Crimes After Interrogation

While people find it hard to believe that anyone would confess to a crime he or she did not commit, there are people who end up making a false confession. In the Central Park Five case, the police managed to get the young boys to admit to the crime with the false promise that they would be allowed to go home if they confessed (Kassin, 2002). For Martin Tankleff, while in an

It may seem implausible that someone would confess to a crime they did not commit, but it does happen, and the prevalence of such confessions occurs at a much higher rate in juvenile populations. Aggressive interrogation methods, like those used in the Reid Technique, lead to a greater probability of false confessions among juvenile subjects than if those techniques had not been used. In a study completed by University of San Francisco law professor and renowned false confession researcher, Richard Leo, 35% of the 125 proven false confession cases he sampled included confessors who were under the age of 18 (2004). Before we examine what it is about this technique that prompts false confessions, we must first outline the systematic, nine-step process developed by John E. Reid & Associates nearly forty years ago.

On June 3, 1993, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley are arrested for the murders of three eight-year-old boys; at this time Damien is only 18 years old. Another significant event that happened during Damien’s adulthood is his girlfriend Dominic became pregnant and had his child Damian Seth Azariah who was born approximately before the trial. Domini would later explain that the child’s name is spelt differently than his dad’s due to the fact that it is based on a biblical character. During the trials Damien recalls just how agonizing it was when he stated,”The only thing I can compare it to is if... imagine that today you found a journal that you had written when you were fourteen or fifteen and started reading it, and had to see how much you had changed and grown as a person, and look back on them. It's kind of embarrassing”

During the trial there were debates on how both children were not in control of their actions which meant that they couldn’t be held responsible for their actions. Many psychiatrists had tried to find the reason that made the two boys’ create such a horrific crime. One forensic psychiatrist stated that examining

Wrongful convictions are common in the court-system. In fact, wrongful convictions are not the rare events that you see or hear on televisions shows, but are very common. They stem from some sort of systematic defect that lead to wrongful convictions such as, eyewitness misidentification testimony, unvalidated or improper forensic science, false confessions and incriminating statements, DNA lab errors, false confessions, and informants (2014). Bringing awareness to all these systematic defects, which result in wrongful, is important because it will better adjust the system to avoid making the same mistakes with future cases. However, false confession is not a systematic defect. It does not occur because files were misplaced or a lab technician put one too many drops. False confessions occur because of some of psychological attempt to protect oneself and their family. Thus, the courts responsibility should be to reduce these false confessions.

Determining a false confession proves difficult due to the multitude of dimensions involved. According to Kassin and Wrightsman’s (1985) survey of the literature, there are three main types of false confessions—voluntary, coerced-compliant, and coerced-internalized. Unlike coerced false confessions, voluntary false confessions arise as a result of someone willingly turning themselves into the police with an account of their crime (McCann, 1998). Voluntary false confessions can result from multiple motives, including an internalized need for punishment or to save someone else’s face. In contrast, coerced false confessions directly result from police interrogations. While coerced-compliant confessions are made to avoid interrogation, escape the stressful situation, or achieve some other reward, coerced-internalized confessions emerge when a suspects begins to

Our criminal justice system has over time implemented and changed the means of sentencing and punishment for crimes. In the United States plea deals are accountable for 90% of criminal cases. A plea deal is an agreement between prosecutor and defendant in whom the defendant accepts a guilty plea to a charge and in return receives some type of concession from the prosecution. As we have moved forward in the judicial system and now have the ability to look back on previous cases, plea deals have become more controversial. The majority of awareness in this area has been used to look deeper into false confessions, grazing right over the fact that false confessions are a large part plea deals. A controversy arose when many refused to believe that situational factors during interrogations and dispositional factors inherent to the suspects could result in false confessions. (Redlich, 2010)

It is almost impossible for justice to be served when the trail was a mess. There was a 12 hour police interrogation of Jessie Misskelley. He is intellectually disabled, causing him to give a false confession. The police should have known the psychology of false confession and shouldn't have interrogated Mr. Misskelley for 12 hours. The sentences were based on hearsay testimony of witnesses who heard the boys talk about the murders: “...the defendant had been motivated as members of a satanic cult” (Robertson 4). Hearsay doesn't prove anything in the court of law. The jury is supposed to know nothing about the case; but of course one juror already had his mind set on his conviction. This juror

