Archive for the 'Innocence' Category
The Case for Videotaping Police Interrogations
Monday, October 27th, 2008Last week in the L.A. Times, Washington, D.C. police Detective Jim Trainum wrote an op-ed explaining how he never believed someone could confess to a crime they didn’t commit—until a suspect he was interrogating did exactly that:
Even the suspect’s attorney later told me that she believed her client was guilty, based on the confession. Confident in our evidence and the confession, we charged her with first-degree murder.
Then we discovered that the suspect had an ironclad alibi. We subpoenaed sign-in/sign-out logs from the homeless shelter where she lived, and the records proved that she could not have committed the crime. The case was dismissed, but all of us still believed she was involved in the murder. After all, she had confessed.
Even though it wasn’t our standard operating procedure in the mid-1990s, when the crime occurred, we had videotaped the interrogation in its entirety. Reviewing the tapes years later, I saw that we had fallen into a classic trap. We ignored evidence that our suspect might not have been guilty, and during the interrogation we inadvertently fed her details of the crime that she repeated back to us in her confession.
If we hadn’t discovered and verified the suspect’s alibi — or if we hadn’t recorded the interrogation — she probably would have been convicted of first-degree murder and would be in prison today. The true perpetrator of the crime was never identified, partly because the investigation was derailed when we focused on an innocent person.
If by-the-books interrogations like Trainum’s can elicit a false confession, it isn’t difficult to see how more coercive questioning could as well. California’s legislature has twice passed a bill requiring the police to videotape interrogations. Both bills were vetoed by Gov. Schwarzenegger after lobbying from the state’s police and prosecutors. A third attempt to pass a bill died in committee this year.
Last year, I criticized Schwarzenegger for vetoing a bill that included the videotape requirement and two other sensible criminal justice reforms.
Morning Links
Monday, October 6th, 2008Morning Links
Monday, September 29th, 2008Morning Links
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008Morning Links
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008Morning Links
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008Afternoon Links
Monday, July 28th, 2008Morning Links
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008*UPDATE: A fellow blogger has scolded me for stating that this aid went directly to the Taliban. It was actually humanitarian aid ostensibly given to Afghan farmers. But it was given to the Taliban’s subjects, in direct response to the Taliban’s crackdown on opium, a crackdown cheered on by the Bush administration. The Taliban certainly benefited from the aid. And much of the aid ended up getting confiscated by the Taliban, anyway. Oh, and in the end the crackdown actually only strengthened the Taliban. They merely eradicated the opium farms not under their direct control, driving up the cost of the stuff. Meanwhile, they themselves kept selling on the open market, with higher profit margins. My point was that the Bush administration’s moral absolutes when it comes to dealing with terrorist-harboring regimes haven’t been so absolute when it comes to the drug war. That point still stands. If I have time, I’ll have more on all of this later.
“Professionalism” Fails in Boston
Sunday, February 10th, 2008The Boston Phoenix investigates the sad case of Stephan Cowans, wrongfully imprisoned for killing a Boston police officer. Cowans was exonerated in 2003, then murdered in 2004 by someone with designs on his $3.2 million settlement. The paper digs into Cowans’ conviction, and finds evidence that police knew Cowans was innocent, yet forged ahead with his prosecution anyway. Regular readers of this site will recognize this language:
What disturbs some political critics, as well as some defense attorneys, is that an unusually high number of botched police cases have not resulted in significant internal reform or any disciplinary action. This despite police conduct that a judge called “a fraud upon the court,” in Christopher Harding’s conviction, and that another judge, presiding over Donnell Johnson’s appeal, said “suggests either serious misconduct or negligence.”
In other cases of wrongful conviction, there was no effort made to answer tough questions about what went wrong. A feeble attempt was made in the wake of Cowans’s exoneration. But its inadequacy only underscores the rottenness of the system. And of all these cases, it is the Cowans conviction that raises the biggest questions about local law-enforcement officials’ ability to police themselves.
[...]
After examining 15 wrongful convictions — all but four in Boston — Reilly and the state’s DAs concluded that they “did not suggest a present systems failure,” and laid most of the blame vaguely on “erroneous eyewitness identifications.”
In the only specific reference to Cowans, the report said that “the Commonwealth’s fingerprint evidence was flawed.”
Such comments fail to acknowledge what the BPD itself concluded more than two years earlier — that the fingerprint evidence was not flawed, but deliberately manipulated and lied about in court.
Defense attorneys who have fought wrongful-conviction cases say that without a more honest and thorough explanation, the public and law-enforcement officials alike cannot know whether a “present systems failure” exists.
It’s a damning article. But if history is any indication, it’s unlikely to bring any real reform.