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.’ As all too many of this Blog's post have shown, I also recognize that pressure for false confessions can take many forms, up to and including physical violence, even physical and mental torture.
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog:
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Craighead didn’t see a way out, so he admitted to the shooting and signed a confession written by Simon. He was convicted of manslaughter for his friend’s death, a sentence which he fought even after his parole in 2009. His break came when Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Shannon Walker vacated the conviction in February 2021 and ordered a new trial, citing Simon’s “history of falsifying confessions and lying under oath. “This new evidence establishes a common scheme of misconduct,” Walker wrote in the order. “This impeachment evidence demonstrates that Simon has repeatedly lied as part of her misconduct, which would allow a jury to evaluate whether to trust her testimony in light of information demonstrating a character for truthfulness.”
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Detroit’s homicide section had a “practice of regularly arresting and detaining persons they believed to have information concerning a homicide-related offense, including suspects’ family members and individuals who lived in the vicinity of the crime,” the DOJ report said. “When there was a high-profile murder in the neighborhood, they were happy to violate the rights of every single person in that community,” Syed, who was lead counsel on the Johnson and Scott cases, said about the homicide unit. “They were just going to arrest any random young Black man who was in the vicinity.” With time and awareness, the culture at the Detroit Police Department has slowly changed. “Once that kind of conduct starts to be revealed, I think, thankfully, the community kind of wakes up and understands there should be a limit to what police can do,” Syed said."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Police often concluded murder investigations after getting signed confessions. “I had a detective tell me, ‘A case is closed if we get an arrest warrant signed, or if there’s a confession, and whatever happens at trial happens, but we closed our case,’” Mueller said. George Calicut Jr. is one such example. He had admitted stealing a cell phone in 1999, but prosecutors and his attorneys say he later signed a false confession written by Simon claiming he killed a woman and left with “$5 and a cell phone.” Calicut had no prior interactions with police and at his trial, “there were no eyewitnesses or physical evidence linking” him “to the crime. DNA testing was ordered but not performed.” An agreement dismissing the case says Simon told Calicut she could help him by drafting a statement that would reduce the charge to manslaughter — and warned that if he contacted a lawyer, he’d be charged with first-degree murder."
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STORY: "She was once considered one of Detroit’s toughest homicide interrogators. Now she’s accused of coercing false confessions," by Reporter Ray Sanchez, published by CNN, on April 26, 2026. (Ray Sanchez is a Senior Reporter for CNN’s National Hub in New York, where for more than a decade he has covered breaking news and generated in-depth human stories chronicling tales of injustice and the struggles of life in America – including the migrant crisis, police brutality, mass shootings and the devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic.)
PHOTO CAPTION: Former Detroit homicide investigator Barbara Simon is at the center of at least six wrongful convictions overturned or vacated because of coerced or falsified statements.
GIST: "Tall, with a mound of curls spilling onto her face, Barbara Simon looks like the preschool and elementary school substitute teacher she is now.
But behind the silver wire-rimmed glasses and sparkling accessories is a hard-nosed ex-cop with a reputation as “The Closer” – a tough interrogator known for her uncanny ability to elicit confessions in murder cases.
Although Simon has never been charged with a crime, many of her former cases are under review and more exonerations are expected, attorneys with the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic told CNN.
Simon has repeatedly denied the allegations in past testimony and declined CNN’s requests for comment for this story; the Detroit Police Department never disciplined her over the claims. Attorneys who represented Simon in previous lawsuits did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment. The Detroit Police Department and the city of Detroit also did not respond.
‘They called her “The Closer”’
Mark Craighead sat before Simon in an interrogation room in 2000, when Detroit police officers brought the husband and father to the old police headquarters, telling him it was about “a three-year-old case that we need to close.”
Craighead had been questioned twice before for the murder of his close friend Chole Pruett, but he insisted he didn’t do it and was at work in a locked warehouse 20 miles away at the time of the shooting.
He was held overnight in a jail cell crawling with roaches and mice and his repeated requests to call his wife and an attorney were ignored.
