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: "Drizin said, noting that in Dassey’s case the “big lie” was that the police already had evidence against him. “That was a lie designed to break Brendan down to a place of hopelessness where it became easier for them to manipulate him into confessing,” he added. Kennedy said that those psychological factors of despair and desperation were evident in the false guilty pleas that stemmed from the Charles Smith cases. Smith, a former pathologist, was subject to a public inquiry due to flawed testimonies he gave on forensic results. “I’ve read affidavits where lawyers would say, ‘no one can do anything with Charles Smith. He’s so good. He’s a demigod. No one is going to disbelieve Dr. Smith,’ ” said Kennedy, noting that false guilty pleas are born out of that feeling of hopelessness."
-------------------------------------------------------
STORY: "Interrogation tactics, errors in justice system lead to false confessions, lawyers say," by reporter Amanda Jerome, published by The Lawyers Daily on March 19, 2019.
GIST: “I said I did it, but I didn’t do it,” was what an 11-year-old boy
convicted of murdering his neighbour told American lawyer Steven Drizin,
during his appeal. This case sent Drizin on an “odyssey” to
understand how people confess to crimes they didn’t commit. For Canadian
lawyer Jerome Kennedy, his work with wrongful convictions started with
the case of a young man convicted of killing his mother. Both men
were drawn into advocating on behalf of the wrongfully convicted and
learning about why innocent people plead guilty. They shared their
perspectives with a packed room during a panel discussion moderated by
Avery Haines, an investigative correspondent with CTV’s W5, and hosted
by Innocence Canada on March 7. Drizin, a clinical professor at
the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in Chicago and
co-founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, asked that
initial young client why he’d confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. The
boy said the police told him, “God would forgive me. They told me that
my mother could come in and see me and they told me I could go home to
my brother’s 9th birthday party.” The police had also lied to the
11-year-old and told him they had his fingerprints on the murder
weapon, Drizin explained. This case caused Drizin to start collecting
and documenting cases with false confessions from America and around the
world. He now has a database of over 350 proven false confessions that
are used by other researchers in their work. Kennedy,
a lawyer with Roebothan McKay Marshall in St. John’s, said after he’d
worked on cases involving Gregory Parsons, who was 19 years old when he
was convicted of murdering his mother, and Ronald Dalton, who had been
convicted of murdering his wife, he became interested in wrongful
convictions. “For me, the exploration into wrongful convictions
was simply a further manifestation of the inequity I saw resulting in
the criminal justice system. Inevitably, I’d look behind me in the dock
and I’d see a person who had problems with alcohol and drugs, a person
who had mental illness, a person who is uneducated, who didn’t have a
chance, so I saw my role as simply trying to even the scales a little
bit,” he said, adding wrongful convictions posed a greater challenge
because “no one would believe it had happened.” Kennedy, who is
chair of the case review committee at Innocence Canada, noted that
despite the Marshall Inquiry, and the wrongful convictions of Steven
Truscott and David Milgaard, Canada seems to have a “superiority complex
that these things happen in the United States, and they happen in the
United Kingdom,” but they don’t happen in Canada. “Truscott and
Milgaard went to the Supreme Court of Canada and some of the brightest
legal minds in our country missed the cases,” he added. Drizin
stressed that there are different kinds of false confessions that can
lead to wrongful convictions. He noted that the rarest of these is
called the “coerced persuaded” false confession, which is usually the
result of extremely lengthy interrogations in which the suspect may
doubt their own memory. “Perhaps they’ve had blackouts when
they were using drugs or alcohol,” explained Drizin, “and the police
officers undermine the suspect’s confidence in their own memory and get
them to search their subconscious mind for images of the crime. Over
time, with leading questions and feeding facts, the suspect actually
comes to believe that they committed a crime that they didn’t commit.” The
most common kind of false confession, he added, is a “coerced
compliant” false confession. Drizin said this kind of confession is a
result of two things: confrontational police interrogation tactics and a
suspect’s own individual vulnerabilities. “In some cases, it’s
more about the police interrogation tactics. In other cases, if you’re a
youth or intellectually disabled or you have certain kinds of mental
illnesses that make you more suggestable and more compliant, you don’t
need as much police coercion,” he said, adding that at a certain point
anybody could falsely confess. “We all have a breaking point. For
some people it’s sooner than for others, but it’s the tactics [used] to
bring you to a place of hopelessness and then the police officers offer
you a life raft. They offer you two choices: one in which you’re a
monster and the system is going to crush you and sentence you to an
extremely long period of time; and the other is where you just made a
mistake. You lost control for an instant or had an impulse; it wasn’t a
deliberate crime,” he explained, noting that over time, a “desperate
suspect” wanting the interrogation process to end will falsely confess. Haines
pointed to Kennedy’s work with Innocence Canada in submitting an
application for ministerial review for Brian Anderson, an Indigenous man
who has maintained his innocence for 45 years in the face of a murder
conviction. Kennedy noted that Anderson never gave a statement or
confessed to the police, but he signed a document that the police had
drafted. “We have a system where there are elements of systemic
racism,” he added, agreeing with Drizin’s statement on a suspect’s
personal vulnerabilities.
