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Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Editor’s note: This series is the product of a six-year investigation by former Daily News-Miner reporter Brian O’Donoghue and his journalism students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, with support from the News-Miner.

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Margaret Williams bumped into her nephew as she left the Eagles Hall about 3 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 11, 1997. 

“He didn’t even know I said hello. He didn’t even know it was me,” she said later, describing 17-year-old Eugene Vent’s condition to police. 

“You know when you’re so drunk your head is, like, two-and-a-half feet in front of your body? That’s what he was doing,” she said. “He was staggering.” 

Within three hours, Vent was facing interrogation about a youth then on life support following a beating downtown. 

By mid-morning, the teenager accepted that a bloody footprint showed he was at the crime scene. By evening, police had Vent’s confession incriminating himself and three former basketball teammates — George Frese, Kevin Pease and Marvin Roberts. They also had what the chief detective described as a corroborating confession from Frese.

John Hartman died that Sunday at the age of 15.

Police and prosecutors cite those confessions from Vent and Frese as proof justice has been served in the 33- to 79-year prison sentences handed to Hartman’s convicted murderers.

More than two decades of experience investigating Fairbanks homicides leaves Lt. Paul Keller sanguine about the reliability of those self-incriminations from suspects who echoed each other confirming the group’s involvement. “Neither had a time to communicate with each other to make up a story to confess,” the retired detective recently pointed out, responding to questions by e-mail.

Supporters of the Hartman suspects and other case critics contend false confessions led police to discount Roberts’ claimed alibi and to ignore alternative suspects.

“I always thought he (Vent) was innocent,” said Richard Leo, a University of San Francisco law professor whose theories about false confessions are far from universally accepted but place him in the vanguard of an emerging field of criminal justice research.

In 1999, Leo flew to Anchorage prepared to explain why he considers Vent’s statement a perfect example of a “persuaded confession.” Jurors never heard from the paid expert, however; there was no way to quantify or test Leo’s explanations of why people sometimes falsely confess, concluded the judge, who barred Leo’s testimony.

In the years since that ruling, DNA-driven exonerations have provided a growing set of wrongful convictions for analysis, yielding new data on the frequency of false confessions in errant murder and rape cases. An empirical study in this area, published in the January issue of Columbia Law Review, shows false confessions tainted the evidence in 16 percent of the first 200 convictions overturned through DNA testing.  Other studies of wrongful convictions report even higher incidences of false confessions.

Injustices revealed by science have opened minds throughout the U.S. justice system to the complexities of psychological interrogation. It also prompted revisions in the nation’s standard-setting police interrogation manual, which now cautions against some of the tactics used more than 10 years ago questioning the Hartman suspects.       

 

Interrogation begins

Vent was walking home from another party at the Alaskan Motor Inn when police stopped him about 4:30 a.m. near Fifth Avenue and Barnette Street. The motel clerk fingered him from a patrol car; the kid, he said, had just pulled a gun on him.

Keller, then Fairbanks’ chief detective, wondered if Vent might also have something to do with a presumed fatal assault a few blocks south. His hunch appeared confirmed when the clerk described a teen wearing camouflage gear — matching Hartman — partying with Vent’s crowd earlier.

Hartman, though, had spent the night across town with friends at Noah’s Rainbow Inn. About 1:15 a.m., according to the taxi driver’s run sheet, he and two companions shared a cab to Laurene Street. This casts doubt on the victim’s claimed presence at the Alaskan, considering the approximate 1:35 a.m. time frame of the fatal assault.

But Keller had no way of knowing that when he sent Detective Aaron Ring to interview Vent at Fairbanks Youth Facility.

At approximately 6 a.m., the detective sat down with Vent, who waived his rights to have an attorney or his mother present, for the first of three interviews spaced hours apart and extending across an 11-hour span. In that initial session, which lasted roughly 120 minutes, the detective mentioned that “a friend” of Vent’s remained gravely injured from a fight. He said other witnesses were talking. And Ring hammered the young suspect with an intentional falsehood: 

“How’d your footprint get in the blood?”

