Posted on 10/20/2016 2:12:03 PM PDT by BBell
If you have an interest in fairness, justice and preventing wrongful convictions, then the new book "How the Police Generate False Confessions," by former Washington, D.C., homicide detective James Trainum is an important read. It takes you inside the interrogation room to see how investigators extract admissions from innocent people, and how the justice system can fix this persistent problem, seen in high profile cases such as the Central Park Five, the Norfolk Four and the teenaged suspect from Wisconsin in the Netflix series "Making a Murderer."
It's a phenomenon that remains, understandably, incomprehensible to many. Someone "admits" to a crime they did not actually commit, to a police detective of all people, knowing they face a long prison sentence for doing so. Who would do such a thing? In all three of the cases above, young men admitted to committing rape, and in two of them to gruesome murders.
Trainum, 61, spent 17 years in homicide for the Metropolitan Police Department, retiring in 2010. He was the lead detective on the high-profile Starbucks triple murder in Georgetown in 1997, which he eventually helped solve in 1999. But in 1994, Trainum had an eye-opening experience when he obtained his own false confession. After a 16-hour interrogation, a woman told him she and two men had killed a man whose body was found, bound and beaten, near the Anacostia River. She was charged with first-degree murder. But she recanted weeks later, and Trainum found proof that she couldn't have been where she originally claimed at the time of the slaying. The charges were dismissed.
"What did I do," Trainum asked himself, "to convince this person to tell me something she didn't do? How did she get all those details she shouldn't have known?" He realized that implying that her cooperation would get her
(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
He took a shot at Tim Kaine as well.
I don’t get “8. Have them provide details of the crime.”
How is that possible if they didn’t do it?
I’m all for videotaping the entire confession process, although I would argue the admissability may vary. I would never say a damned thing without a lawyer present and a tape running.
Here’s what they don’t tell you: It says 15% of false convictions involve confessions. Well, 90% of all trials end in a plea. A plea includes a confession. A LOT of criminals plea to one crime to stay out of a trial over another crime, and that’s going to lead to a LOT of false confessions. But that doesn’t mean the defendant is innocent. So that stat doesn’t really impress me. And how many times does “false confession” mean the confession was proven to be false, versus simply on a re-hearing, with newly excluded evidence, a jury failed to reach a verdict?
Also, James Trainum is not only selling his book, but also his interrogation consulting services. Let that sink in.
As for PEACE, what the article neglects to mention is that in the U.K., there is no right against self-incrimination. Failure to cooperate fully can lead to a presumption of guilt.
Know what? If I’m on a jury and a defendant told me he made a false confession because he was told he was going to get life or the death penalty, and was promised he could get plea out for 3rd-degree manslaughter, I’m open to his claim.
Joe is the man! I love his show and his demeanor.
That guy has a book out now, “You Have The Right To Remain Innocent”. I’ll give away a spoiler he teases in one of his videos:
One of the tricks the cops use is to phrase a statement or a question so that you make an assumption from it that is correct 99.9% of the time. Then they say, aha!, we never actually told him that! Only the murderer would know that!
They pull this a lot on murder cases. The community has been beating the bushes for a week, divers have been in the town lake for the last three days, the candlelight vigil has been held, but let the spouse speak of the deceased in the past tense one time, and aha!, we never said we were certain his wife was dead!
Yes indeed.
Chicagoland had 2 concurrent textbook cases. Dem States Atty framed the Chicago Heigts 7 in Crook County and GOP establishment States Atty Jim Ryan (no relation to the other GOP Ryans) in Dupage County.
Jim Ryan&Co frequently paid a snitch Rolando Cruz, a petty thief, pothead and embarrassment to the human race. But Cruz was not a murderer. Cruz was also a pathetic liar. He was no good on the witness stand pointing at the defendant.
And Jim Ryan had a murder of a little girl he had to solve before election day to prove that an establishment haack was a law-n-order conservative. So he conveniently framed Rolando Cruz, knowing Cruz wais a pathetic liar and would be easy to convict.
Lesson: It’s always smart for an ambitious person to have a fall guy, a scapegoat, close at hand. And pick someone who can’t mount a good defense. <;)>
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