Requirement That Interrogations Be Recorded Is the Best Way To Preserve Integrity Of Confessions
By: Houston Criminal Lawyer John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
The New York-based Innocence Project reports that as of September 10, 2010 there have been 258 DNA exonerations in this country. The project says that 25 percent of them involved false confessions and incriminating statements.
So why would a person confess to somewhat he didn’t do?
“The interrogation itself is stressful enough to get innocent people to confess,” Saul Kassin, psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York told the Chicago Tribune this past July. “But add to that a layer of grief and shock and perhaps even some guilt—‘I should have been there’—and then that the parent is trying like hell to be cooperative because they want the murder of their child solved.”
Professor Kassin was referring to a case like that of Kevin Fox who, according to the Tribune, spent 14 hours in a small, windowless interrogation room before he “simply gave up” and confessed to the murder and sexual assault of his three-year old daughter. The detectives handling the interrogation denied Fox’s request for an attorney; threatened to have it arranged so other inmate could rape him; repeatedly screamed at him while showing him pictures of his daughter bound and gagged with duct tape; and told him that his wife was going to divorce him.
Fox needed relief—any kind of relief. He finally agreed with the detectives’ “hypothetical account” of how his daughter had died in an accident. He believed the “phony details” would not match the evidence ultimately developed by the police. He was wrong. Tribune reporters Steve Mills and Lisa Black said the police kept him in jail 8 months before DNA evidence excluded him as a suspect, This past May, the newspaper reported, another man was arrested for the rape/murder of Fox’s three-year-old daughter.
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