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 (as well as false identification and jailhouse informants) – and because of the growing body of scientific research showing how vulnerable suspects (especially juveniles) are to widely used interrogation methods such as the notorious ‘Reid Technique.’
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PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: "Ever since his 1997 trial, Tapp and his attorneys have argued that he was factually innocent and that the state’s case against him was rooted in police-driven coerced statements that included crime scene details police fed to him. The police used interrogation techniques over multiple days proven by scientific and legal experts to be psychologically coercive and capable of producing false confessions."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "In more than two dozen exoneration cases, innocent people like Mr. Tapp were convicted even though they were excluded by DNA testing before they even went to trial. In nearly all of these cases, rather than recognizing the DNA exclusion for what it was—evidence of innocence—prosecutors pursued and secured wrongful convictions because of their misplaced faith in police-induced custodial statements over actual science,” said Vanessa Potkin, the Innocence Project’s director of post-conviction litigation and part of Tapp’s legal team."
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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "In fact, before the case went to trial, DNA testing conducted by the state excluded Tapp as the source of semen deposited by the rapist immediately before he murdered her. Nonetheless, law enforcement pursued Tapp as the prime suspect. Over the course of several weeks in early 1997, investigators subjected Tapp to more than 30 hours of intense interrogation. Early on, Tapp told police that he was not involved and had no knowledge of the crime. Yet, as police questioning continued, in conjunction with their threats of execution and false promises of leniency, Tapp eventually implicated himself as well as two other innocent men suggested to him by the police based on their erroneous theory of the case. The prosecutors’ case rested on Tapp’s confession, although it was mired with troubling inconsistencies and the testimony of a young woman who the police manipulated into falsely claiming she heard Tapp mention his involvement in the murder at a party. Tapp and his defense argued at trial that the confession was false and coerced by investigators who were ignoring all other evidence, including the compelling exculpatory DNA results. Nonetheless, Tapp was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison plus 15 years. The district court rejected the prosecution’s request for the death penalty. "
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RELEASE: "DNA Testing Identifies Actual Perpetrator in 1996 Idaho Falls Rape and Murder, Confirming Christopher Tapp’s Innocence, by Innocence Project staff, published on July17, 2019."
GIST: "Today,
the District Court of the Seventh Judicial Circuit in Idaho Falls,
Idaho, granted the Bonneville County District Attorney’s motion to
vacate the 1998 murder conviction of Christopher Tapp based on actual
innocence and to drop all charges. The court’s decision was based on new
DNA testing which excluded Tapp from the crime scene evidence and
identified Brian Dripps as the man who actually raped and murdered Angie
Dodge in 1996. Dripps was much older than Tapp and had no connection to
him. This is the nation’s first exoneration to rely on genealogical DNA
testing.
The entire release can be read at:
“The system thought that I could be thrown away.”“The system thought that I could be thrown away. They thought that I’d never amount to anything,” said Tapp. “They were wrong. I want people to know that I’m innocent. I’ve said it for the past 22 years. Finally, the truth is being revealed. I am appreciative and deeply humbled that this moment has finally come.” Ever since his 1997 trial, Tapp and his attorneys have argued that he was factually innocent and that the state’s case against him was rooted in police-driven coerced statements that included crime scene details police fed to him. The police used interrogation techniques over multiple days proven by scientific and legal experts to be psychologically coercive and capable of producing false confessions. “We are all deeply relieved that, finally, after more than 22 years, the court has acknowledged Mr. Tapp’s innocence. Sadly, this is a case that should have been resolved decades ago. DNA evidence excluded Mr. Tapp before he went to trial in 1997. But this case is one more example of how false confessions trump all other evidence in our criminal justice system,” said John K. Thomas, Tapp’s lead attorney.
Sadly, this is a case that should have been resolved decades ago.“In more than two dozen exoneration cases, innocent people like Mr. Tapp were convicted even though they were excluded by DNA testing before they even went to trial. In nearly all of these cases, rather than recognizing the DNA exclusion for what it was—evidence of innocence—prosecutors pursued and secured wrongful convictions because of their misplaced faith in police-induced custodial statements over actual science,” said Vanessa Potkin, the Innocence Project’s director of post-conviction litigation and part of Tapp’s legal team. In 2017, after more than 20 years of wrongful incarceration, Tapp was released from prison based on additional DNA testing. While the court vacated his rape conviction, Tapp was re-sentenced for first-degree murder. This past May, however, Idaho Falls police announced that following the creation of a vast family tree for the DNA profile isolated from the rapist’s semen, Brian Dripps was identified as the source of the semen. Dripps was arrested, additional DNA testing confirmed the match and he offered a detailed confession to the rape and murder, explaining to the police that he’d acted alone. Further investigation showed that Dripps lived across the street from the victim at the time of the murder.