“I guess I was there,” Vent responded the sixth time Ring inquired about the supposed bloody footprint at the crime scene. 

After the detective’s 16th reference to fictitious footprint evidence, Vent eyed his shoes.

“He looked at his shoe and tried to wipe it off,” the detective recalled during an evidentiary hearing.  “I didn’t see any blood, but (it) gave me the impression that he thought there might be blood on his shoe.”

Bit by bit, the detective conveyed facts about the case. He showed Vent photos of Hartman in the hospital and of his distinctive jacket. He mentioned a matchbook and lighter recovered from the scene. He told him police sought a group with a car. He brought up the robbery down the street from the wedding reception at the Eagles Hall.

Another officer introduced the names of a pair of schoolmates suspected as accomplices. “Excuse me, the station just called,” the transcript notes an unidentified voice stating, “and, uh, Kevin Pease and Harley Semaken (inaudible) were both arrested and, uh, they think they are involved in this. Kevin Pease had some problems tonight.” 

Vent eventually blurted, “You’re starting to make me think like I killed somebody, man. You’re trying to fill my brain with things I didn’t do.”

The first interrogation ended about 8:30 a.m. Vent hadn’t owned up to seeing the assault. But he seemed to accept the shoeprint’s bloody proof he had passed through the intersection, perhaps after Hartman’s assault.

The citation Vent received that morning for underage drinking noted his breath-alcohol content at 0.158 percent, roughly double Alaska’s current intoxication standard. Though he had asked Ring for a burger during that first session, offering to pay for it, the teenager received nothing to eat before jailers awakened him shortly before 1 p.m. for a second round of questioning.

The detective began by again reading Vent his rights. This time the minor first briefly talked to his mother by telephone. 

Vent had rambled on during the first session about the possibility that two friends who enlisted his help scoring weed were responsible. The story didn’t hold up. “You knew that he was in Wisconsin,” Ring said about one of the friends, confronting the suspect on the apparent lies. 

Testifying at his own trial two years later, Vent blamed his initial deceit on intoxication. “If I wasn’t drunk, I wouldn’t have made that story up.”

Under cross-examination, however, he acknowledged lying throughout his sessions with the detective. “I was pretty much agreeing with him, because I was sort of lying through the whole thing, but I don’t know why I was lying.   

The detective, meanwhile, fished for the teen’s accomplices using a yearbook from Howard Luke Academy.

“These are your good friends. You play basketball with these guys,” Ring said. 

“You see I got your picture here.”

The ’95-’96 photo of the Howard Luke Suns shows broad-shouldered, stern-faced Pease kneeling in the front row, shoulder-to-shoulder with Roberts. Vent is standing in the back row, smiling alongside the coach.

“These guys are friends of yours,” Ring said. “There’s you standing right next to ’em. Standing right back in line. And you guys hung around together. I’ve already talked to people. OK? They were involved in this.”

By midway through the second session, Vent agreed that he “probably” hit and kicked Hartman. Yet he claimed having a “blackout” regarding details, including what provoked the violence.   

“Here’s the thing about blackouts,” Ring said. “And let me tell you I’ve been hearing about them a lot longer than you. Blackouts like that, where you’re still up and around the next day, are mostly blackouts that you give yourself cause you don’t want to talk about it. And those you can overcome. You just basically pushed it back because you don’t want to think about it right now. But this is the best time for you to be straightforward with me and come forward with this. ’Cause when, when you do it later, you won’t talk about it later, ’cause this isn’t something to keep inside.”

“I’m telling you I ain’t,” Vent said. “I don’t remember beating anybody up.”

 

Revisions in the training manual

There was no telltale footprint or bloody shoe. Hartman’s injuries were mainly internal and he bled very little. Ring later justified his trickery as a means of overcoming the “jousting” denials expected from any guilty party. 

In 1997, that view prevailed nationwide.