When Craighead met with Simon, “She tells me that my wife is going to find herself a new husband and my kids are going to be calling somebody else daddy if I didn’t tell her what I had done because I am going to jail for the rest of my life,” Craighead said, according to court documents from a 2001 evidentiary hearing to determine if his confession was made voluntarily.
Craighead was forced to take a polygraph test, which he was told he failed.
“She told me that if I don’t start cooperating with her and tell her what really happened, that she would use the polygraph and the witness statement to place me at the scene of the crime,” Craighead said. “And that would convict me, convict me and then send me to jail for the rest of my life.”
But, Craighead said Simon told him, there “must have been a reason for the shooting.”
“She told me I didn’t seem like the kind of person that would kill and rob my best friend so I must have had a reason.”
Craighead said Simon gave him an example, “like an argument that turned into a fight … and it was an accident that the gun went off and did something like that happen, if it happened like that, that I should tell her.”
Only then, she told him, could she help him get his charges reduced, get an attorney and get bond and “fight this thing on the outside,” he testified.
“They called her ‘The Closer,’” Craighead said in an interview with CNN. The police “knew what tactics she was using.”
If he didn’t cooperate, then Simon said she would “use what she got and send me to jail for the rest of my life.”
Craighead didn’t see a way out, so he admitted to the shooting and signed a confession written by Simon.
He was convicted of manslaughter for his friend’s death, a sentence which he fought even after his parole in 2009.
His break came when Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Shannon Walker vacated the conviction in February 2021 and ordered a new trial, citing Simon’s “history of falsifying confessions and lying under oath.”
“This new evidence establishes a common scheme of misconduct,” Walker wrote in the order. “This impeachment evidence demonstrates that Simon has repeatedly lied as part of her misconduct, which would allow a jury to evaluate whether to trust her testimony in light of information demonstrating a character for truthfulness.”
The Michigan Court of Appeals later affirmed the decision, writing that the “newly discovered evidence also indicates that Investigator Simon’s interrogation tactics demonstrated a scheme, plan, or system to obtain false confessions.”
Later, the prosecution dismissed Craighead’s charges and he was exonerated.
The way the decisions unfolded in cases involving Simon was “groundbreaking,” said Imran Syed, a law professor and co-director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic.
“In Michigan, that sort of pattern-and-practice-based exoneration wasn’t really a thing until Craighead,” he said.
The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office declined to comment about Craighead’s case or any of the others handled by Simon. But Prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a statement last month that her office’s “systematic review of Investigator Simon’s cases” is “exhaustive and ongoing.” Worthy added that the conviction integrity unit has “been consistently working on these cases and more involving other DPD Homicide detectives.”
New eyewitness account leads to exonerations
Justly Johnson and Kendrick Scott each spent nearly two decades in prison for a killing they didn’t commit in a case Simon investigated.
The men were arrested for the brutal murder of Lisa Kindred in front of her children on Mother’s Day 1999, based on witness testimony that was recanted.
“It was a very high-profile case. And the Detroit police felt the pressure. Somebody in that neighborhood was going to prison. They didn’t care who it was,” Johnson, now 52, told CNN. “The whole agenda was they were going to put that murder on somebody, and we were the suspects, and we were going to take that case.”
“Basically, our lives were destroyed,” he said.
The pair filed numerous unsuccessful appeals until new evidence emerged 12 years later: the eyewitness account from Charmous Skinner Jr., Kindred’s son, who was 8 at the time of the murder, and testified that Johnson and Scott were not the killers.
The Michigan Supreme Court remanded the cases for new trials and the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office later dismissed the charges. Johnson and Scott were exonerated in 2018.
At a deposition in 2019, Skinner said the Detroit Police Department never interviewed him – even though he was sitting right next to his mother in the minivan when she was shot.
Simon told Johnson she was under pressure to close the case when she interrogated him, according to an affidavit from Johnson.
He served 19 years for a fatal shooting he didn’t commit. A letter from the gunman changed everything
“Investigator Simon then told me that investigators did talk to my alibi witnesses but it didn’t matter because the mayor was on her boss, and her boss was on them (homicide investigators) and they were going to charge me with the murder whether I was innocent or not,” Johnson said in the affidavit.
