Brooklyn DA’s Probe of 50 Convictions Featuring One Detective: Conviction Integrity Unit, False Confessions in the Spotlight

With the news that the District Attorney of Brooklyn is re-examining convictions in 50 cases featuring the work of one particular detective (see stories here and here ), we see two issues that have surfaced on the Failed Evidence blog before: false convictions and Conviction Integrity Units (CIUs).

First, the cases under re-examination all involve retired NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella, who had a penchant for getting confessions out of suspects when other detectives could not. According to Scarcella, “there were cases where suspects talked to one detective and they got nothing, and they called me and I got statements. A lot of guys don’t know how to talk to people.”   Some of these suspects who allegedly confessed said that they had told Scarcella nothing.  Scarcella also relied regularly on testimony from one particular drug-addicted prostitute; among the many times she served as Scarcella’s “go-to witness,” she gave crucial eyewitness testimony in two separate murder cases against the same man.  According to one prosecutor who had the woman testify in two trials, “It was near folly to even think that anyone would believe [her] about anything, let alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy kill two different people.”

But there is also this: the re-examinations are being handled by the Brooklyn DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), which I wrote about in connection with the exoneration and release of David Ranta, here.  As readers of the Failed Evidence blog know, CIUs are  dedicated units within prosecutors’ offices, just like  homicide or fraud units, that take on the task of re-opening old convictions now in doubt.  The first CIUs were established by DA Craig Watkins in Dallas and former DA Pat Lykos in Houston, and they have begun to pop up in other places.  In New York, both the Brooklyn DA and the Manhattan DA have established CIUs.

The CIU model for examining possible wrongful convictions isn’t perfect; a CIU is, by its nature, not independent of the DA’s office, and could be stopped in its tracks or dismantled completely just as easily as it could be created.  But as I’ve argued here before, they at least represent a step toward accountability for wrongful convictions, in a field in which too few elected prosecutors will touch prior convictions at all.  We should pay careful attention to how this large-scale investigation by the Brooklyn DA’s CIU works out; it will say a lot about whether CIUs can be part of the solution going forward.

 

Clarity on Miranda: Why the Boston Bomber Won’t “Walk on a (Miranda) Technicality”

For those who want clarity on how the Miranda warnings, and the government’s use of the “public safety” exception, here’s my interview on WESA FM Public Radio on the program Essential Pittsburgh.  This wide-ranging discussion allowed host Paul Guggenheimer and I to thoroughly explore all the aspects of the Miranda warnings.  How it is actually used by police?  Does the warning actually stop people from talking to the police, undermining efforts to prosecute the guilty?  And how it might impact the prosecution of the Boston bombing case?

In the days since the federal government’s announcement that they would not read the Boston bombing suspect the Miranda warnings, under the “public safety” exception, I’ve had some conversations with some acquaintances — all reasonably bright, aware people.  I’ve asked them what they thought would happen to the bomber in the courts if the government did not read the suspect his rights.  The unanimous reply: the Miranda failure means he’ll be freed because some court will let him “walk on this technicality.”  Those conversations, the uninformed media coverage of the issue, and the willingness of politicians of both parties to twist the law for their own political gain are what motivated me to write an op-ed for yesterday’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and to discuss the issue on the radio.

“Failed Evidence” Discussions in Cincinnati, April 4 and 5

On Thursday April 4, and Friday April 5, I’ll be in Cincinnati for two discussions of Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science (2012).  Both are free and open to the public.

On April 4, I’ll be discussing the book at 7:00 p.m. at the Clifton Cultural Arts Center, 3711 Clifton Avenue, Cincinnati OH 43220.  The event is sponsored by the ACLU of Ohio.

On April 5, I’ll present at talk at the University of Cincinnati College of Law at noon.  The address is  2540 Clifton Ave, Cincinnati, OH 45221.  The event is in Room 114.  The event is sponsored by the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Institute for Justice/Ohio Innocence Project.  The event has been approved for CLE credit for attorneys.

Another Call for Recording Interrogations: South Carolina

In another sign that resistance to better, science-based practices will eventually have to yield, a news report indicates that a member of the South Carolina has  introduced a bill that would require police to record interrogations of suspects.

The bill, proposed by Rep. Todd Rutherford of Columbia, “would require judges to instruct jurors that they could ‘draw an adverse inference’ if a law enforcement officer failed to record the questioning of a suspect unless there was an equipment failure.”  That required instruction would effectively require that the police record interrogations, because jurors would hear from the court that the interrogation might be suspicious.

Even if the bill does not pass, the significance of the proposal is hard to miss.  An increasing number of states and jurisdictions require recording of interrogations under various circumstances (see the Innocence Project’s map here), and the research shows that the recording requirement does not harm the investigation process.  In fact, recording turns out to be a great help to the police overall.  The research of Thomas Sullivan on the practical effects of recording has been particularly insightful and helpful on this issue, and academics such as Richard Leo, Saul Kassin, and Richard Ofshe have made tremendous contributions in the area of false confessions and why recording can help.