Sympathizing with a suspect, minimizing the moral significance of a crime and calculated deception such as telling an offender that accomplices have confessed when they haven’t — these were and remain fundamental aspects of the “Reid Technique,” a nine-step interrogation methodology developed in the 1940s by John Reid, a Chicago crime lab veteran. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court referenced the Reid technique in the landmark Miranda decision, which mandated the now-routine briefing suspects receive concerning their rights.

At the time of the Hartman case, according to Keller, all Fairbanks detectives were “Reid school trained.”

Over the decades, the techniques set forth in Reid’s industry-standard training manual, “Criminal Interrogation and Confessions,” received periodic updates incorporating advances in applied psychology and changing legal precedents. At 639 pages, the newest edition is roughly twice the size of the 1986 text in use when Ring interrogated suspects in the Hartman case.

The new material includes a 35-page chapter, “Distinguishing between True and False Confessions.” Reid’s fourth edition sprinkles warning against practices shown to have contributed to systemic failures that have sent innocent people to prison.

“While this concept has been addressed frequently in this text,” one of the new warnings states: “it is worth repeating again — at no time should an investigator attempt to persuade a suspect that he is guilty of a crime he does not remember committing.”

It remains standard practice for interrogators to exaggerate, even lie, to coax incriminating admissions from a suspect reasonably considered guilty. As the latest edition of the Reid’s manual states: “It is absurd to believe that a suspect who knows he did not commit a crime would place greater weight and credibility on alleged evidence than on his own knowledge of his innocence.”

However, the current manual specifically warns against employing trickery dealing with subjects uncertain about their involvement. 

“This tactic should not be used for the suspect who acknowledges that he may have committed the crime even though he has no specific recollections of doing so.”

The manual further cautions against using fictitious evidence with “youthful suspects with low social maturity,” or “diminished mental capacity.”

 “These suspects may not have the fortitude or confidence,” the manual warns, “to challenge such evidence and, depending on the nature of the crime, may become confused as to their own involvement if the police tell them evidence clearly indicates they committed the crime.”

Joseph Buckley, president of John E. Reid and Associates, which publishes Criminal Confessions and trains law enforcement agencies in its use, reviewed this story and the full transcript of Vent’s police statements. “I do not have any problems with your references to our text and the quotes that you use,” Buckley replied by e-mail. He added, however, that none of the material he reviewed offered a basis for evaluating either suspects’ guilt or innocence. 

Ferreting out the truth from a suspect who claims no memory of an event requires skill and patience, observed Buckley. “It’s a ploy that must be tested by the interrogator,” he commented by e-mail. “There is no time limit per se, particularly when the suspect keeps changing his story as Vent was doing.”

The interrogation of Vent, in Buckley’s view, skipped over the technique’s recommended starting point:  a non-accusatory interview designed to assess the suspect’s story in light of available evidence.

“Vent’s session,” he observed, “seems to be just Q & A with a few efforts of Ring trying to suggest some reason for the crime — for example, the victim made a disparaging remark, etc.” 

 

Suspicious injury 

That afternoon, Frese limped into the emergency room at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital.

“Foot pain,” stated the triage assessment. “Got in a fight last night, doesn’t know how it happened. He was drunk. Has a bruise.”

“Kicked someone last night,” a doctor noted, “but doesn’t remember anything else. States awoke this AM @ home foot hurting.”

Mindful of the teen then on life support, a nurse alerted police. Ring approached Frese, who was awaiting an X-ray. The 21-year-old didn’t remember much. Too wasted from drinking, he said.

The detective mentioned the Barnette assault and that Vent was talking. “If you were there and you took off because you didn’t like what was going on, which is what Eugene said he did, then we can talk,” he said. “We can work with that.”

As police requested, Frese’s girlfriend fetched his boot from their apartment. 

Sgt. David Kendrick and Julie Klaker, Hartman’s primary nurse, compared the boot’s tread to Hartman’s facial bruises.

“They matched up perfectly, actually,” Klaker later testified. 

After receiving treatment for a badly sprained ankle, Frese agreed to accompany police to the crime scene in hopes of jogging his memory. The 155-pound suspect made the trip sitting astride the center console of a Ford pickup, flanked by a 200-pound detective and the 6-foot 7-inch sergeant.

