. "When I have an emotional involvement or vested interest and can't do it objectively, I will say so."

Price's role in helping elicit confessions from two of his former patients is in the spotlight now, almost two decades later, because of new DNA evidence pointing to a different killer. The so-called Beatrice Six case has set a record for the number of people exonerated by DNA evidence in a single case.

The five suspects who confessed fit the pattern of false confession cases: Suggestible young people with psychiatric or cognitive problems who used alcohol or drugs, were easily confused, and were worn down by aggressive questioning.

False confessions like this are not nearly as unusual as many people still think. According to the Innocence Project, they have been found in about one-fourth of DNA exonerations.

What is unusual in the Beatrice Six case is the psychologist's role. A psychologist playing the dual roles of trusted therapist and criminal interrogator "would have had a powerful place of trust and persuasion over suspects," the Omaha World-Herald cites confession experts as stating.

The Six did not become formal suspects until four years after the 1985 murder of Helen Wilson. The ball got rolling when a hard-partying 23-year-old named Tom Winslow was in jail for an unrelated crime, the beating of a motel clerk during a robbery. Police approached him with an offer he couldn't refuse: "Help us solve our murder case, and we'll get you out of jail on bond."

Winslow claims police called him a liar and threatened him with the electric chair if he did not confess. He said police fed him information and "suggested he was blocking out memories of a horrific crime due to the cloud of alcohol or drug abuse," according to reporter Paul Hammel, who has followed the case for the World-Herald.

Earlier this month, authorities announced that the DNA found at the crime scene matched an Oklahoma City man, Bruce Smith, who had since died. In light of that evidence, the state is seeking pardons for the Beatrice Six.

Joseph White, a 26-year-old drifter from Alabama, was the only one of the Six who refused to confess. A jury deliberated for only a few hours before convicting him anyway, largely on the testimony of co-defendants who received reduced charges in exchange.

One of White's attorney's, Toney Redman, recalled arguing in court that those testifying were "so weak-minded" that their stories could not be trusted.

"I'm fully convinced now that the police, if they wanted to, could get any borderline personality person, who has alcohol and drug issues, and scare them to death and get them to confess to anything," he told the World-Herald.

Two of the three who testified against White - Ada JoAnn Taylor and Deb Shelden - were former patients of Dr. Price. Their accounts reportedly changed over time, partly after Dr. Price encouraged them to recollect more details.

Taylor, diagnosed by Price with a personality disorder, initially said she couldn't recall much because she had memory problems. After police insisted she was at the scene of the murder, she eventually changed her story. She also told investigators she communicated telepathically with a friend and had five former lives and an imaginary twin. She took a plea deal and was paroled in November.

Shelden, the other former patient of Price's, initially told interrogators she didn't recall the details of the assault on her grand-aunt until months later, when she began having nightmares. She said Dr. Price helped her to remember the details. Shelden was paroled after serving 10 years in prison.

Although Dr. Price - now executive director of Blue Valley Behavioral Health in Beatrice - doesn't see a problem with his dual roles in the Beatrice Six case, many other psychologists might.

Beneficence and Nonmaleficence is the very first principle of the American Psychological Association's Ethics Code, advising us to to "benefit those with whom [we] work and take care to do no harm." Another principle, Justice, cautions psychologists to "exercise reasonable judgment and take precautions" to avoid participating in unjust practices. A third principle, Respect for People's Rights and Dignity, discusses the duty to safeguard people's confidentiality and self-determination, especially when their "vulnerabilities [might] impair autonomous decision making."

The dangers of multiple relationships are specifically addressed in Section 3.05 of the Ethics Code. Psychologists are forbidden from engaging in dual relationships that "risk exploitation or harm to the person with whom the professional relationship exists."

The Forensic Psychology Specialty Guidelines, published two years after Dr. Price's involvement in the Beatrice Six interrogations, also caution against engaging in dual relationships that might cause harm: "Forensic psychologists recognize potential conflicts of interest in dual relationships with parties to a legal proceeding, and they seek to minimize their effects. Forensic psychologists avoid providing professional services to parties in a legal proceeding with whom they have personal or professional relationships that are inconsistent with the anticipated relationship."

It's hard to see how providing someone with confidential psychological therapy would not be inconsistent with later becoming that person's police interrogator.

If you have other thoughts on the ethical contours of this case, I encourage you to comment.

Omaha World-Herald coverage of the Beatrice Six case is here, here, and here.

A classic article on dual roles in forensic psychology is: Greenberg, S.A. & Shuman, D.W. (1997). Irreconcilable Conflict Between Therapeutic & Forensic Roles. Professional Psychology: Research & Practice, 28, 50-57.

The case for videotaping interrogations

Detective's candid call for reform

I've been a police officer for 25 years, and I never understood why someone would admit to a crime he or she didn't commit. Until I secured a false confession in a murder case.

So begins a Los Angeles Times opinion piece by Jim Trainum, a Washington DC police detective who runs a cold case unit and lectures on interrogations and false confessions and other police investigation topics.

Like most people, Trainum was firmly convinced that only the guilty confess to crimes. And, like most police, he believed his suspect's confession - obtained without threats or abuse - was "solid."

