THE PROBLEM FALSE CONF 4/20/06 3:56 PM THE PROBLEM OF FALSE CONFESSIONS IN THE POST-DNA WORLD* ** *** STEVEN A. DRIZIN & RICHARD A. LEO In recent years, numerous individuals who confessed to and were convicted of serious felony crimes have been released from prison—some after many years of incarceration—and declared factually innocent, often as a result of DNA tests that were not possible at the time of arrest, prosecution, and conviction. DNA testing has also exonerated numerous individuals who confessed to serious crimes before their cases went to trial. Numerous others have been released from prison and declared factually innocent in cases that did not involve DNA tests, but instead may have occurred because authorities discovered that the crime never occurred or that it was physically impossible for the (wrongly) convicted defendant to have committed the crime, or because the true perpetrator of the crime was identified, apprehended, and convicted. In this Article, we analyze 125 recent cases of proven interrogation- induced false confessions (i.e., cases in which indisputably innocent individuals confessed to crimes they did not commit) and how these cases were treated by officials in the criminal justice system. This Article has three goals. First, we provide and analyze basic demographic, legal, and case-specific * The authors’ names are listed in alphabetical order. Professors Drizin and Leo would like to thank the many law students for their invaluable research assistance in this project, including Beth Colgan, Kate Shank, Masato Ishibashi, Colleen Ryan, Jason Christopher, Alice Decker, Megan Chmura, and Eric Jehl. A special thanks is due to Kylie Pak for her assistance in both researching and cite checking the Article. We would also like to thank Welsh White for helpful comments on an earlier draft. ** Clinical Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law. B.A., 1983, Haverford College; J.D., 1986, Northwestern University School of Law. *** Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society, and Associate Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine. B.A., 1985, University of California, Berkeley; M.A., 1989, University of Chicago; J.D., 1994, University of California, Berkeley; Ph.D., 1994, University of California, Berkeley. THE PROBLEM FALSE CONF 4/20/06 3:56 PM 2004] FALSE CONFESSIONS IN THE POST-DNA WORLD 892 descriptive data from these 125 cases. This is significant because this is the largest cohort of interrogation-induced false confession cases ever identified and studied in the research literature. Second, we analyze the role that (false) confession evidence played in these cases and how the defendants in these cases were treated by the criminal justice system. In particular, this Article focuses on how criminal justice officials and triers-of-fact respond to confession evidence, whether it biases their evaluations and overwhelms other evidence (particularly evidence of innocence), and how likely false confessions are to lead to the wrongful arrest, prosecution, conviction, and incarceration of the innocent. Analysis of the aforementioned questions leads to the conclusion that the problem of interrogation-induced false confession in the American criminal justice system is far more significant than previously supposed. Furthermore, the problem of interrogation-induced false confessions has profound implications for the study of miscarriages of justice as well as the proper administration of justice. Third, and finally, this Article suggests that several promising policy reforms, particularly mandatory electronic recording of police interrogations, will minimize the number of false confessions and thereby inject a much needed dose of justice into the American criminal justice system. INTRODUCTION .............................................................. 894 I. THE ROLE OF FALSE CONFESSION IN THE STUDY OF WRONGFUL CONVICTION........................................... 901 II. THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF POLICE INTERROGATION AND FALSE CONFESSION ........................................... 907 III. METHODOLOGY AND SOURCES OF DATA......................... 924 IV. FALSE CONFESSIONS AND CASE OUTCOMES: QUANTITATIVE TRENDS ............................................ 932 A. The False Confession Cases1 ............................ 932 1. BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY defines a “confession” as “a statement admitting or acknowledging all facts necessary for conviction of a crime.” A “confession” is distinguished from an “admission” which is “an acknowledgment of a fact or facts tending to prove guilt which falls short of THE PROBLEM FALSE CONF 4/20/06 3:56 PM 2004] FALSE CONFESSIONS IN THE POST-DNA WORLD 893 B. Demographic Data.......................................... 944 C. Case Characteristics ....................................... 946 D. Case Outcomes .............................................. 949 E. Sources of Exoneration ................................... 955 F. Risk of Miscarriage of Justice ........................... 959 IV. FALSE CONFESSIONS AND CASE OUTCOMES: QUALITATIVE TRENDS .............................................. 963 A. Vulnerable Populations: Children..................... 963 1. Ryan Harris ............................................... 964 B. Vulnerable Populations: Juveniles.................... 968 1. Allen Jacob Chesnet.................................... 969 C. Vulnerable Populations: Mentally Retarded ....... 970 1. Michael Gayles........................................... 971 D. Vulnerable Populations: Mentally Ill ................. 973 1. Colleen Blue .............................................. 974 E. Multiplying Effect of False Confessions .............. 974 1. Multiple False Confessions to the Same Crime ....................................................... 974 a. Frank Kuecken and Jonathan Kaled.......... 977 2. Multiple Innocent Defendants Arrested, Charged, and Convicted Based on Co- Defendant’s False Confession....................... 981 a. Calvin Ollins, Larry Ollins, Marcellus Bradford, and Omar Saunders ................. 981 3. Multiple False Confessions from Same Defendants to Multiple Crimes: The So- called Serial Killer Cases ............................. 985 a. Innocents Who Falsely Confess to Crimes Committed by Serial Killers ..................... 986 an acknowledgment of all essential elements of the crime.” In the eyes of police and prosecutors, however, a confession has a much broader meaning, encompassing any statements which tend to incriminate a suspect or a defendant in a crime. BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY 269 (5th ed. 1979). For example, statements placing a defendant at a crime scene are often treated as “confessions,” as are “hypothetical statements” in which a suspect is asked by an interrogator to describe how a crime might have been committed. Also considered confessions are “dream statements” in which a defendant is asked to recount a dream he has had about a crime. There are several cases in our database in which defendants fell short of giving police a full confession. We have included these cases, at the risk of offending suspects or defendants who insist that they never confessed, because the consequences of these inculpatory statements are the same as if the suspect confessed. Police officers relied on these statements as the basis for an arrest, prosecutors relied on them to charge the defendants, and judges and juries often relied on them to convict defendants. THE PROBLEM FALSE CONF 4/20/06 3:56 PM 2004] FALSE CONFESSIONS IN THE POST-DNA WORLD 894 i. Jerry Frank Townsend, Frank Lee Smith, and Eddie Lee Mosley ............. 986 b. Closing Open Cases by Falsely Attributing Unsolved Murders to Guilty Defendants............................................ 992 i. Hubert Geralds, Derrick Flewellen, and Andre Crawford.......................... 992 F. Prosecuting the False Confessor ....................... 993 1. David Saraceno.......................................... 994 2. Teresa Sornberger...................................... 994 CONCLUSION................................................................. 995 INTRODUCTION In April 1989, a young woman was attacked while jogging in New York City’s Central Park. The jogger entered the park near 84th Street shortly after 9:00 p.m., traveled north along the East Drive, and then turned onto the 102nd Street Crossdrive heading west. At approximately 9:15 p.m.,2 she was knocked down and dragged into a ravine where she was raped and sodomized. She was beaten so severely, particularly in the area of her left eye, that she lost nearly eighty percent of her blood.3 On the same evening, a large group of teenage boys, with estimates ranging as high as forty to fifty boys, entered Central Park near East 110th Street in Harlem and began walking south along the park’s East Drive. The boys subsequently encountered Antonio Diaz, who was eating dinner and drinking beer in the park that night. Some of the boys proceeded to beat up Diaz and dragged him into a nearby thicket of bushes.4 This group of boys then continued heading south on East Drive, harassing several cyclists along the way.5 Sometime thereafter, a police car passed the group, causing them to break up temporarily before regrouping near some ball fields in the park’s North Meadow. According to Jermain Robinson, who was one of 2. TIMOTHY SULLIVAN, UNEQUAL VERDICTS 243 (1992). Based on the jogger’s own estimates of the time she entered the park and how fast she was running, on cross-examination, she estimated she would