“It’s a scary thing,” Ring observed in that taped, on-the-road, conversation. “Because, 

I mean, we are talking about a sexual assault, ya know, of another male.”

Police pointed out the intersection where the victim was found, skid marks on the pavement nearby, as well as local landmarks. The detective advised him police would be keeping his boot, because its tread matched the victim’s bruises, a match that he said the crime lab would confirm with the reliability of a fingerprint. 

“So what if he dies and, uh, what’s gonna happen to me?” Frese asked.

“Well it depends on your involvement here,” said the detective. He suggested continuing their conversation at the station, promising Frese a ride home afterward. 

 

Horrific admissions 

Legal battles over the Hartman interrogations reached Alaska’s highest court in 1998. Vent’s entire first interview and Frese’s latter statements were both suppressed. Reporting for this story draws upon full uncensored transcripts from appellate files.

Both confessions contain damning statements. 

Vent eventually took full blame for hitting and kicking a stranger, simply because someone suggested the kid looked “queer.”

“Who got out and assaulted this guy?”

“Just me,” Vent said, voice cracking.

“You and who?”

“I don’t know, me, I guess.” The detective offered a shocking reason to reconsider. “And you’re responsible for putting something up this guy’s rectum?”

“I wouldn’t even think of doing that,” the teen protested.

Then others had to be involved, Ring pointed out.

Frese had acknowledged hurting his foot in a fight he couldn’t recall. By the time he agreed to accompany detectives to the station, police portrayed his boot as evidence of involvement the crime lab would soon confirm. Though Frese wasn’t under arrest, the gravity of the situation would have been apparent as he faced Ring, and later, Kendrick, across a table in a 9-foot by 7-foot interrogation room in the basement of Fairbanks’ old police headquarters. 

“At what point,” the sergeant asked, roughly midway through that final session, “did you hurt your foot.”

“F------ after I kicked him in the face.”

“After you kicked him a couple times?

Yeah,” Frese said.

“O��”

“And then I f------ hit the ground.”

And what of the others? Kendrick inquired. How many times did Pease kick the victim?

“He just kicked him, a, a, lot.”

“Well how many times would you say is a lot?”

“I don’t know,” Frese said. “More than five times?” 

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And what about Vent? The sergeant asked. “What was Eugene doing at that point?”

“I don’t really f------ remember,” Frese said. “I wasn’t really paying attention because my f------ foot was hurting; thought it was broke.”

The sergeant pressed for details. “But before you hurt your foot. Kevin’s around him. Eugene’s around him. And you’re around him. Is that correct.”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s right?”

The suspect blurted, “We just got out and Kevin started it. And f------, we just got out, kicked him a couple times and f------ took off.”

Despite his admissions, Frese was allowed outside, unescorted, for a cigarette break. And he eventually got that ride home

Police knew where to find him.

 

Remembers ‘everything’

Police showed up at Roberts’ home in south Fairbanks that evening. He, too, voluntarily accompanied detectives to the station. 

Kendrick, Ring and then-Sgt. James Geier traded off applying verbal pressure. They claimed his license plate was observed near the crime scene and that skid marks left near the victim scientifically matched his tires. Friends from Howard Luke had confessed, police insisted, naming him. They played him a portion of Vent’s recorded statement. 

“This is the first time I’ve heard about that,” Roberts said, according to the transcript. “Give me a lie detector test, man.”

Police showed him photos of the victim. Come clean, they urged. Shed that burden.

“It’s not going to tear me up,” the suspect countered, “because I wasn’t even there.”

Roberts smoked marijuana that night with his friend Dan Huntington, but there was nothing hazy about his memory. This suspect insisted he “remembered everything.” He had run into his old teammates at the reception. Roberts recalled seeing Vent again later at the Alaskan Motor Inn, lounging on a bed. He swore he hadn’t given any of them a ride.

“I’m innocent,” Roberts declared dozens of times. “I wasn’t even there,” he repeated over and over.