Even after an "ironclad alibi" forced dismissal of charges, the detective and others continued for years to think she was guilty: After all, she had confessed. And even her own attorney thought she was guilty of killing the man, who had been robbed, beaten, and dumped in a river.

Trainum's thinking underwent a dramatic change only years later, when he reviewed the videotape of the mid-1990s confession in light of more contemporary understanding of false confessions:

"We ignored evidence that our suspect might not have been guilty, and during the interrogation we inadvertently fed her details of the crime that she repeated back to us in her confession," he realized.

Trainum's op ed, focusing on the need to videotape interrogations, is here.

Fictional confession proves man's undoing

Sensational case mesmerizes Poland

"The perfect crime" is how the Polish media dubbed the unsolved case.

The hog-tied body was found floating in a remote inlet of the Oder River in 2000. Before death, Dariusz Janiszewski was tortured and starved, suggesting he was killed by someone who bore him enmity.

But who would have killed the happily married, good looking, and well liked young advertising executive, an amateur guitarist who enjoyed Led Zeppelin and wore his blond hair long and flowing? Police were unable to locate any suspects, and the case went cold.

Perhaps, as in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, the killer could still hear the beating of the dead man's heart. Or maybe his overconfidence did him in. Maybe it was neither guilt nor overconfidence, but simply the temerity of Jacek Wroblewski (dubbed "Jack Sparrow" by his colleagues), the new detective assigned to the cold case.

Sifting through the case file three years later, the detective decided to trace the whereabouts of the dead man's cell phone. He found that a few days after Janiszewski’s death, "ChrisB[7]" had sold the phone on an Internet auction site. ChrisB[7], as it turned out, was Krystian Bala, a postmodernist intellectual featured in the documentary "Young Money" about Poland's nouveau capitalist class.

That link would not have been enough to convict. But Bala had written a creepy novel called "Amok" that contained startling similarities to the killing. The novel’s protagonist, a postmodernist intellectual named Chris, kills his lover and then sells the murder weapon on the Internet.

Detective Wroblewski pored over Bala's sleazy tract for clues until he had it practically memorized, even hiring a psychologist to analyze the author's personality. Further digging unearthed a direct but hidden connection between Bala and his victim: Janiszewski and Bala's wife had a brief extramarital affair some months before the murder.

Was it guilt, revelry, or a desire for attention that drove Bala to write about his crime?

Gisli Gudjonsson, the internationally known confessions expert and forensic psychologist whom I've previously blogged about, says it is rare for people to be able to keep a horrendous crime totally secret. People, even the most depraved, are social animals.

And Bala, by all accounts, was overconfident. Two psychologists who evaluated him after his arrest reported that he had a high IQ, extreme narcissism, and sadistic tendencies. A lethal combination for his victim and a dangerous one for him, too, in that his constant need to demonstrate his superiority led to anonymous boasts to police and the Polish media of his "perfect crime."

Bala's reported psychological makeup is similar to what psychologist Del Paulhus likes to call the "Dark Triad," a combination of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Using rather circular reasoning, author Marilee Strong argues in her new book Erased (which I review here) that the triad explains a specific type of cold-blooded, premeditated wife killer, Scott Peterson being the exemplar. (Hans Reiser, currently on trial in Oakland, is potentially another example; I plan to say more about him after the jury verdict.) I say circular, because applying the labels of narcissist, psychopath, and Machiavellian provides little in the way of explanation, nor are these theoretical constructs independent of each other.

Another way to look at these types of killings is to see them as a blending of instrumental and expressive motivations. Instrumental violence is theorized to underlie more rational, goal-oriented killings, such as the murder of a rape or a robbery victim in order to eliminate a witness, or killings that occur during warfare or organized crime disputes. Expressive violence is driven by emotion and is typically impulsive and unplanned.

Bala's motive was jealous rage, but his cunning and intelligence enabled him to harness his rage in order to plot and execute a more chilling murder. (Check out the recent San Francisco killing of Leonard Hoskins for what could turn out to be a similar blending of instrumental and expressive violence.)

But even more essential to these types of killings than cold-blooded cunning is a chilling level of entitlement. These types of killers, mainly relatively privileged white men, seem to believe that they have the unalienable right to permanently dispose of others who become inconvenient to them. One of the few nonwhite wife killers in Strong's book, for example, is a star football player; as catalogued in recent books on sexual violence in competitive sports, these cultural icons take entitlement to a whole higher plane.

What proved Bala's undoing was his arrogant horn tooting. Amok, described as "a pulp-fiction orgy of bestiality, pornographic Oedipal complexes and indiscriminate sexual violence," went on to become a star witness against him at his trial last year. Simultaneously, the book surged from obscurity to bestseller status as the Polish public lapped up every detail in the most sensational trial in the nation's history.

Although Bala was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison, his conviction has been overturned and a retrial is expected to get underway soon.

For a lengthy essay on the Bala case, see David Grann's "Letter from Poland" in the New Yorker. News coverage is here and here; literary commentary is here. BBC has an interesting article here on cases of voluntary confession. Photo credit: valobstruction's "SUV parked in a loading zone" (Creative Commons license).