False confession

Dr. Richard Leo is a Hamill Family Professor of Law and Psychology at the University of San Francisco School of Law.

He holds both a law degree and a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and is one of the world's leading experts on police interrogation, psychological coercion, false confessions, and wrongful convictions.

He's the author of the award-winning book, Police Interrogation and American Justice, and the co-author of The Wrong Guys, an examination of the false confessions and wrongful convictions of the Norfolk Four.

We are going to ask him to tell us take us from the violence of the old third degree through the court's earlier efforts to confront coerced confessions and ultimately to the 1966 decision that produced the warning nearly every American now recognizes.

Dr. Leo, welcome to America at 250.

And even if there is a mock judicial instruction saying that it's coerced and to not put weight on it.

And we know in the real world studies, of selected false confession cases, and these studies have to go out and find the false confession cases and aggregate them and look for patterns across them, because there's no known database where one could randomly sample confessions or interrogations.

In these cases of known or proven false confessions, we find something like between 73 and 81% on the published studies.

We know that because he was the same guy from Jeffrey Deskovic's case who lied in his case.

Then the false confession in your case, which is really one of the main reasons why you're still here, where the state, county – authorities have admitted that they got it wrong, right? Anthony's home and he's been on the show.

He's live and in person and you're still here.

And I think it's fair to say that one of the main reasons for that is the fact that they did manage to elicit a false confession from you, which again is confounding to so many people who look at me with these faces and they go, I would never confess to something I didn't do.

And a jury can't understand that either, right? How did they get you to confess to a crime you didn't commit?

Well, it's not my words.

And I pretty much helped them convict me wrongfully for this crime.

Well, you were young and naive, and I don't think you can really beat yourself up.

I told them the story that she and I had cooked up.

And, of course, that false confession contained many mistakes that the real killer would not have made.

I described the clothing of one victim incorrectly, and I placed the other victim in the wrong room, and there were numerous mistakes like that, which should have alerted the police to the fact that I might not be telling the truth.

In addition to that, of course, at that time, the police who were interrogating me were in possession of an FBI crime scene profile by one of the people who invented crime scene profiling, one of the leading special agents.

And I do want to bring John and Chip into the conversation now, too, just to talk about this scenario that took place in England and the immediate aftermath of it.

John, you were a criminal defense lawyer in your younger years.

Yeah, it goes back to a confession, false confession.

There's no other proof.

Michael was understandably wary.

He knew there were people out there who were willing to make a false confession in exchange for fame and notoriety.

So instead of going straight to the authorities, Michael started emailing with Daxus.

He wanted to learn everything about John Bonnet's alleged killer before sounding the alarm.

I'm not making excuses for it, but I wasn't as far wrong as the sister.

If her false confession had ended it, she wouldn't have taken the rap for her brother, who she thought was guilty, but for Walter Helm, who she was afraid was innocent.

It only proves again that you have to watch the words that go above your signature.

Yours truly, Johnny Dollar.

But the prosecutors and detectives were about to learn there would be a serious problem with what happened inside this interrogation room.

This case was a false confession.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Law and Crime.

20-year-old Brooke Schuyler Richardson is facing aggravated murder, manslaughter, child endangerment, tampering with evidence, and abuse of a corpse charges in connection with the death of her baby, Annabelle.

And without Dr. Murray allegedly being so certain, we never would have done that.

I thought this could blow this case for us and at a minimum make it an uphill battle for the prosecutors.

Yet even with serious questions about whether Skylar Richardson had been coerced into making a false confession, prosecutors were confident they had the evidence to convict her at trial.

All rise.

Torture is not like there have been multiple studies done about it.

It produces basically false confessions, the confession that the torture wants to hear because you just want the torture to stop.

So let's, for example, say you you are a murderer, but you're getting tortured to confess to being a thief.

You will confess to being a thief, you know.

Now, I would think if someone was truly innocent, they would fear no issue.

Go

Google the amount of false confessions that are out there.

The bottom line of the short story is Melissa Kaluzinski is one case.

She's completely innocent.

Right.

So, um, you also mention the trap of false confessions.

You mentioned just recently, like, not to talk to, um-

Police