He acknowledged cruising Barnette several times that night ferrying other friends around. At one point, police had him thinking his car might have been stolen for the crime and then returned. “If my car was there, it was there,” Roberts said. “But I didn’t see nothing. I would’ve stopped it.”

So why, detectives asked, are you acting scared?

“I’m scared because I’m innocent.” 

Fellow-suspect Pease, a hardened-juvenile offender mistrustful of police, told Ring he spent the evening with his girlfriend.

The lie was her idea, the young woman later testified. She just wanted to help Kevin avoid trouble. When she learned her boyfriend was a murder suspect, Jessica Lundeen acknowledged his alibi was false. 

Detectives took the lie as proof they had the right man. 

“Human error,” Pease said in a telephone interview from prison. “I messed up when I said that. I was scared.”

 

Confessors reconsider

District Attorney Harry Davis advised grand jurors that both Vent and Frese had incriminated themselves and were expected to testify against the other suspects.

Both instead chose to stand trial rather than take deals offered for their testimony. Police manipulated them into making false confessions, each said later. 

“I can’t really explain it. He broke me down,” Vent said in a videotaped 2004 interview at a private Arizona prison housing Alaska’s long-term convicts. “I was drunk you know, and I was tired, and he took advantage of me and forced me into a corner.”

Regardless of his state of intoxication during the first interrogation, Vent had had plenty of time to absorb the alcohol coursing through his system before Ring’s third and final visit, 7 p.m. that Saturday.

By then, the teenager had slept, eaten and showered. The detective again read the suspect his rights.

He again put the suspect’s mother on the phone. 

Vent again consented to talk. Again he incriminated his friends. Again he acknowledged taking part in the assault.

“Do you remember how many times you kicked him, approximately?”

“I don’t know,” Vent said, “10 times.”

“OK,” the detective said. 

“Mostly to the body? Or arms? I think you said?”

“To the body. To the arms. Couple times to the head,” Vent said.

That third interrogation lasted less than 20 minutes. Toward the end, Ring switched off the tape for two minutes. Afterward he asks Vent if he has been coerced or threatened in any way.

“No,” the teen responds.

“Are you glad you gave this statement?” the detective asked.   

“Yes,” said the suspect. 

Ten days later, Vent, Frese and the others pleaded innocent.

Before setting out for the reception, Frese and several friends had played “Up and down the river,” a card game requiring losing participants to toss back as many as four beer shots with each hand. One of those friends, Edgar Henry, later told police the five people involved drank two full cases of beer in about two hours before continuing on to Eagle Hall.

After returning to his apartment about 5 a.m., Frese sipped hard liquor, he said, until 7:30 or 8 a.m.

His intoxication level wasn’t tested during the afternoon emergency room visit. 

“They gave me a scenario, and I went with it,” Frese said of his confession in a telephone interview from Arizona. 

He acknowledges that he accepted police statements that his boot made the marks on Hartman’s face. “I wasn’t expecting no corrupt s----- like that,” the inmate said in another telephone interview last spring. “And they’re telling me, this matches? 

A decade later, Frese isn’t sure what happened that night. “I don’t know if I did this or not. You know? I don’t know.” 

And if he indeed hurt his foot kicking someone other than Hartman, that person has never came forward.

 

‘What’s missing’

Ring, at various times, offered two reasons for placing confidence in Vent’s confession.

“I might have given him gum,” the suspect had responded when the detective asked if his fingerprints might turn up on items collected at the crime scene.

“I hadn’t said anything about gum at that point,” Ring said at a pre-trial hearing, discussing what fed his suspicions. “We had found gum at the scene. And so that kind of clued me in, as well maybe this guy was there. Maybe he knows what he’s talking about.”

The other disclosure had to do with the victim’s precise location on the street.

“Let me draw you a picture and ask you to show me one thing,” the detective remarked concluding Vent’s recorded second interview. 

“And at that point he (Vent) indicated the uh, southwest corner of the intersection just off the sidewalk,” the detective later said, “and he put a little dot there for me.”

