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Brendan Dassey: False confessions; Making a Murderer; Douglas Starr, co-director of the graduate program in science journalism at Boston University, asks whether the U.S. Supreme Court could help address the problem of false confession, in The New Yorker... "This month, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to review the case of Brendan Dassey, the Wisconsin man who, as a teen-ager, confessed to the 2005 rape and murder of a young photographer named Teresa Halbach. Dassey’s videotaped confession to police, portions of which were included in the 2015 Netflix documentary “Making a Murderer,” bore so many hallmarks of coercion that, after the documentary aired, hundreds of thousands of viewers signed petitions calling for his pardon. In 2016, Dassey’s attorneys, arguing that his confession was both false and involuntary, convinced a federal judge to overturn his conviction, but that ruling was later reversed by the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. At present, Dassey continues to serve the life sentence he received following his initial conviction—one that was entirely based on his confession, with no physical evidence linking him to the crime. After the Seventh Circuit’s ruling, Dassey’s attorneys filed an appeal to the Supreme Court. In some ways, the issues at stake in the case are overdue for review."
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is
interested in false confessions because of the disturbing number
of exonerations in the USA, Canada
and multiple other jurisdictions throughout the world, where, in the
absence of
incriminating forensic evidence the conviction is based on
self-incrimination –
and because of the growing body of
scientific research showing how vulnerable suspects are to widely used
interrogation methods such as the notorious ‘Reid Technique.’
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.
-----------------------------------------------------------
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "According to attorneys from the Innocence Project, an
organization that uses DNA evidence to exonerate wrongfully convicted people,
more than a quarter of all exonerated people were originally convicted
following false confessions. Juveniles are particularly susceptible to
offering false confessions, as are people with intellectual
disabilities. Dassey’s case could provide some much needed
attention to the subject of police interrogations. When interviewing a
suspect, most police officers in the U.S. rely on some version of the
Reid Technique—a method that has been denounced by many psychologists
and jurists as outdated and coercive, as I detailed in this magazine,
in 2013. And, even if the Reid Technique weren’t itself seen as a
problem, much of the training that officers receive is informal, and
happens on the job. The result is that the quality of interrogation in
any given police department depends almost entirely on the individual
police officers’ experience."
----------------------------------------------------------
COMMENTARY: "In the “Making a Murderer” Case, the Supreme Court Could Help Address the Problem of False Confessions by Douglas Star, published by The New Yorker on June 6, 2018. (Douglas Starr is co-director of the graduate program in science journalism at Boston University.)
PHOTO CAPTION: "Brendan
Dassey, whose case was featured in “Making a Murderer,” is serving a
life sentence that was entirely based on his confession, with no
physical evidence linking him to the crime."
GIST: "This month,
the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to review the case of
Brendan Dassey, the Wisconsin man who, as a teen-ager, confessed to the
2005 rape and murder of a young photographer named Teresa Halbach.
Dassey’s videotaped confession to police, portions of which were
included in the 2015 Netflix documentary “Making a Murderer,”
bore so many hallmarks of coercion that, after the documentary aired,
hundreds of thousands of viewers signed petitions calling for his
pardon. In 2016, Dassey’s attorneys, arguing that his confession was
both false and involuntary, convinced a federal judge to overturn his
conviction, but that ruling was later reversed by the U.S. Seventh
Circuit Court of Appeals. At present, Dassey continues to serve the life
sentence he received following his initial conviction—one that was
entirely based on his confession, with no physical evidence linking him
to the crime. After the Seventh Circuit’s ruling, Dassey’s
attorneys filed an appeal to the Supreme Court. In some ways, the issues
at stake in the case are overdue for review. The Court has not weighed
in on the so-called voluntariness issue since DNA-based exonerations
began to reveal just how common false confessions are in our justice
system. According to attorneys from the Innocence Project, an
organization that uses DNA evidence to exonerate wrongfully convicted people,
more than a quarter of all exonerated people were originally convicted
following false confessions. Juveniles are particularly susceptible to
offering false confessions, as are people with intellectual
disabilities. Dassey’s case could provide some much needed
attention to the subject of police interrogations. When interviewing a
suspect, most police officers in the U.S. rely on some version of the
Reid Technique—a method that has been denounced by many psychologists
and jurists as outdated and coercive, as I detailed in this magazine,
in 2013. And, even if the Reid Technique weren’t itself seen as a
problem, much of the training that officers receive is informal, and
happens on the job. The result is that the quality of interrogation in
any given police department depends almost entirely on the individual
police officers’ experience. It’s a fundamental premise in
American law that no one should be forced to confess to a crime that he
or she didn’t commit. The Supreme Court took up the subject in earnest
in the nineteen-thirties, after a federal commission found that police
across the country commonly used torture to extract confessions; in
1936, the Court reversed the convictions of three African-American men
