In the News - Full Article

By Leonard Post, Staff reporter

When a beleaguered 13-year-old confessed to murder after hours of interrogation in a Mississippi sheriff's station in 2003, he had been isolated from his mother and had never met with a lawyer.

Tyler Edmonds later recanted, becoming a national poster boy for those who question the reliability of child confessions-a concern that has long roiled courts nationwide.

Last month, the Mississippi court of appeals heard arguments in the Edmonds case, which raised, among other issues, whether expert testimony on factors that could contribute to the making of false confessions should have been allowed. Edmonds v. State, No. 2004-TS-02081.

A repudiated confession by a Long Island, N.Y., 17-year-old, Martin H. Tankleff, was key to his 1990 conviction for murdering his parents. He never signed the confession that was handwritten by a detective. A judge is expected to rule on new evidence shortly in his efforts to reopen the case. New York v. Tankleff, No. 1535-88/1290-88.

Although there have been many high-profile juvenile false confession cases-such as the Central Park Jogger case in New York, in which five teenagers falsely confessed to raping a woman but years later were exonerated by DNA evidence-many courts have not recognized a heightened risk that a juvenile's confession could be false.

Nationwide, the relatively few appeals courts that have addressed the issue don't all agree. The trend, though, allows generalized expert testimony about factors that can lead to false confessions, but forbids experts from drawing conclusions about a particular defendant's circumstances.

But studies are helping to define the scope of the issue.

An analysis of 125 proven false-confessions cases done by Richard Leo, a University of California at Irvine criminology professor, and Steven Drizin, a clinical professor at Chicago's Northwestern University School of Law and the director of the school's Innocence Project, found that 32% of them involved juveniles.

It's important to allow experts to testify on the reliability of juvenile confessions, said Simmie Baer, co-chairwoman of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' juvenile justice committee, and senior attorney at the Children and Family Justice Center at the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern's law school.

"The research has been done-we know that juveniles as a group are more suggestible and gullible, not just in an interrogation, but of course in an interrogation," said Baer. "Sure they're capable of telling the truth, but their truth may be a different truth."

She added that when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that juveniles should never be executed, they came to that conclusion because experts from the medical, legal and social sciences fields came together and described the science of adolescent thinking and behavior to the court.

"If they needed assistance, how could a jury hearing a juvenile case not?" she said.

Mississippi morass

In Edmonds, the defense asked the trial judge, James T. Kitchens, to allow a developmental psychologist to testify about factors that contribute to false confessions among juveniles.

In a pretrial hearing, Allison Dyan Redlich of Delmar, N.Y.'s Policy Research Associates, described a 2003 laboratory study she co-authored in which subjects were told that pressing a prohibited key would cause their computers to crash.

Although none pressed that key, all were told they had. Seventy-eight percent of 12- to 13-year-olds, 72% of 15- to 16-year-olds and 59% of those between the ages of 18 and 26 falsely confessed.

The prosecution rebutted her testimony with that of Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist and an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. He testified that "research relating to false confessions is extremely limited, and as it relates to juveniles, it is virtually nonexistent."

The prosecution takes the position in Edmonds that children's confessions should be judged by the same standards as those of adults.

"There should be no scepticism [sic] toward the testimony of children or young people more than adults," argues Mississippi Special Assistant Attorney General W. Glenn Watts in the state's appellate reply brief.

The attorney general's office did not return calls for comment.

Jury is still out

Mississippi's position reflects that of the National District Attorneys Association 2002 Resource Manual and Policy Positions on Juvenile Crime Issues.

"You have to look at the totality of the circumstances to determine whether a statement has been made freely, voluntarily and competently,"said James Backstrom, co-chair of the National District Attorneys Association's juvenile justice and family law committee. "Age, experience and prior contact with law enforcement are some of the factors that have to be considered when the test is applied appropriately.

"I think the jury is still out on whether expert testimony [about factors that contribute to false confessions] should be allowed. You have to be cautious. Generalities about psychology are just that," added Backstrom, the Dakota County, Minn., district attorney.

"Such generalities may not apply to a specific individual . . . .You would have to let the facts of each case dictate the relevancy of expert testimony."

At the conclusion of Edmonds' pretrial hearing, after reviewing the social sciences literature the defense had provided, Kitchens refused to let Redlich testify.