We used every new technique we could find to analyze the DNA to advance Mr. Tapp’s innocence claim.In 1998, despite clear evidence of his innocence, Tapp was wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder and rape after 18-year-old Dodge was discovered in her Idaho Falls apartment, stabbed to death and her throat slashed. No physical evidence linked Tapp to the crime. In fact, before the case went to trial, DNA testing conducted by the state excluded Tapp as the source of semen deposited by the rapist immediately before he murdered her. Nonetheless, law enforcement pursued Tapp as the prime suspect. Over the course of several weeks in early 1997, investigators subjected Tapp to more than 30 hours of intense interrogation. Early on, Tapp told police that he was not involved and had no knowledge of the crime. Yet, as police questioning continued, in conjunction with their threats of execution and false promises of leniency, Tapp eventually implicated himself as well as two other innocent men suggested to him by the police based on their erroneous theory of the case. The prosecutors’ case rested on Tapp’s confession, although it was mired with troubling inconsistencies and the testimony of a young woman who the police manipulated into falsely claiming she heard Tapp mention his involvement in the murder at a party. Tapp and his defense argued at trial that the confession was false and coerced by investigators who were ignoring all other evidence, including the compelling exculpatory DNA results. Nonetheless, Tapp was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison plus 15 years. The district court rejected the prosecution’s request for the death penalty. The Idaho Innocence Project (IIP) took Tapp’s case in 2007, changing the Idaho DNA testing statute to allow for Tapp’s DNA petition and helping Idaho Falls police identify the male DNA lineage that eventually led to the new suspect. The IIP worked with John K. Thomas of the Bonneville County Public Defender’s Office for more than a decade to test several items of evidence. “We used every new technique we could find to analyze the DNA to advance Mr. Tapp’s innocence claim,” said Idaho Innocence Project Executive Director Greg Hampikian. The Innocence Project in New York joined the defense more than five years ago. Through their investigation, the legal team worked with false confession expert Steve Drizin to examine the more than 30 hours of recorded video interrogation and discovered that police fed the then-20-year-old Tapp facts about the crime scene using deception and other sophisticated and psychologically manipulative techniques to eventually secure a false confession. More than 25 percent of the more than 360 wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence in the United States have involved some form of a false confession. Research into these exoneration cases has revealed various factors that lead to false confessions, including psychologically coercive techniques—such as investigators’ use of false statements about the presence of incriminating evidence, intimidation or use of force by law enforcement and police misleading suspects to believe they’ll be released if they simply confess—that are rooted in securing confessions as opposed to gathering information and facts about the case. One solution to prevent false confessions is for states to enact statutes or court rules that require custodial interrogations to be recorded in their entirety. Idaho does not have such a statute in place and, therefore, should pursue a mandate for the recordation of interrogations. As demonstrated by the Tapp case, in which a large portion of the interrogation was recorded, it’s imperative that the state also implement alternative interrogation methods that are neither guilt-presumptive nor driven by techniques that are coercive or based in deception. Tapp’s lead attorney is Bonneville County Public Defender John K. Thomas. He is also represented by Jennifer Cummins of the Idaho Innocence Project at Boise State University; Peter Neufeld and Vanessa Potkin of the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University; and was previously represented by former Idaho Innocence Project attorneys Richard Visser and Jared Hoskins, Dennis Benjamin of Nevin, Benjamin, McKay and Bartlett LLP and Sarah Thomas, formerly of the Idaho State Appellate Public Defenders). Dr. Greg Hampikian of the Idaho Innocence Project at Boise State University provided extensive DNA analysis and consultation. Steven A. Drizin, clinical professor of law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in Chicago, provided expert analysis on Tapp’s false confession. Carol Dodge, the mother of Angie Dodge, fought tirelessly to secure justice for Tapp and for her daughter. "
The entire release can be read at:
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Also read the National Registry of Exonerations entry by Ken Otterbourg at the link below:
On the morning of June 13, 1996, Angie Dodge was raped and stabbed to death in her apartment in Idaho Falls, Idaho. She was 18 years old, and her body was found after she didn’t show up for work.
The city’s police department investigated the killing, but the summer and fall came and went without an arrest. That changed in early 1997, after a man from Idaho Falls named Benjamin Hobbs was arrested on January 5 in Ely, Nevada, and charged with sexual assault. After learning of the arrest, Idaho Falls police interviewed Hobbs and then began interviewing his friends, trying to build a case against him. One friend was 20-year-old Christopher Tapp. He and Dodge were part of a sprawling group of young people, so-called “River Rats,” who hung out by the trails along the Snake River not far from Dodge’s apartment. Tapp had also been seen with Dodge at a gathering the night before she died.