She said, “they were going to charge me with murder, and that there wasn’t a jury in America that wouldn’t convict me for killing a white woman,” Johnson said, before she “stormed out of the room.”
In a 2020 deposition about the Kindred case, Simon said she didn’t remember the case and said she wasn’t involved with interrogating the witnesses, who recanted their statements.
She also denied being “under any pressure” to close homicide cases.
“I did my job. I did the best that I could,” she said at the deposition.
A ‘poster child’ for police misconduct in Detroit
Simon graduated from the police academy in 1977 and worked her way up from a patrol officer and member of the sex crimes unit to become a homicide investigator with the Detroit Police Department around 1990.
She has “become the poster child” of “Detroit police misconduct in the 1990s, 2000s,” Syed said, but she was “not the only bad actor.”
“She comes from a culture where what she did was at least tolerated. And some of our clients would say it was more that it was encouraged. It was a whole cultural problem.”
That culture was the subject of a Department of Justice investigation finding that the Detroit Police Department’s homicide section in the 1990s was notorious for casting a wide net over entire neighborhoods and unlawfully arresting people they believed knew about a murder.
In 1998, Detroit police arrested more than three people for every homicide but solved fewer than half of them, according to FBI statistics cited by the DOJ. The city averaged more than 500 homicides a year that decade.
Detroit’s homicide section had a “practice of regularly arresting and detaining persons they believed to have information concerning a homicide-related offense, including suspects’ family members and individuals who lived in the vicinity of the crime,” the DOJ report said.
“When there was a high-profile murder in the neighborhood, they were happy to violate the rights of every single person in that community,” Syed, who was lead counsel on the Johnson and Scott cases, said about the homicide unit. “They were just going to arrest any random young Black man who was in the vicinity.”
With time and awareness, the culture at the Detroit Police Department has slowly changed.
“Once that kind of conduct starts to be revealed, I think, thankfully, the community kind of wakes up and understands there should be a limit to what police can do,” Syed said.
In 2003, the DOJ and Detroit agreed to a monitor to oversee reforms at the police department, including use of force, unlawful detention practices and other misconduct. The oversight ended in 2014, when the DOJ said the department had effectively resolved many of the unconstitutional practices that prompted federal intervention.
Meanwhile, the state passed a law in 2013 requiring police to make video and audio recordings of statements from people arrested for major crimes.
There were other consequences for the city too – like the hefty settlement payments Detroit doled out to the exonerated men in Simon’s cases. Johnson and Scott each received $8 million settlements.
“I will say it would appear with the new police department leadership in the last several years, they want to make themselves more accountable,” said attorney Wolfgang Mueller, who represented Johnson, Scott and Craighead in legal action. “And for selfish reasons, the city’s paying out too much money, and it gives the good cops a black eye.”
‘A very good interrogator’
During Simon’s time with the police department, interrogations took place at the gritty old police headquarters building at 1300 Beaubien Street, a hulking nine-story monolith that occupied an entire city block in downtown Detroit. Witnesses and suspects were often held for hours or even days without probable cause, moving between small interrogation rooms and filthy, vermin-infested holding cells, according to the DOJ report and accounts from the exonerated men and their attorneys.
“Barbara Simon was involved in scores, probably hundreds, of interrogations over a long career, and we just don’t know how many of those cases are bogus, are tainted, but surely there’s more,” said David Moran, who co-founded the Michigan Innocence Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School and was lead counsel on two major cases involving the homicide investigator.
The Michigan Court of Appeals described “striking” similarities in how Simon interrogated three of her cases.
She “was seen as one of the police department’s best interrogators, with a reputation for getting suspects to confess and witnesses to name names,” according to the National Registry of Exonerations, which tracks exonerations through publicly available information.
Simon acknowledged her reputation during a deposition in 2023.
“You were considered a very good interrogator, right?”
“That’s what they say,” she answered.
“And you were very good at getting confessions, right?” asked Mueller.
“I did my job. So, I am not going to say I was a pro.”
DNA and preserved evidence lead to reversals in decades-old cases
Police often concluded murder investigations after getting signed confessions.