"[T]he false confession theory needs further study and refinement," he ruled, calling it a "new," as yet "unreliable," theory.

Nonsense, said Edmonds' lead counsel, Jim Waide of Tupelo, Miss.'s Waide & Associates.

"To judge the voluntariness and the truthfulness of Tyler's quote unquote confession under the same standards as that of an adult directly contradicts the U.S. Supreme Court," he said, citing In re Gault, 387 U.S. 1 (1967).

In that case, the court held that "authoritative opinion has cast formidable doubt upon the reliability and trustworthiness of 'confessions' by children."

The Edmonds case is fairly straightforward. After his adult half-sister was arrested for the murder of her estranged husband, she accused him of the killing. His mother brought Edmonds to the sheriff's office, where he repeatedly denied knowledge of the murder. After deputies separated him from his mother, they told him they didn't believe him, and that his sister had already pinned the murder on him.

The deputies brought the sister in to meet with him. After she left the room, he confessed on tape that he and his sister had pulled the trigger at the same time-her finger over his-when they shot the victim in his bed. He described white blood-splattered pillowcases. They were neither
white, nor blood-splattered. The weapon was never recovered by police.

In his subsequent recantation, Edmonds said that his sister had told him before her arrest that she had murdered her husband, but that if he confessed, nothing would happen to him, while she feared being executed. A deputy would later testify that the sister had "come to some kind of
hold on the child."

'McMartin' revisited

Redlich said that after the unraveling of the rash of bizarre, illogical ritual daycare sexual abuse allegations, such as in the McMartin preschool cases in Los Angeles County, it became clear that
certain interview techniques could implant false memories in children.

"In McMartin, [police and psychologists] kept telling the children that the abuse did happen until they believed it or just wanted to please their interrogators. Now it's the opposite, belief is not automatic except when children confess to a crime . . . .Certain juveniles are at risk in interrogation because of their incomplete development. Separating Tyler from his mother was inexcusable."

Redlich's study piggybacked on the groundbreaking work of Williams College Professor Saul M. Kassin who, in 1996, was the first to provide an experimental proof of the phenomenon of false confessions. "Expert testimony is designed to educate a judge or jury about the psychology of interviewing, interrogations and confessions," said Kassin.

"People believe false confessions . . . . They look like true confessions," he said.

"They contain all the ingredients of a real confession-details, motivation, re-enactments, expressions of remorse," Kassin said. "Police know how to create an allusion of credibility. In the majority of cases, the investigator believes them to be true. It's why it's so important that all questioning be taped from beginning to end, without interruption."

Solomon Fulero, an attorney and a forensic psychology professor at Dayton, Ohio's Sinclair Community College, follows the research on false confessions and tracks developing case law on expert testimony.

In 1986, in Crane v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 683, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed and remanded a murder conviction in which the government's case rested mainly on a juvenile's confession.

It held that evidence of the circumstances surrounding the confession should not have been excluded, even though the trial court had determined that the confession was voluntary. It said that "the physical and psychological environment that yielded the confession can also be of substantial relevance . . . . Confessions, even those found to be voluntary . . . may be shown 'unworthy of belief.' "

That, Fulero said, left open the question of what kinds of evidence a defendant could present.

In 1991, in California v. Page, 2 Cal. App. 4th 161, the state 1st District Court of Appeal affirmed a trial court's decision that had allowed expert testimony about the general psychological factors that
might cause someone to confess falsely, and also allowed descriptions of supporting experiments.

The court, though, also affirmed the lower court's refusal to allow the expert to reach specific conclusions about the defendant's murder confession.

Two federal appeals court panels-in the 7th and the 1st circuits-have come to similar conclusions, as have many state courts, including high courts in Indiana, Nebraska, Ohio and Virginia.

But other courts have gone the other way: for example, those in Florida, Illinois, Maine, Wyoming and the military. Still, none of these courts has forbidden trial courts from admitting such evidence. They merely reviewed trial court denials under abuse of discretion
standards.

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POLICE QUESTIONING OF CHILDREN

The following information was compiled by The Children and Family Justice Center of the Northwestern University Legal Clinic. Much attention has been focused on the procedures and policies of various police departments and state law enforcement offices when investigating crimes in which children or teenagers are suspects. In these situations, law enforcement very often defends their actions, claiming that they were following the law. However, many believe that the laws and policies should be changed to better protect our children.