Tapp was first interviewed by the Idaho Falls police on January 7 and then released. He was interviewed again on January 10, and police scheduled another interview with him the following day. Before that third interview took place, his parents hired an attorney, and Tapp didn’t show up for the scheduled interview. The police went to his house, where Tapp’s mother told them that her son would come to the station on January 13 with his attorney to answer questions. Rather than wait, the police returned with an arrest warrant and charged Tapp with being an accessory to a felony.
In the first interview, Tapp said neither he nor Hobbs were involved in Dodge’s death, and that he knew nothing about it. Then, at the interview on January 10, Tapp said that Hobbs had killed Dodge and asked him to provide an alibi. On January 15, his story changed again, and he said that he had been with Hobbs when Hobbs killed Dodge. He said Hobbs was angry at Dodge for trying to break up his marriage.
During most of these interviews, a videorecorder was running. In addition, Tapp’s attorney watched on a monitor from a separate room. One of the officers who questioned Tapp was Jared Fuhriman, who had been a school resource officer and was seen as a person Tapp trusted.
On January 15 and 17, Tapp entered into a series of immunity agreements with prosecutors. Under the terms of these agreements, Tapp had to provide truthful information about the crime, and in return he would only be charged with and allowed to plead guilty to aiding and abetting an aggravated battery.
Tapp was interviewed on January 18, but there was now was a problem. DNA tests had come back and excluded Hobbs and Tapp as the source of the semen found on Dodge’s body and clothes. The police suggest a fix, offering up the idea that a friend of theirs named Jeremy Sargis was also involved.
Tapp changed his story again, and now said that Hobbs and Sargis raped and killed Dodge./
On January 27, the DNA tests on Sargis came back. They were negative. In addition, Sargis’s alibi had checked out. Prosecutors were angry, and they voided Tapp’s immunity agreement on January 29 because they said he had been untruthful. Also on that day, Tapp was taken to the crime scene. His attorney declined to go. Afterwards, Tapp changed his story again. Now, Tapp said, he had held Dodge down during the rape and stabbing. Hobbs was still there, but Sargis was no longer present, replaced by a friend of Hobbs’s named “Mike,” whom Tapp didn’t know.
On January 30, Tapp took his fifth polygraph test. During the questioning, police told him that he could possibly get a more lenient sentence if he had been in fear of his life after witnessing the attack on Dodge. Eventually, Tapp said he cut Dodge across the breast, joining the assault, because Hobbs threatened to kill him. The police officer told him he “passed” the test, but would note on his report that Tapp was “deceptive” in his answer about participating in the crime.
On February 3, Tapp was charged with first-degree murder, rape, and use of a deadly weapon in the commission of a felony, which was a sentencing enhancement. Hobbs, although convicted of the Nevada assault, was never charged in Dodge’s death. Sargis had been initially charged as an accessory, but the charges were dismissed.
Tapp’s trial in District Court for Idaho’s Seventh Judicial District began on May 12, 1998. Tapp’s attorney tried unsuccessfully to suppress the confession, arguing that it had been coerced, but Judge Ted V. Wood said the vast majority of Tapp’s statements to police could be used against him.
The confession tapes and the police explanations of their contents took up much of the trial. In the first interviews with Tapp, it was clear that police were focused on Hobbs as the suspect, and trying to get Tapp to implicate his friend. They falsely told Tapp that Hobbs had already placed Tapp at the crime scene, and that they could help Tapp if he cooperated. Tapp said he would help if he could, but he didn’t know anything; he was just a “scared little man.” In later interviews, under pressure from the detectives, Tapp’s involvement would steadily increase, and he would eventually say that he helped hold down Dodge, while Hobbs and the third man raped and stabbed her, and then forced Tapp to slash her right breast. During the interviews, he would be threatened with the death penalty and told that he couldn’t remember what he had done because he had repressed the memories of his brutal actions. At trial, Fuhriman testified that Tapp knew what Dodge was wearing before he was shown crime-scene photos. But a later examination of all the polygraph and confession videos showed Tapp did not mention the clothing until after seeing the photos.
Along with Tapp’s confession, prosecutors also introduced the testimony of a young woman named Destiny Osborne. She said she was at a party a few days after Dodge was killed, and she overheard Tapp and Hobbs talking about the crime. Osborne, who acknowledged being high on drugs at the party, said that she heard Hobbs say he had killed Dodge because she owed him money for methamphetamine. That was contradicted by Tapp’s statements to police, in which he said Dodge didn’t do drugs.