The moment of truth wasn’t recorded. 

In a 2002 interview, Ring blamed the gap on a fluke. “It’s not that the tape recorder was turned off,” he told a UAF student, “it just ran out of tape.”

Alaska is one of a handful of states that require the recording of custodial interrogations.

The obligation came down in a 1985 opinion by the state Supreme Court, which further tasked authorities with explaining any interruptions “so that courts are not left to speculate about what took place.” Even in the case of “acceptable excuses” such as a power or equipment failure, the court noted, the burden falls on authorities to justify gaps because “the failure to record should be viewed with distrust.”

As far back as 1997, Chief Dan Hoffman confirmed, department policy called for a written narrative summarizing unrecorded portions of custodial interviews.

The Hartman transcripts merely note interruptions without elaboration. 

The suspect’s knowledge about Hartman’s position is noted only on Ring’s sketch. 

“Location of victim per Vent,” state’s a handwritten comment with a line pointing to an X. 

Vent’s former defense attorney Bill Murphree expects people assume he’s biased in describing his client’s confession as “bunk.” He points to “what’s missing” in the state’s case.

“You can’t stomp someone to death and not leave trace evidence,” the lawyer said in 2005, citing experience gained over 17 years as a state prosecutor, a job he resumed last summer.

Self-incriminating statements were only the starting point in former Alaska State Trooper Jim McCann’s hunts for truth. The homicide detective viewed confessions as maps pointing toward supporting evidence.

If genuine, he said in a 2002 interview, they ought to guide investigators to recovering fingerprints, weapons, bloodstained clothing or some other tangible proof of involvement.

“I couldn’t imagine convicting someone on just that and no physical evidence.” 

Tomorrow:

 

Brian O’Donoghue is a UAF assistant professor of journalism. Former students Jade Frank, Laurel Ford, Gary Moore, Nate Raymond and Frank Shepherd contributed to this story.

 

 

 

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DNA provides lessons in looking for false confessions

 

 

Why credit claims of innocence from any inmate who has already confessed?

Science not long ago delivered a three-letter answer: DNA.

Three years after guilty verdicts were returned in the Hartman case, a notorious serial rapist and convicted murderer informed authorities in New York that he was solely responsible for assaulting a Central Park jogger in 1989. His DNA matched stains on the jogger’s sock. Lengthy investigations by the district attract attorney and police confirmed other details of his story, resulting in the release of five young men then serving time for the crime. 

The five, then ages 14 to 16, had all confessed. Four repeated their self-incriminations on videotape, several in the company of their parents. They were serving five to 15 year sentences at the time of their exonerations in 2002.

The first 200 DNA exonerations
Common contributing factors:
Eyewitness misidentification	79%
Incorrect forensic evidence	57%
Informant testimony	18%
False confessions	16%
Source: Judging Innocence, January 2008, Columbia Law Review

The case remains, perhaps, the best known of the 216 wrongful convictions overturned in recent years through new DNA evidence. This new measure of evidentiary truth has not only shattered faith in the system, where such injustices were long perceived as anomalies, but has also identified case files for criminal justice researchers seeking explanations and systemic flaws — even in cases where DNA isn’t available.

The Hartman verdicts aren’t subject to DNA validation; physical evidence needed for such tests is lacking.

What may apply are the lessons from DNA exoneration case files.

False confessions figured in the trial evidence against 31 of the first 200 inmates freed by DNA testing, according to a 2008 University of Virginia study, which tracked the legal process of each from arrest to exoneration.  

Murder cases made up a disproportionately high number of those trials involving false confessions, seven of which resulted in death sentences before the individual’s innocence was belatedly recognized. 

“In some cases,” study author and law professor Brandon Garrett noted, “DNA proves not only that the defendant was innocent but also that police fed facts, asked leading questions, supplied details” that added apparent veracity to their false confession.

Garrett characterized known exonerees as the “tip of the iceberg,” suggesting there’s no reason to assume false confessions and other factors contributing to wrongful convictions identified through DNA are less common in the larger pool of criminal cases lacking evidence suited to scientific validation. 