from Mississippi who confessed to murder after all three were whipped
and one hung by the neck from a tree. “The rack and torture chamber may
not be substituted for the witness stand,” Chief Justice Charles Evans
Hughes wrote. That decision cemented the constitutional protection that
only confessions given “voluntarily” could be accepted in court. In
the decades following, the Supreme Court narrowed the definition of
voluntary confessions to exclude those made after threats or
psychological pressure from interrogators. Yet this standard proved
subjective. Through the years, the Court rejected as involuntary a
confession that was given at the moment of arrest, sustained one that
was given after fourteen days of interrogation, rejected one given after
the accused was stripped naked, and sustained one given after police
placed the bones of the murder victim in the suspect’s lap. By the
nineteen-sixties, the notion of voluntariness had become so troublesome
that jurists sought a way to clarify the matter. They found it in the
case of Ernesto Miranda, a Phoenix man who confessed to kidnapping and
rape without being told of his right to remain silent and to have an
attorney. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction, in 1966, in a
decision that set a clearer standard: if police read a suspect his or
her so-called Miranda rights, any subsequent confession would be
generally admissible in court; if they hadn’t, then it wouldn’t be. “The
idea was to get away from this mess of voluntariness and get some more
clarity,” Eve Brensike Primus, a law professor at the University of
Michigan, told me. Yet Miranda doesn’t effectively prevent false
confessions, because police have not been held fully accountable for
what takes place after a warning, during interrogations. Dassey’s
interrogation provides a vivid example. He was a sixteen-year-old with
poor social skills and a borderline intellectual disability when police
pulled him out of his classroom for questioning, in February of 2006.
Like some eighty per cent of people who face interrogation, he waived
his Miranda rights. (Most people do so in order to appear coöperative.)
Over the next forty-eight hours, he faced four separate interrogation
sessions without the presence of an attorney. One of his questioners,
the investigator Mark Wiegert, later testified that he had received
formal training in the Reid Technique. Hayley Cleary, a
criminologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, has studied the kind
of interrogation training American police receive. In 2016, she
published the results of a survey of three hundred and forty mid-career
police officers, from all over the country, who attended the F.B.I.’s
in-service training in Quantico, Virginia. She found that about
fifty-six per cent had received some formal training in the Reid
Technique, nearly ninety-one per cent reported that they learned on the
job, and just over eight percent had studied the nonconfrontational
techniques favored by British police departments. (The numbers add up to
more than a hundred per cent because many officers trained in more than
one method.) “Virtually all
of them are learning back-of-the-envelope kinds of training—tricks and
strategies from the folks who come before,” Cleary told me. “It’s
terrifying when bad information is spreading from officer to officer and
interrogator to interrogator.” The videos of Dassey’s
interrogation illustrate Cleary’s point. Over many hours of interviews,
the investigators appear to do exactly what psychologists and legal
experts warn not to do with juveniles and other suggestible people—they
manipulate Dassey, scold him when he gives the “wrong” answers, and
steer him to the right ones. In one exchange, the police repeatedly ask
Dassey what happened to the victim’s head. Dassey gives several wrong
answers, including that her hair was cut and that her throat was cut.
Finally, Wiegert blurts out, “All right, I’m just gonna come out and ask
you. Who shot her in the head?” Such tactics can easily overwhelm a
young person’s will. Dassey confessed, and was found guilty and
sentenced to life. His uncle Steven Avery was also found guilty and
given a life sentence. Dassey’s attorneys hope to reverse the
conviction and reinforce the “voluntariness” protection. They want to
reinvigorate the idea that courts should take special care in examining
whether confessions are given freely or as a result of coercion. “Even
though this case is specifically about children, the broader implication
is that courts need to be enforcing rules that guard against
involuntary confessions—rules that apply to everyone,” Laura Nirider,
one of Dassey’s attorneys, told me. “We want to remind police officers
that, in order to get accurate and voluntary statements, they need to be
focussed on whether the person they’re questioning is confessing
voluntarily, and not just on whether they’ve been read their Miranda
rights.” Others hope to intervene earlier in the process, by
training police officers to conduct interviews in less coercive ways. In
March, 2017, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, a nationally known
interrogation-training company, announced that it would stop teaching
Reid-style interrogation in favor of the nonconfrontational interviewing
style used by British police. Since then, the company has trained about
a thousand personnel from numerous police forces around the country,
according to Dave Thompson, the company’s vice-president of operations.
That’s a start. “We now spend about a third of our time in class talking
about false confessions,” Thompson told me. “We use the Dassey case as
an example of what can go wrong.”
The entire commentary can be read at the link below:
PUBLISHER'S
NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles
Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous
employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable
effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his
protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic
pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses
on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog
