Tag Archives: Innocence Project

Why Do The Innocent Confess?

On September 28th, Damon Thibodeaux, 38, became the 300th prisoner nationwide to have his conviction overturned based on DNA evidence, and the 18th death row prisoner freed based on such evidence according to the Innocence Project. Thibodeaux served 16 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, most of them on death row.

While the above numbers are startling, Thibodeaux was also one of the approximately 25% of wrongfully convicted defendants cleared by DNA evidence who made false confessions, admissions or statements to law enforcement officials.

He was convicted in 1997 and sentenced to death after he confessed to the July 19, 1996, rape and murder of his 14-year-old step-cousin, Crystal Champagne, in Westwego, near New Orleans. DNA testing later showed that he was not the murderer and that the victim had not been raped.

So why in the world would Thibodeaux or any innocent person confess to a crime they did not commit?

Studies have shown that the decision to confess is often seen as a way to avoid an immediate consequence, even though the confession likely increases the risk of incurring a future consequence. Other studies have found that those who are truly innocent naively believe that the truth will come out in a fair trial and that justice will prevail.

Personality traits can be another factor. Some people are simply more malleable and suggestible than others, allowing experienced interrogators to lead them into a false set of beliefs. Police have also been known to present false evidence or misinformation, thus increasing a person’s willingness to confess.

How do we decrease the number of false confessions? The Innocence Project believes the single best reform is the electronic recordings of interrogations from the moment Miranda rights are read to a suspect.

In 2003, Illinois became the first state to require that all police interrogations of suspects in homicide cases be recorded.

The Supreme Courts of Alaska and Minnesota have declared that, under their state constitutions, defendants are entitled as a matter of due process to have their custodial interrogations recorded.

Three hundred people have served a combined total 4,013 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. It’s long past time the rest of the states required the video recording of all interrogations.

False Convictions

Researchers estimate the total number of felony convictions in the United States at nearly a million a year. The vast majority of those who are tried, convicted, and sent to prison are guilty, despite their claims to the contrary. But what percentage is actually innocent? A report released yesterday sheds some light on the issue.

According to a new archive compiled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, more than 2,000 people who were falsely convicted of serious crimes have been exonerated in the United States in the past 23 years. As appalling as that statistic looks at first glance, less than 100 people a year are falsely accused. That’s a pretty good record, unless you were one of the unfortunate 2,000. In which case, you’d spend a lot of time in prison.

Eight hundred seventy-three of the exonerated defendants spent a combined total of more than 10,000 years in prison, an average of more than 11 years each. Nine out of 10 of them are men and half are African-American. Nearly half of the 873 exonerations were homicide cases, including 101 death sentences. Over one-third of the cases were sexual assaults.

Not surprisingly, DNA evidence led to exoneration in nearly one-third of the 416 homicides and in nearly two-thirds of the 305 sexual assaults. It seems clear that without DNA, most of the exonerated individuals would still be serving time for crimes they didn’t commit.

So how did these innocent people end up in prison in the first place? The most common factor leading to false convictions was perjured testimony or false accusations. Mistaken eyewitness identification and false or misleading forensic evidence were the other major contributors. Defense lawyers, police officers, prosecutors, and judges all share some of the blame in whenever there is a miscarriage of justice. Far too often the rush to find a perpetrator outweighs the search for truth. And the consequences are devastating.

That’s why even one false conviction is one too many.

DNA Frees Another Innocent Man

Cornelius Dupree with his wife Selman Perkins. Photo courtesy of the AP and The Innocence Project

Texas leads the nation in the number of wrongly convicted inmates, having freed 41 wrongly convicted inmates through DNA testing since 2001—more than any other state.

Cornelius Dupree Jr., sentenced to 75 years in prison in 1980 for the rape and robbery of a 26-year-old Dallas woman a year earlier, was the latest to be declared innocent Tuesday after spending 30 years in prison. Dupree, who always maintained his innocence, holds the dubious distinction of having served more time in prison for a crime he didn’t commit than any other Texas inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.

He is the 21st inmate exonerated by DNA evidence in Dallas County, which maintains biological evidence decades after a conviction. Craig Watkins, the Dallas County DA, and the first black district attorney in Texas history, has cooperated with innocence groups in reviewing hundreds of requests by inmates for DNA testing. Watkins has reversed what he calls “a convict-at-all-costs mentality” that he says permeated his office before he arrived in 2007.

Dupree spent over half his life behind bars because of mistaken identification, which is not unusual considering 75% of wrongful convictions of people later cleared by DNA evidence resulted from misidentifications, according to the Innocence Project. They recommend that all law enforcement agencies be required to have written policies for identification procedures based on scientific research on eyewitness memory to increase accuracy and reliability.

A Department of Justice study found that even the most experienced officer could inadvertently give subconscious hints to the witness to identify the suspect, resulting in false identification. Thus, an officer who doesn’t know the identity of the suspect should conduct the line-up. Also, under traditional simultaneous lineups, some witnesses will inadvertently begin to compare photos to one another, or persons in live lineups, instead of comparing one photo or one person to their memory. Consequently, the identifications are not as reliable as those conducted sequentially. Photos or persons should be viewed one at a time and presented in random order.

Fortunately for Cornelius Dupree, Texas also has the most generous compensation laws for the wrongly imprisoned in the country. He is eligible for $80,000 for each year he was behind bars, plus a lifetime annuity. He could receive $2.4 million in a lump sum that is not subject to federal income tax. The Texas Legislature passed the compensation law in 2009, after dozens of wrongly convicted men were released from prison. But I’ll bet if you asked him, no amount of money could ever compensate for the thirty lost years of his life.