The notion a person would falsely confess to crimes as serious as murder defies common sense, observed Rob Warden, a law professor and director of Northwestern University’s Center for Wrongful Convictions. “Absent physical torture or threats, most of us can’t imagine confessing to a crime we did not commit,” he commented via e-mail. “But psychological techniques employed during police interrogations, while not as effective as torture, are nonetheless quite effective.”

It isn’t that police seek false confessions. “The trouble,” he said, “is that the techniques are effective against the innocent as well as the guilty.”

A number of scholars have singled out fictitious evidence introduced in a police interrogation as dangerously manipulative. “To see why such a tactic is a problem, one has only to look at the false-memory literature and note what ordinary individuals can be falsely led to believe,” wrote Elizabeth Loftus, a University of California at Irvine psychology professor and National Academy of Sciences member, in a 2004 opinion piece for Psychology and Public Policy. 

Innocence may actually invite risk during psychological interrogation, according to Saul Kassin, a Williams College psychology professor. His research indicates innocent people with no felony record are far more likely to waive Miranda rights and answer police questions without an attorney present. He also found lawmen participating in his experiments were falsely confident about their personal ability assessing guilt, and thus pressed the interrogation even harder with innocent test subjects.    

“Police-induced confession is like a Hollywood drama,” observed Kassin, in a 2005 American Psychologist article, “scripted by the interrogators theory of the case, shaped through questioning and rehearsal, directed by the questioner and enacted by the suspect.”

Richard Leo, a law school professor excluded from testifying as a paid expert on Vent’s behalf in 1999,  coined the phase “persuaded confessions” describing false incriminations resulting from 

“shattering a suspect’s confidence in his memory” and convincing the person they, more likely than not, committed a crime. 

From his pre-trial review of the tapes and transcripts, Leo contends Vent  “came to believe he did the crime in a  state of blackout.” He agreed to explain in court how that can happen, as well as point out that facts about Hartman’s assault were supplied through the detectives’ questions. 

Judge Ben Esch weighed the paid expert’s credentials, listened to his planned testimony, and just didn’t see how his testimony would enhance the jury’s decision making.

In 2003, Alaska’s appellate court upheld Leo’s exclusion, finding that it arguably fell within the trial judge’s discretion, and, if not, represented “harmless error.”

Leo contends Alaska courts are behind the times. 

In 2005 a New York judge conducted the most extensive legal exploration to date, a 12-day hearing weighing the methodology of false confession studies and value of allowing expert testimony in court. Judge Victor Ort concluded that jurors could benefit from an expert’s explanation of how and why people confess to crimes they did not commit.

A U.S. Army judge advocate echoed that sentiment last fall, urging military courts to recognize the advances made by researchers since the late 1990s. “Justice demands that prosecutors and judges educate themselves to the growing body of evidence suggesting psychological interrogation methods produce misleading and false confessions at unacceptable rates,” wrote Maj. Peter Kagelieiry, chief of military justice for a Germany-based Army unit, in a 2007 article for Military Law Review.

 

 

 

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Manual spells out method for obtaining confessions

 

 

The nation’s leading interrogation technique has two stages: a non-accusatory assessment of the suspect’s probable guilt, followed by hard-edged, psychological grilling structured to elicit truthful confessions.

The opening segment is “designed to develop enough information for us to assess the credibility of the suspect’s story in conjunction with the investigative and forensic evidence available,” according to Joseph Buckley, president of company that trains law enforcement agencies in what’s known as the “Reid Technique.”

Suspects “whose guilt,” as the manual puts it, “in the opinion of the trained investigator, seems definite or reasonably certain” are candidates for the nine-step confession-eliciting method named for 1940s-era crime lab pioneer John Reid.

The real interrogation begins with a direct accusation on the part of the inves-tigator and progresses into monologues lasting “as long as 30 minutes,” explained Buckley, that offer a suspect moral justifications and face-saving reasons to come clean on participation in a crime.

 

 

 

 

 

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