More to the point, South Carolina would not be viewed by anyone as a jurisdiction that has been particularly favorable to defendants on criminal justice issues.  The fact that the legislature in South Carolina now has a proposal to consider on recording interrogations means that, little by little, we are nearing a tipping point, which will bring us closer to what the scientific research shows us.

 

Recording Confessions: Prosecutor Says It’s a Good Idea, But Don’t Tell Us We Have To

There is more talk than ever about how to safegaurd the criminal justice system against false confessions.  One reform that can help avoid these catastrophic errors is for police to record in-custody confessions.  With a recording of the entire interrogation (not just the part where the subject admits his or her involvement), the worst abuses are curbed, the jury or judge can see and hear exactly what happened, and there are many fewer legal issues about whether Miranda warnings were properly given.  The results, according to the police departments that have been required under state law to do this for years (most notably, Minnesota since 1994 and Alaska even earlier) have been almost uniformly positive.

Thus I was encouraged by a news item I saw from Pennsylvania, my home state, in which a county prosecutor seemed to take a forward-looking stance: she was launching a pilot program in which county detectives will record interrogations of murder suspects:

“Police and prosecutors need to be on the front lines of making sure we are doing things the right way … It’s up to us to do our jobs with integrity and maintain integrity in our investigations,” Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman said…[S]he said she was drawn to the issue after serving as a member of the Joint State Government Commission’s advisory committee on wrongful convictions. The committee issued a report in the fall of 2011.

Applause for Ms. Fermin…except for one thing.  She is against any requirement that recording  be mandatory.  Rather, police and prosecutors should get to decide for themselves whether they want to do this.

“When you’re working in law enforcement and you’re working on the street … you learn there are any number of ways to do” things, Ms. Ferman said. “Why would you try to hamstring police? The goal should be: do it right, do it properly, do it with integrity and do it fairly.”

I can’t agree.  First, police and prosecutors in Pennsylvania have the power, right now, to decide to make recording of interrogations standard practice.  Despite the fact that it is universally applauded by law enforcement in every jurisdiction in which it is required — see the many comments here and in Failed Evidence from police and prosecutors experienced with recording — most agencies still don’t do it.  Second, recording really does make for better law enforcement and better outcomes and fewer false confessions. So there comes a time when those resisting should not get to continue to resist, just because they think they know better.

If a doctor wanted to keep using leeches because he thought he knew better, would we let that continue?

 

 

“The Central Park Five:” New Ken Burns Film Highlights False Confessions

Recall the 1989 case of the Central Park jogger: a young woman brutally beaten and sexually assaulted in Central Park.  The suspects, five young black and Latino men, confessed while in police custody.  Based on those confessions — there was no physical evidence connecting them to the crime, and their DNA did not match specimens at the crime scene — they went to prison.  Years after the fact, a convicted rapist and murderer confessed that he had perpetrated the crime, acting alone.  When his DNA did match, the five men were exonerated by a court.

This case is the newest subject for filmmaker Ken Burns, the man who has made widely-acclaimed multi-part PBS documentaries about baseball, the Civil War, and so many other aspects of American life and history.  In “The Central Park Five”, Burns (joined by co-directors David McMahon and Sarah Burns, his daughter) tells a powerful story of injustice.  A major focus of the film is a central question that will be familiar to readers of Failed Evidence: why would anyone ever confess to committing a serious crime, when the person did not do it?  For example, here is Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, in a review heard December 3 on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition:

“The Central Park Five” also serves as a cinematic primer on what has become a disturbing aspect of our criminal justice system: the ability and the willingness of police to psychologically manipulate people into confessing to things they have not done.

Turan’s review lets one of the five exonerated men explain why and how such a thing could happen:

They had made up a story saying something like, uh, ‘well, we have your prints on her pants.’  I’m thinking, ‘how did they take my prints, and put it on her pants?’

Readers of Failed Evidence will recognize what happened here: lies about forensic results and forensic testing are among the perfectly legal interrogation techniques that increase the risk that an innocent person will confess.

Congratulations to Burns and his co-directors for bringing the full story of the case to the nation’s attention.   The question I am most frequently asked, in presentations and interviews of all kinds, remains the same: why would anyone confess to something that the person did not do?  Perhaps The Central Park Five will help give people an answer.

 

Alleged Killer of Boy in NYC Cold Case Will Argue His Confession Was False

In a headline-grabbing New York murder case, we will soon get to see whether recording the interrogations of suspects will help cases stand up in court and persuade juries.