“I had a detective tell me, ‘A case is closed if we get an arrest warrant signed, or if there’s a confession, and whatever happens at trial happens, but we closed our case,’” Mueller said.
George Calicut Jr. is one such example. He had admitted stealing a cell phone in 1999, but prosecutors and his attorneys say he later signed a false confession written by Simon claiming he killed a woman and left with “$5 and a cell phone.”
Calicut had no prior interactions with police and at his trial, “there were no eyewitnesses or physical evidence linking” him “to the crime. DNA testing was ordered but not performed.”
An agreement dismissing the case says Simon told Calicut she could help him by drafting a statement that would reduce the charge to manslaughter — and warned that if he contacted a lawyer, he’d be charged with first-degree murder.
After the Michigan Innocence Clinic asked the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office to review the case, it was discovered that DNA evidence excluded Calicut from the scene and he was freed last month after nearly 30 years behind bars.
“I’m still trying to figure out what it means to be free,” he told CNN.
Preserved evidence from the crime scene also led to Lamarr Monson’s murder conviction being vacated after he served 20 years in prison.
Monson was convicted in 1997 based on what he says was a false confession after Simon interrogated him.
“You could say she was aggressive. I would say she was mean,” Monson said of Simon. “I was in a state of shock, and she tried to take advantage of that.”
He said she wrote a statement omitting his alibi and falsely said he stabbed a girl – despite a medical examiner’s testimony that the child was likely beaten with a toilet tank lid found at the scene, according to court records.
“She just began to twist my words and twist things in a way you could say she was answering her own questions. And in doing so, she falsified (the) statement,” Monson told CNN.
“As I complained about me wanting a lawyer, or me wanting to use the phone, she would just kind of shut down, leave the room, maybe leave me in there about an hour or so, then come back in and begin to continue the questions,” he said. “She was actively piecing together what she wanted things to look like.”
Moran, Monson’s attorney, examined the toilet tank lid in 2016 – and discovered fingerprints embedded in the blood stains.
“The toilet tank lid was sitting in a Detroit police warehouse,” Moran recalled. “They brought it out for us and unwrapped it, and it was still covered in dried blood. And in the dried blood were fingerprints they had never bothered to run because they had obtained a false confession from Lamarr Monson within hours.”
The prints matched another man who had confessed to his ex-girlfriend, and Monson was released.
Monson’s case was settled with the city for $8.5 million, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
“I do want (Simon) to be held accountable for her actions,” Monson told CNN.
“She’s made a career of doing this to young Black men in particular. I just have a real disdain about that.”
No accountability, no justice
A few weeks after Calicut’s release, another man convicted of second-degree murder based on a statement obtained by Simon was also freed.
In the case against Roy Blackmon, two witnesses later testified their statements were coerced. They said Simon threatened to charge them as accessories to murder unless they implicated Blackmon in a fatal shooting.
Blackmon is now pursuing a bachelor’s degree and hopes to become a social worker and mentor young people, according to the Innocence Clinic.
He joins Johnson, Scott, Craighead, Monson and Calicut in trying to rebuild their lives after years behind bars – and they share a belief that justice won’t be complete until Simon answers for what she did.
“I pray for her,” Johnson said. “I can’t say I forgive her. She needs to be punished. She hasn’t apologized to nobody. You know what, it’s probably better. She’s probably tormented every day.”
As the men await accountability, Simon remains in the Detroit area. Last year, she testified in a deposition that she has been working as a substitute teacher for students from preschool through fourth grade, but it’s not clear which school district. A company that contracts substitute teachers for schools in the Detroit area did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Before that, after retiring from the police department, she worked as a special agent for the Michigan Attorney General’s Child Support Division.
Simon “worked exclusively on matters related to nonpayment in child support cases,” Michigan Attorney General spokesperson Danny Wimmer said in a statement.
“In her position at this department it would not have been possible for Ms. Simon to engage in the type of misconduct she is now alleged to have committed at other agencies, and we are aware of no issues concerning her investigations into parents who refused to pay child support,” the statement said."
The entire story can be read at:
detroit-barbara-simon-exonerations
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. 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. 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.
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
