False confessions: How the innocent admit, are convicted of crimes they didn't commit.

KANSAS CITY, Missouri -- Eddie Lowery lost 10 years of his life for a crime he did not commit. There was no physical evidence at his trial for rape, but one overwhelming factor put him away: He confessed.

At trial, the jury heard details that prosecutors insisted only the rapist could have known, including that the rapist hit the 75-year-old victim in the head with the handle of a silver table knife he found in the house. DNA evidence would later show that another man committed the crime. But that vindication would come only years after Lowery had served his sentence and was paroled in 1991.

"I beat myself up a lot" about having confessed, Lowery said in a recent interview. "I thought I was the only dummy who did that."

But more than 40 others have given confessions since 1976 that DNA evidence later showed were false, according to records compiled by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Experts have long known that some kinds of people -- including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led -- are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There are also people like Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance by interrogators.

New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim that only the defendant could have committed the crime.

An article by Garrett draws on trial transcripts, recorded confessions and other background materials to show how incriminating facts got into those confessions -- by police introducing important facts about the case, whether intentionally or unintentionally, during the interrogation.


Garrett said he was surprised by the complexity of the confessions he studied.

"I expected, and think people intuitively think, that a false confession would look flimsy," like someone saying simply, "I did it," he said.

Instead, he said, "almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable," rich in telling detail that almost inevitably had to come from the police. "I had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred," he said, using a term in police circles for introducing facts into the interrogation process. "I didn't expect to see that almost all of them had been contaminated."

Links:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/us/14confess.html
http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2010/09/false_confessions_how_the_inno.html