HizeCool

just as I kinda bored and try to lower/decrease my productivity, I’ve found some readings on how does the police interogation works. Here’s the link

The more stress a suspect experiences, the less likely he is to think critically and independently, making him far more susceptible to suggestion. This is even more true when the suspect is a minor or is mentally ill, because he may be poorly equipped to recognize or fight off manipulative tactics. A process designed to cause someone so much stress that he’ll confess just to escape the situation is a process that leaves itself open to false confessions. Researchers estimate between 65 and 300 false confessions per year in the United States. Here are just a few false confessions that investigators have uncovered:-

• Peter Reilly, 1973
  Peter Reilly was 18 years old when his mother was found murdered in their home. After eight hours of interrogation by Connecticut police, he confessed to brutally murdering her. A jury convicted him of first-degree manslaughter based on his confession, and he served three years in prison before a judge set him free in the face of new evidence indicating someone else committed the crime.
• Earl Washington, Jr., 1982
  Earl Washington, Jr., a man described by psychologists as “mildly retarded” with an IQ of 69, confessed to raping and murdering a 19-year-old woman after undergoing interrogation. He was convicted on the confession alone and spent 18 years in prison, half of that time on death row. Nine days before his scheduled execution, the governor of Virginia pardoned him because DNA evidence had revealed that the actual perpetrator was another man. (Watch this video clip of an interview with Earl Washington, Jr., after his release.)
• The “Central Park Five,” 1989
  After more than 20 hours of interrogation, five teenagers — Raymond Santana, 14, Kharey Wise, 16, Antron McCray, 16, Kevin Richardson, 14, and Yusef Salaam, 15 — confessed to raping and beating a woman jogging in Central Park in New York City. They spent between six and 12 years in prison (four out of the five were tried as minors) before another man confessed to the crime in 2001. DNA evidence confirmed that this other man was in fact the Central Park rapist.
• Michael Crowe, 1998
  Michael Crowe was 14 years old when police interrogated him without a parent or other adult in the room. He eventually confessed to stabbing his 12-year-old sister to death after the interrogator told Michael of false physical evidence against him. He was charged with the crime, but at pre-trial hearings, a judge deemed his confession to be involuntary. DNA evidence later led police to the man who actually murdered the girl.

Michael Crowe’s entire interrogation was videotaped, and that tape assisted the judge in determining that the confession was involuntary. Just videotaping the confession itself can do little to ensure the legality of the process that led up to it, and critics of police interrogation techniques point to mandatory taping of all interrogations from start to finish as a step in the right direction. Another possible solution to the problem of false confessions is to train police to recognize subtle signs of mental illness that make a false confession more likely. Many within the law-enforcement community cite prohibitive costs as a reason not to mandate solutions like these and maintain that the problem of false confessions is not as big as critics suggest. Still, most of us see one false confession that leads to conviction as one too many.

So, it makes me think… it’s just happened in States right? Isn’t it?

On this day..

• Hurt when helpless? - 2007
• Another flaw... - 2006
• Awaiting Cinema Cinema Cinema - 2005
• Post Bloggers' Meet in Mid Valley - 2005