WHAT IS THE LAW?

Do police officers have to contact parents when they take their children to the police station?

Yes. When police take a juvenile (aged 16 and under) suspect into custody, federal law requires that they make a "reasonable attempt" to notify the juvenile's parents or legal guardian. Police must tell the parents where their child is being questioned and why he is being questioned.

What if a parent or guardian cannot be located?

Police officers can proceed to question children even if they have been unable to locate parents. Federal law only requires that a "reasonable attempt" be made to locate parents. In practice, this often translates into leaving a business card with other relatives at the home or leaving a message on a parent's answering machine at home or work.

Do police officers have to wait for a parent to arrive at the stations before questioning a child?

No. Even if a parent tells the police not to ask the child any questions, police could proceed to ask the child questions because the "right to silence" (explained in the Miranda Rights, p. 2) is the child's and not the parents. If the police did this, however, a court would take this fact into account in deciding whether the child's statement was coerced or was made voluntarily.

Do police officers have to tell parents if their children are being viewed as witnesses or suspects?

No. The law does not require that police tell parents whether their child is a witness or a suspect. Nor does the law require that police tell parents if the police have changed the way they are viewing the child. Told that their children are witnesses, parents are often eager to help police and consent to let police take their kids to the station. It is only hours later, when they go to pick up their children, that they are told that their kids have been charged with serious crimes.

WHAT ARE THE "MIRANDA RIGHTS"?

Origin of the Miranda Rights:

On March 13, 1963, police arrested Ernesto Miranda for stealing money from a Phoenix, Arizona bank worker. During two hours of questioning, Miranda confessed to the crime, but was never offered an attorney during his interrogation and eventually received a prison sentence based primarily on his confession. On June 13, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Arizona Court's decision and granted Ernesto Miranda a new trial at which his confession could not be admitted as evidence. The ruling established the "Miranda" rights of persons accused of crimes.

Language of the Miranda Rights:

There is no exact wording of the "Miranda Rights". The Supreme Court did not script a passage to be read, but instead made guidelines of what needed to be expressed to a person about to be interrogated. Based on these guidelines, law enforcement agencies have created a basic set of simple statements that can be read to accused persons prior to any questioning.

What follows are examples of the Miranda Rights and the Supreme Court's explanation behind each statement:

1. You have the right to remain silent.

Court Explanation: At the outset, if a person in custody is to be subjected to interrogation, he must first be informed in clear and unequivocal terms that he has the right to remain silent.

2. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.

Court Explanation: The warning of the right to remain silent must be accompanied by the explanation that anything said can and will be used against the individual in court.

3. You have the right to have an attorney present now and during any future questioning.

Court Explanation: The right to have counsel present at the interrogation is indispensable to the protection of the Fifth Amendment privilege under the system we delineate today. ... [Accordingly] we hold that an individual held for interrogation must be clearly informed that he has the right to consult with a lawyer and to have the lawyer with him during interrogation under the system for protecting the privilege we delineate today.

4. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you free of charge if you wish.

Court Explanation: In order fully to apprise a person interrogated of the extent of his rights under this system then, it is necessary to warn him not only that he has the right to consult with an attorney, but also that if he is indigent a lawyer will be appointed to represent him. Without this additional warning, the admonition of the right to consult with counsel would often be understood as meaning only that he can consult with a lawyer if he has one or has the funds to obtain one.

Sources: The Supreme Court Historical Society; LandmarkCases.org; 1999 Massachusetts Criminal Textbook - Police Interrogations Section.
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It Happened To Me
By: Michael Crowe
12/05/2003

In 1998, 14 year old Michael Crowe was coerced into confessing that he murdered his sister after several grueling rounds of interrogations by Escondido County, CA. detectives, all of which were captured on videotape. Here's how he described his ordeal in an article he wrote for Jane magazine December 2002

My sister was murdered in the bedroom next to mine.

The cops convinced me I was the one who killed her.

 

I'm still haunted by the sound of screams that echoed through my house one morning in January 1998, when I was 14. I bolted out of bed and saw my mother holding my 12-year-old sister, Stephanie, who was covered in blood and lying in the doorway of her bedroom. I didn't know it yet, but Stephanie was dead.

First the paramedics arrived, and then the police. The cops took me and my stunned family including my grandmother and youngest sister, Shannon to the station and kept in separate rooms for about seven hours.