“One of the things I think we’ve got to
put a push on at Innocence Canada, and we’re really trying, is to look
further into Indigenous cases,” Kennedy said, noting that Indigenous
people may plead guilty just to get the interrogation process over and
done with. Drizin’s experience representing vulnerable suspects was broadcast through the Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer,
as he represented Brendan Dassey, a 16-year-old convicted of murder, on
appeal. Dassey’s interrogation was featured in the documentary and
symbolizes the “standard psychological interrogation tactics” that can
produce false and unreliable confessions, Drizin noted. “If you
look at Brendan’s [Dassey] case, there’s no yelling, no screaming, no
fist pounding, there’s no profanity, there’s no direct threats of harm.
There is a threat of harm at the beginning when they [the police] say in
the first interrogation that the DA is ‘looking at this case closely
and they’re looking at you as having something to do with it, but I said
I was going to talk to you. You seem like a good kid and that we could
work something out.’ So there’s the threat in the background, but it’s
not like cases I’ve seen in the States where police officers threaten
directly ‘you’re going to get the death penalty.’ They roll up their
sleeves and they point to a vein and they tell a suspect ‘this is where
the needle is going to go if you don’t co-operate with us.’ The Dassey
case is coercive, but it’s a more subtle kind of coercion that we see
over and over again,” he explained. The interrogation practice
Drizin described is called the Reid technique, Haines noted, adding that
the RCMP have started using the PEACE model instead. PEACE stands for:
Preparation and Planning; Engage and Explain; Account, Clarify and
Challenge; Closure and Evaluation. Kennedy explained that Canadian courts have said to stop using the Reid technique and that the PEACE model comes out of the U.K “I think what the RCMP have moved to is a modified form of the PEACE technique,” he added. Both
Drizin and Kennedy acknowledged that police can lie to suspects during
interrogations. However, while Kennedy said the practice is “frowned
upon” in Canada, Drizin noted American courts have “blessed” the
technique. “Police officers in the States lie frequently and they
lie with impunity. They lie about big things and they lie about small
things and our courts have blessed this practice because they’ve been
convinced that in order to get true confessions police officers have to
lie. They have to get down on the same low moral plane as the suspects.
If suspects lie to police officers, why can’t police officers lie to
suspects? And the thing is, you don’t have to lie to get reliable
confessions and that’s been proven since the 1980s in the United Kingdom
when they banned lying to suspects,” Drizin said, noting that in
Dassey’s case the “big lie” was that the police already had evidence
against him. “That was a lie designed to break Brendan down to a
place of hopelessness where it became easier for them to manipulate him
into confessing,” he added. Kennedy said that those psychological
factors of despair and desperation were evident in the false guilty
pleas that stemmed from the Charles Smith cases. Smith, a former
pathologist, was subject to a public inquiry due to flawed testimonies
he gave on forensic results. “I’ve read affidavits where lawyers
would say, ‘no one can do anything with Charles Smith. He’s so good.
He’s a demigod. No one is going to disbelieve Dr. Smith,’ ” said
Kennedy, noting that false guilty pleas are born out of that feeling of
hopelessness. “We’ve had a willingness in Canada to accept that
these wrongful convictions occur and to try and identify what caused
these wrongful convictions. The one thing we all have to accept is that
as long as there are human beings involved in the criminal justice
system, mistakes are going to be made,” he added, stressing that the
justice system must “continuously” be assessed. Drizin noted that the Making a Murderer series sold him on the idea of having cameras in the courtroom. “There’s
no better educational tool as a clinical teacher than having a video
record of a trial or a courtroom procedure,” he added. The
popular Netflix show was watched by 20 million people in the United
States during its first month on the streaming service, Drizin said,
stressing that the series “has opened a window into the interrogation
process that many people throughout the United States, let alone the
world, hadn’t really seen before.""
The entire story can be read at:
The entire story can be read at:
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/