There was no evidence collected and tested at the crime scene which could have proved who committed the murders. A lieutenant who contacted a juvenile officer in Memphis both agreed that the murders had to have been done by someone in a cult. The juvenile officer quickly knew of someone who was involved in a cult and said this juvenile could be capable of a crime like this. The accused, Damien Echols, was immediately interviewed and asked questions that the police believed no one but the killer would know the answers to. The answers that were given by Damien Echols were known answers throughout the community and this made Damien look guilty. Damien’s appearance was very strange and different and he was not considered “normal” in the communities beliefs. He was considered guilty by his Wiccan beliefs and his gothic appearance. Not only was Damien deemed guilty of this crime, but two other boys were also accused of these murders. There are many inconsistencies with the case. The police did not collect all evidence in the woods that could have been collected to possibly link the murders to someone. According to TruTV Crime Library, there was a boy who claimed he saw who committed the murders. He claimed he even saw men who spoke Spanish commit the murders. He later changed his story and said he saw one of the victim’s fathers killing the three boys. This same boy could not even identify two of the boys

On June 9th, 1959, a 14 year old boy named Steven Truscott was seen giving 12 year old Lynne Harper a ride on his bike, not knowing that he would be accused and found guilty of sexually assaulting and strangling her to death. For the next 50 years he would seek justice for being wrongfully imprisoned and finally get it. Steven Truscott was a popular and athletic teenage boy who lived with both his parents and his three siblings in the Ontario town of Clinton. Lynne Harper was a girl who also lived with both of her parents as well as her younger brother, whose life ended shortly.

There were a total of seventeen crime scenes due to his actions. The parents believe that they unfairly treated this crime because they failed to consider that their son had a mental illness and also failed to prevent such things from happening. The victims killed were George Chen, Cheng Yuan Hong, Weihan Wang, Katherine Breann Cooper, Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, and Veronika Elizabeth Weiss.

On June 9th 1959, a twelve year old girl by the name of Lynne Harper was walking around her neighbourhood until she encountered a young boy from school, Steven Truscott who gave her a bicycle ride home. Once he dropped her off home and went off, she was abducted, two days later her body was found, she had been raped and strangled. By the reason of several witnesses spotting Steven and Lynne together, the Ontario police wrongly convicted him for committing murder. Steven Truscott was a 14 year old boy, who was popular, athletic, he had no behavioral issues and no criminal past. However the Ontario police did not take time to consider the fact that Steven Truscott was just a normal teenage boy, instead they jumped to conclusions and prosecuted

The community began to search for the boys with no help from local police until the following morning. The boy’s bodies were discovered the next day, tied, naked, and mutilated, in a muddy ravine. Steve Jones, a former juvenile officer with Crittenden county, located a shoe belonging to one of the boys. He called for detective Mike Allen, who found the bodies of the young boys submerged under water (Berg, director, 2012). The murders shocked the small town of West Memphis, and put major pressure on the police department to find the killers and bring them to justice. Arrests were made less than a month after the murders and no other suspects were sought. Three teenage boys, Michael Dwayne (Damien) Echols, age 18, Charles Jason Baldwin, age 16, and Jessie Loyd Misskelley Jr., age 17, were arrested and charged with three counts of murder. All three boys initially claimed their innocence until Misskelley was interrogated for 12 hours with no legal representation or either parent present, confessed to participating in the crime along with Echols and

Terry Vickorie, Steven Rogers, and Andru Crowley will face many charges for their involvement in the homicide of William Boyd, and their actions leading up to and after the event. The charges the boys face will be determined by what the prosecution believes they can prove to a jury, and the wording of the statutes. The prosecution will likely bring the charges of stalking, bribery, conspiracy to burglary, burglary, felony murder, and felony kidnapping. For the events leading up to William’s death. The prosecution will have many options of charges to press in the death of William. This will depend on statute wording, and abundance of evidence toward each charge.

“The wall street Journal noted in Sept. 8, 2013 report, National Registry of Exonerations statistics suggest that young people in particular are more prone to admitting guilt for crimes they did not commit. Thirty-eight percent of exonerations for crimes allegedly committed by youth under 18 in the quarter century involved false confessions.” (John Wihbey and Margaret Weigel,2015,Para.3) False confession is the admission of being guilty for a crime that they did not commit. In the interrogation, Police officers may question witness or victims who may have information on a specific crime. The officers may lead a group of questions about the event or evidence of the crime scene. The suspects or victims may know information about it, however,