In my September 2 op-ed piece in the New York Daily News, I discussed the case against the killer of Etan Patz, a young boy murdered over three decades ago in New York City.   The investigation had been dormant until this past spring, when the NYPD announced the arrest of Pedro Hernandez, a New Jersey resident.  The NYPD said that Hernandez had confessed, and — because the interrogation took place in New Jersey and not New York — the NYPD had a recording of the confession.  This recording would likely not have been made in New York, because — at least at that time — the NYPD continued to refuse to record interrogations, as it had for many years.  (The rule changed in September, when NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly announced that the NYPD would begin to implement a plan to record interrogations in all murder and sexual assault cases.

At the end of last week, Hernandez appeared in court for a hearing.  According to multiple media accounts, Hernandez will plead not guilty.  The reason: according to his lawyer, Hernandez had confessed falsely because he is mentally ill, and there was no other evidence that implicated him aside from the conviction.

The case will thus make for an interesting test of the utility of recording.  Back in May, when Commissioner Kelly announced Hernandez’s arrest, he made a special point of saying that the NYPD had the interrogation recorded.  For those who had long advocated recording as fundamental to better interrogation practice, the reaction was at once “great!” and “so why are you still resisting the idea of doing this regularly, if it was a good enough idea to do in this important case?”

Whether the defense team will be able to prove that Hernandez was mentally ill at the time of the interrogation, and if he was to prove also that his illness made a difference in the interrogation, remains to be seen.  Even persons with long histories of mental illness aren’t necessarily incapacitated or hurt by these illnesses in every circumstance in which they find themselves.   My guess, without having seen the recording, is that the recording will make it easier for the prosecution to convict.  And that, I hope, will increase the momentum behind making recording of interrogations standard best practice in law enforcement.

Where is Minnesota on Failed Evidence? Part I — Recording Interrogations

I’ll be speaking about my book Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science (2012) this Thursday, Nov. 8 at the University of Minnesota Law School at 4:30 pm in Mondale Hall.  My talk will be followed by a panel that includes Ramsay County Attorney John Choi and John Harrington, former chief of police in St. Paul and currently the police chief of the Metro Transit Police Department.  The event is free and open to the public.  The Law School is located at 229 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455.

Because I’ll be in the Twin Cities speaking about the book, let’s ask: how does Minnesota stand on the issues covered in Failed Evidence: faulty eyewitness identifications, false confessions, and basic types of forensic evidence?

A good place to start is with interrogations and false confessions.  Minnesota was one of the first two states to require its police officers to record interrogations. Here’s the story.

In 1994, the Minnesota Supreme Court decided the case of State v. Scales.  The evidence of the defendant’s guilt, including statements he made to the police, was overwhelming, and the Supreme Court did not overturn his conviction.  But the justices used the case to require  recording of interrogations in all future cases.

…[W]e hold that all custodial interrogation including any information about rights, any waiver of those rights, and all questioning shall be electronically recorded where feasible and must be recorded when questioning occurs at a place of detention.  If law enforcement officers fail to comply with this recording requirement, any statements the suspect makes in response to the interrogation may be suppressed at trial.

Minnesota thus became the first state with a large population to require recording.

How did this mandate go over with law enforcement?  By all reports, not so good at first; predictably, there was resistance and widespread prediction of a public safety crisis.  But a funny thing happened on the way to this apocalypse: the police became big believers in recording interrogations when they figured out that doing so helped them get convictions and did away with bogus claims of constitutional violations by defendants.  One quote, attributed to Neil Nelson, a former St. Paul police commander, shows up again and again: Nelson called recording of interrogations “the best tool ever shoved down our throats.”

If you are or were part of law enforcement in Minnesota, what are your thoughts about recording? Your experience gives your comments great value.

 

Richard Lapointe, Convicted Based on a False Confession, Gets a New Trial

Readers of the Failed Evidence blog will recall the story of Richard Lapointe, the Connecticut man who was convicted for the murder of his wife’s grandmother.  Lapointe, who suffers from mental and physical disabilities, has been serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.  He was arrested after a nine and one-half hour interrogation.  According to an op-ed column in The Middletown Press:

The interrogation wasn’t recorded. Detectives’ notes quote him as saying: “If the evidence shows that I was there, and that I killed her, then I killed her, but I don’t remember being there.” Many of the statements he made, about how Martin was assaulted and murdered, were contradicted by the facts in the case.

If ever a case called out for recording, it was this one.  And it was not done.

Now, an appellate court in Connecticut has granted a new trial, based on prosecutorial failure to disclose evidence to the defense.  This will give Lapointe a chance to present evidence uncovered since the trial, including DNA that does not support Lapointe’s conviction.

Stay tuned.

Failed Evidence on WYPR Public Radio’s “Midday” Program

I was a guest on WYPR Public Radio’s “Midday” program today, discussing Failed Evidence.  Today was the monthly “Midday on Science” show, and host Dan Rodicks and regular science contributor John Monahan asked great questions on everything from DNA to more traditional forensic sciences to eyewitness identification and false confessions.  Listeners asked terrific questions too.

You can hear the whole show by clicking here and clicking on the audio button.