newsminer.com

Fairbanks — Why credit claims of innocence from any inmate who has already confessed?

Science not long ago delivered a three-letter answer: DNA.

Three years after guilty verdicts were returned in the Hartman case, a notorious serial rapist and convicted murderer informed authorities in New York that he was solely responsible for assaulting a Central Park jogger in 1989. His DNA matched stains on the jogger’s sock. Lengthy investigations by the district attract attorney and police confirmed other details of his story, resulting in the release of five young men then serving time for the crime.

The five, then ages 14 to 16, had all confessed. Four repeated their self-incriminations on videotape, several in the company of their parents. They were serving five to 15 year sentences at the time of their exonerations in 2002.

The case remains, perhaps, the best known of the 216 wrongful convictions overturned in recent years through new DNA evidence. This new measure of evidentiary truth has not only shattered faith in the system, where such injustices were long perceived as anomalies, but has also identified case files for criminal justice researchers seeking explanations and systemic flaws — even in cases where DNA isn’t available.

The Hartman verdicts aren’t subject to DNA validation; physical evidence needed for such tests is lacking.

What may apply are the lessons from DNA exoneration case files. False confessions figured in the trial evidence against 31 of the first 200 inmates freed by DNA testing, according to a 2008 University of Virginia study, which tracked the legal process of each from arrest to exoneration.

Murder cases made up a disproportionately high number of those trials involving false confessions, seven of which resulted in death sentences before the individual’s innocence was belatedly recognized.

“In some cases,” study author and law professor Brandon Garrett noted, “DNA proves not only that the defendant was innocent but also that police fed facts, asked leading questions, supplied details” that added apparent veracity to their false confession.

Garrett characterized known exonerees as the “tip of the iceberg,” suggesting there’s no reason to assume false confessions and other factors contributing to wrongful convictions identified through DNA are less common in the larger pool of criminal cases lacking evidence suited to scientific validation.

The notion a person would falsely confess to crimes as serious as murder defies common sense, observed Rob Warden, a law professor and director of Northwestern University’s Center for Wrongful Convictions. “Absent physical torture or threats, most of us can’t imagine confessing to a crime we did not commit,” he commented via e-mail. “But psychological techniques employed during police interrogations, while not as effective as torture, are nonetheless quite effective.”

It isn’t that police seek false confessions. “The trouble,” he said, “is that the techniques are effective against the innocent as well as the guilty.”

A number of scholars have singled out fictitious evidence introduced in a police interrogation as dangerously manipulative. “To see why such a tactic is a problem, one has only to look at the false-memory literature and note what ordinary individuals can be falsely led to believe,” wrote Elizabeth Loftus, a University of California at Irvine psychology professor and National Academy of Sciences member, in a 2004 opinion piece for Psychology and Public Policy.

Innocence may actually invite risk during psychological interrogation, according to Saul Kassin, a Williams College psychology professor. His research indicates innocent people with no felony record are far more likely to waive Miranda rights and answer police questions without an attorney present. He also found lawmen participating in his experiments falsely confident about their personal ability assessing guilt, and thus pressed the interrogation even harder with innocent test subjects.

“Police-induced confession is like a Hollywood drama,” observed Kassin, in a 2005 American Psychologist article, “scripted by the interrogators theory of the case, shaped through questioning and rehearsal, directed by the questioner and enacted by the suspect.”

Richard Leo, a law school professor excluded from testifying as a paid expert on Vent’s behalf in 1999, coined the phase “persuaded confessions” describing false incriminations resulting from “shattering a suspect’s confidence in his memory” and convincing the person they, more likely than not, committed a crime.

From his pre-trial review of the tapes and transcripts, Leo contends Vent “came to believe he did the crime in a state of blackout.” He agreed to explain in court how that can happen, as well as point out that facts about Hartman’s assault were supplied through the detectives’ questions.

Judge Ben Esch weighed the paid expert’s credentials, listened to his planned testimony, and just didn’t see how his testimony would enhance the jury’s decision making.

In 2003, Alaska’s appellate court upheld Leo’s exclusion, finding that it arguably fell within the trial judge’s discretion, and, if not, represented “harmless error.”

Leo contends Alaska courts are behind the times.

In 2005 a New York judge conducted the most extensive legal exploration to date, a 12-day hearing weighing the methodology of false confession studies and value of allowing expert testimony in court. Judge Victor Ort concluded that jurors could benefit from an expert’s explanation of how and why people sometime confess to crimes they did not commit.

A U.S. Army judge advocate echoed that sentiment last fall, urging military courts to recognize the advances made by researchers since the late 1990s. “Justice demands that prosecutors and judges educate themselves to the growing body of evidence suggesting psychological interrogation methods produce misleading and false confessions at unacceptable rates,” wrote Maj. Peter Kagelieiry, Chief of Military Justice for a Germany-based Army unit, in a 2007 article for Military Law Review.