The detectives started asking me questions. At that time, I thought maybe Stephanie had had a bad accident. But then the police started hinting that she'd been murdered. They asked if I knew of anyone who'd want to hurt her and whether certain doors were usually locked in my house. If I didn't know, they'd push me to guess but if I guessed a different way later, they'd say I was contradicting myself. That set the stage for things to come.

When I was finally reunited with my family, we still weren't allowed to go home. Each of us had to be photographed from all angles while taking off our clothes one piece at a time. I was getting over bronchitis and was very shy, and my sister had just been slaughtered, but the police didn't show us any sympathy at all.

After that, Shannon and I were told we had to be sent to a center for abused and neglected children. The reason: Stephanie was murdered in our house. We cried and said we didn't want to go. That night, Shannon and I didn't sleep. We'd lost our sister, and now we were afraid we might never see our parents again.

The next day, when I was taken back to the police station, I tried to be helpful. But after a few hours of questions, one detective suddenly said, "What did you do with the knife?"

I didn't even know my sister had been stabbed. "What knife?" I said.

"You know what we're talking about," he answered.

I kept saying, "No, I don't know."

And he'd say, "Well, "'I don't know' is not a good enough answer."

Confused and terrified, I insisted I didn't do it. They had me take a Computer Voice Stress Analyzer Test, a.k.a. a crappy version of a lie detector, which I thought would prove my innocence. Then they told me I'd failed everything.

I was so exhausted, I could barely stand. At times I was sobbing, but the interrogation continued for three-and-a-half hours. They said they'd found blood in my bedroom and that whoever did it must have already been in the house. They described more and more evidence they supposedly had against me. That's when I said, "Well, if I did this, I don't remember it." And they said, "Sometimes that happens."

Nobody told me that police are legally allowed to lie during interrogations. Instead, I started believing maybe I'd blocked the whole thing out.

The following day, I was arrested. The cops said if I told them what happened, they'd help me. If not, I'd go to prison. So, after hours and hours, I said, "Okay, this is going to be a lie, but", And I told them my sister and I were rivals, I hated her and that I killed her. But I didn't.

They took me to juvenile hall, where I was put in maximum security. I felt like a zombie. When I told my parents about the way I was questioned, they told me not to talk to anyone else, except my attorney. I was locked up for seven months until I was finally released on bail.

Fortunately, my interrogation had been videotaped, or else, I'd probably be in jail right now. At the pretrial hearing, the judge recognized that I'd been coerced, so he refused to allow my confession as evidence. It turns out that no blood was found in my room, one door had accidentally been left unlocked that night, and a mentally ill man named Richard Raymond Tuite had been seen looking into people's windows in my neighborhood. The police knew all this the whole time, but they had released Richard because they thought he was too clumsy and drug-addled to be capable of killing.

In January 1999, the case against me was dismissed when Stephanie's blood was found on Richard Tuite's shirt from that night. The trial against him is coming up in early 2003, five years after my sister's murder.

I've changed a lot. I have difficulty being in groups. When I go out, I still hear people say, "That's they guy who killed his sister." I'm shy to the point of being antisocial. So, my number of friends is down to just two: my fiancée and my best guy friend.

Most of all, though, I haven't yet begun to deal with the loss of my sister. I'm going to need to get over everything else before I can even touch that. But right now, I'm still trapped somewhere in the grief.

 

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is
distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit

research and educational purposes only.

 

http://www.prisonerlife.com/articles/articleID=54.cfm

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The Interrogation of Michael Crowe

The_interrogation_of_michael_crowe.html

A totally compelling look at the interrogation of a 14-year-old boy accused of murdering his sister.

Twelve-year-old Stephanie Crowe was found brutally stabbed to death in her bedroom in Escondido, CA. The family awoke to the gruesome scene that began a never-ending nightmare. Finding no signs of an intruder, police began to focus on Michael, the victim's brother, as their prime suspect. Citing sibling rivalry as the motive, police claimed that Crowe and two friends conspired and killed Stephanie. During hours of intense questioning, without a parent or lawyer present, Crowe denied any involvement in the stabbing. However, as the interrogation wore on, with police repeatedly saying they had evidence proving his involvement -- which they did not -- Crowe, visibly distraught and overwhelmed, changed his story. After making incriminating statements, Crowe and two friends were arrested and charged with the murder. Soon after the murder, the police had arrested a homeless, mentally ill, drifter named Richard Raymond Tuite near the Crowe home. Tuite's blood-stained clothes were kept by the police, but he was released from custody. Just before the murder trial was to begin, DNA tests proved that the blood on the Tuite's clothes was Stephanie Crowe's. Michael Crowe and his friends were released and the charges dropped. Tuite, now in police custody on other charges, has still not been charged with the murder.