Tapp did not testify, but witnesses provided an alibi. They said that Tapp had spent the night with a woman, and the date was clear because Tapp’s girlfriend had caught them the next morning. But prosecutors presented other witnesses in Tapp’s circle of acquaintances who said he had the dates wrong.
The jury of nine women and three men convicted Tapp on all three charges on May 28, 1998. He was sentenced later that year to life in prison, with a minimum sentence of 30 years for the murder conviction and 10 years for the rape conviction.
Tapp fought his conviction through a series of appeals, challenging – among other things -- the prosecution’s voiding of the immunity agreement, whether he had diminished mental capacity, and the effectiveness of his attorneys in suppressing his statements to police. Each was rejected, although a 2001 opinion by the Idaho Court of Appeals said Tapp’s Miranda rights had been violated during several – although not all – of his interviews with police. It also said that error was harmless.
Caroline Dodge, Angie’s mother, had initially pushed for Tapp to receive the death penalty. As years passed without any other arrests, however, she began to harbor serious doubts about Tapp’s guilt, and eventually she became one of the strongest advocates for his innocence. In 2013, after viewing the videotapes of Tapp’s confessions, she contacted Steven Drizin, one of the nation’s leading experts in false confessions and a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law. He agreed to investigate the case pro bono. The report he published in 2014 concluded that Tapp’s confession was coerced, produced through deceit and pressure, and then enhanced by the officers supplying Tapp with sufficient details to lend credibility to his statements. Drizin helped recruit the Innocence Project of New York to work on Tapp’s case, and they joined the Idaho Innocence Project and Judges for Justice in the sprawling effort to secure Tapp’s freedom.
In May 2016, Tapp’s attorneys, led by John Thomas of the Bonneville County Public Defender’s Office, filed a motion for post-conviction relief. They asserted that Tapp’s confession was the result of police coercion and deception, and that videotapes of three of the seven polygraph tests that showed that coercion and deception had been withheld from Tapp’s trial team.
In addition, the motion noted that Tapp’s confession didn’t fit the evidence. He had told the officers that the crime took place about 1 a.m., but Dodge had been with friends at about 12:30, and an autopsy showed her bladder was very full, indicating she had been asleep for some time.
That motion would never be ruled on. On March 22, 2017, Thomas reached an agreement with Bonneville County District Attorney Danny Clark: Tapp’s rape conviction was vacated, and the sentence for his murder conviction was reduced to time served. As part of the deal, Tapp agreed not to fight his murder conviction or seek compensation. He was released from prison. At the time, Clark said the deal made clear Tapp’s involvement in Dodge’s death. “Anyone who says the evidence proves Tapp is innocent is operating from a biased agenda or his or her own personal belief,” he said.
Separately in 2017, Osborne recanted her testimony, first to Dodge’s mother, then to Tapp. She said she didn’t even know Hobbs. Osborne said the police had threatened to arrest her on drug charges, and that when she had trouble remembering events as she practiced her testimony before trial, the officers reassured her that the difficulty was due to her drug use.
After Tapp’s release, the Idaho Falls police began working with a technology company called Parabon Nanolabs in an effort to find a match for the DNA sample. After creating a genetic profile from the sample, Parabon compared it with profiles submitted to genetic databases by people looking to identify relatives or discover their ancestry. Starting with samples in the database, Parabon was able to use other records to build a family tree of potential donors through the use of genetic genealogy. The first six samples from that tree didn’t match.
Then, the analysts learned that there was a seventh potential donor, a man named Brian Dripps. Dripps had lived across the street from Dodge and been questioned by police early in the investigation, before the focus turned to Hobbs and then to Tapp. Dripps now lived in Caldwell, on the other side of the state. The Idaho Falls police surveilled him, waiting for him to leave a DNA sample through a discarded cigarette or a drink can. Eventually, they recovered a cigarette butt, and the testing showed a match. Dripps was brought in for questioning, confessed, and was arrested on May 15, 2019 for murder and rape. He said he acted alone and did not know Tapp.
On July 17, 2019, Tapp’s murder conviction was vacated. “As far as the court is concerned, you are cleared of the charges you have been living under for the past 20-plus years,” Judge Alan Stephens stated in his decision. It was believed to be the first time that genetic genealogy has been used to exonerate a defendant.
Afterwards, Tapp said: “I’m so thankful that I’ve been given this second chance at life. I’ve wasted 20 years of my life for something I never did, but I also grew up over those 20 years.”
Clark, the district attorney who two years earlier had said Tapp was complicit in Dodge’s death, joined in the new motion to vacate the murder conviction. He said, “We stringently try to hold those who are guilty accountable. And sometimes that comes late.”
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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;