This powerful documentary sheds new light on the interrogation process: the strategies, tactics, and pressures used by some police officers to elicit incriminating statements.

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A Psychological View of Confessions

Court TV Confessions-psychological.html

By Barbara Kirwin, Ph.D.

Is confession good for the soul? In my jaded opinion after examining more than 300 murderers -- most of whom exhibited little remorse as they confessed to their crimes-- it is nothing more than public theatre. I never take a murderer’s confession at face value. I never believe their explanations for their actions. After all, insight and self-disclosure are hallmarks of a well-adjusted personality. If these people had insight into their own motivations, they probably wouldn’t have done what they did in the first place. Confessions, no matter how graphic or compelling, are simply samples of verbal behavior to be analyzed in the context of the defendant’s mental state and motives at the time of the crime.

Studying people who murder and then confess is viewing human beings in extremis — at the outer bounds of human behavior. Confessions are examples of self-reports which psychologists know are the most suspect and unreliable forms of data. Not only are they limited by the person’s lack of introspection and insight, but they can also be consciously manipulated for a self-serving end. In the high stakes world of a death penalty murder rap, even confessed "truth" remains elusive.

Simply put, a confession is the acknowledgement or the admission of committing a crime. The Miranda rights protect an individual from giving incriminating confessions that are coerced, involuntary, inadvertent or ill-advised. Career criminals and repeat offenders rarely waive their Miranda rights and talk to police without legal counsel. They know better. However, in cases of the most bizarre and violent murders where the mental status of the accused is an issue, the prosecution’s case often revolves around the defendants’ own confession given in response to police interrogation without an attorney present. As the trial progresses, the defendant’s confession is shown over and over again to the jury, referred to numerous times in questioning witnesses, and, if it is particularly gory, featured nightly on the news. The confession is generally the most powerful indictment of all, the one act -- aside from the crime itself -- in which the defendant’s own words unveil him or her as a remorseless, cold-blooded killer. If, as so many people believe, entering a psychological defense is trying to get away with murder, why do these defendants confess? The answer can be found in the same remote recesses of the human psyche as the motivation for the crime itself.

The confessed murderers featured here represent a broad spectrum of sex, age and life circumstances: Betty Broderick, the blonde socialite who blew away her ex-husband and his young wife while they slept; William Paul Neeley, the righteously indignant father who took the law into his own hands when he shot his friend execution style for allegedly raping his 12-year-old daughter; Rod Ferrell, the teenage vampire cult killer who hacked and mutilated his girlfriend’s parents to death; and lastly, Karla Faye Tucker, the down-home girl who fatally bludgeoned her ex-boyfriend and his lover, claiming to orgasm with each blow of the pickax.

Beyond the fact that each of these people took one or more lives, the ties that binds them all is their emptiness, their disenfranchisement and isolation from humanity. You can read it in their vacant eyes and hear it in their hollow voices. Why were they compelled to tell their horrifying stories in such stark detail? Were they driven by guilt? Remorse? A desire to be punished for their deeds? Did they have a primal longing to be understood? Or did they just want their fifteen minutes of fame? As you read the circumstances of their terrifying crimes and view their confessions, sit as a juror and judge for yourself. I will assist as a psychological expert, analyzing the personalities and motivations behind these confessions, constructing a psychological profile for each, and addressing the psycho-legal issues they raise.

In the final analysis, the effectiveness of each of these confessions lies in the believability or persuasiveness of the defendant. If they can strike a sympathetic chord with the jurors and convince them that under the same circumstances anyone would have been capable of the same actions, they just might be acquitted of murder or receive a lighter sentence.

Barbara Kirwin, Ph.D., is a New York forensic psychologist, who has testified in more than 100 homicide cases. This essay first appeared on Courttv.com in October, 2000

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Maps, video & links of the Stephanie Crowe murder and Trial of Brother Michael on this Court TV website

 

http://www.courttv.com, Crowe Case