Another Innocent Barely Beats the Reaper
Bill Funke
Feb 5, 1999, concerning the journalism students in David Protess'
class at Northwestern U doing field work investigating a murder:>
-----------------------------------------------
Class of Sleuths to Rescue on Death Row
Journalism Students Track Down Suspect After Re-enacting Killing
By : Pam Belluck
Chicago, Feb 4
...
...{Anthony} Porter caught a break. Two days before he was supposed
to be executed for the murder of a young couple in 1982, he was
granted a stay...
...
...With the help of a private investigator, the journalism students
and Mr. Protess examined court records, re-enacted his crime and
tracked down witnesses. What they found suggested that another man
had committed the murders.
On Wednesday, that man, Alstory Simon gave a videotaped interview to
the private investigator implicating himself in the murders and
apparently exonerating Mr. Porter.
...
Now, the prosecutor's office has reopened the investigation.
...
If Mr. Porter, 43, is cleared, he will be the 10th person released
from death row in Illinois since the state reinstated the death
penalty in 1977, a number second only to that in Florida which has had
18 such cases since 1973....
Mr. Protess, whose class had a leading role three years ago in freeing
four men wrongfully convicted of a gang rape and double murder in
suburban Ford Heights, said he did not believe Illinois necessarily
made more mistakes in death penalty cases. Rather, he said the state
has aggressive lawyers, journalists and advocates who are actively
engaged in the issue.
...
"In a lot of these cases there are not the investigative resources for
indigent defendants," Mr. Protess said. "My college students have the
time to investigate."
...
{On charges that the Chicago PD intimidated a witness into fingering
Porter:}
...
A spokesman for the Chicago Police Department, Lauri Sanders, said
today that the department had not seen the taped confession or Mr.
Taylor's affidavit alleging harassment and that, until it did, it had
no plans to investigate its conduct.
"We did our part, Ms. Sanders said. "There was a crime committed, we
investigated, we interviewed people, and we filed charges. That's
where our responsibility ends."
-----------------------------------------
It wasn't the system working that got this poor guy off. The system
damn near fried him.
A bunch of college students doing field work for extra credit solved a
crime the police, prosecutors, judge, and jury couldn't get right!
Forget this bullshit death penalty and find some detectives who know
that solving a crime is not the same as clearing a case.
(Maybe we should get these kids to help out with WM3, eh guys?)
Whoopty Doo
this shows then that the system works.
No need to repeal the Death Penalty if the system works, right?
Thanks for the article...
The cow says "Mooo"
I just say "Whoopty Doo"
Oren Green and Barbara Bennington
you were to be executed you might have a little less regard for the workings
of "the system".
JIGSAW1695
From: "Oren Green and Barbara Bennington" <oba...@earthlink.net>
Date: 2/5/99 11:49 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id: <79ghf5$q3k$1...@fir.prod.itd.earthlink.net>
I'm sure if you spent years on death row and won a reprieve two days before
you were to be executed you might have a little less regard for the workings
of "the system".
===============================
On the other hand.......................
HNBaines
>Date: 2/5/99 1:55 PM Central Standard Time
>Message-id: <79fim2$rpu$6...@camel25.mindspring.com>
>
><Excepted from an article published in the New York Times on Friday,
>Feb 5, 1999, concerning the journalism students in David Protess'
>class at Northwestern U doing field work investigating a murder:>
>-----------------------------------------------
>
>Class of Sleuths to Rescue on Death Row
>Journalism Students Track Down Suspect After Re-enacting Killing
>
>By : Pam Belluck
>Chicago, Feb 4
>
>...
>...{Anthony} Porter caught a break. Two days before he was supposed
>to be executed for the murder of a young couple in 1982, he was
>granted a stay...
>...
>...With the help of a private investigator, the journalism students
>and Mr. Protess examined court records, re-enacted his crime and
>tracked down witnesses. What they found suggested that another man
>had committed the murders.
>
>A bunch of college students doing field work for extra credit solved a
>crime the police, prosecutors, judge, and jury couldn't get right!
>
Amazing. I wonder how long it will take the "deathies" to preen about how
the appeals system "works", when in fact it failed at every turn in this case.
When unjust convictions are left to journalism students and 60 Minutes crews to
uncover, something is definately wrong.
Bill Funke
HNBaines wrote in message
<19990206092005...@ng-fp1.aol.com>...
other threads on this case.
Think maybe we should be recruiting ADA's out of journalism school
instead of law school?
.
necroemminence
wrote:
><Excepted from an article published in the New York Times on Friday,
>Feb 5, 1999, concerning the journalism students in David Protess'
>class at Northwestern U doing field work investigating a murder:>
>-----------------------------------------------
>
>Class of Sleuths to Rescue on Death Row
>Journalism Students Track Down Suspect After Re-enacting Killing
>
>By : Pam Belluck
>Chicago, Feb 4
>
>...
>...{Anthony} Porter caught a break. Two days before he was supposed
>to be executed for the murder of a young couple in 1982, he was
>granted a stay...
>...
>...With the help of a private investigator, the journalism students
>and Mr. Protess examined court records, re-enacted his crime and
>tracked down witnesses. What they found suggested that another man
>had committed the murders.
>A bunch of college students doing field work for extra credit solved a
>crime the police, prosecutors, judge, and jury couldn't get right!
>
>Forget this bullshit death penalty and find some detectives who know
>that solving a crime is not the same as clearing a case.
>
>(Maybe we should get these kids to help out with WM3, eh guys?)
Sure. You bet. Only a few problems with that.
One, there was a confession.
Two there is an independent witness, Narlene Hollingsworth, that
places Damien and a companion near the murder scene.
Three he matches the physical description of a man who took Steve
Branches photo nearly a month before the murders.
Four, there ARE no bite marks.
Five, Damien was overheard by two other witnesses saying that he had
murdered those three little boys and was going to pick out two more
before he got arrested.
Six, Damien told police only six days after the murder that they
should look for, among other things, candles. A substance that could
be candle wax was found on one of the victims.
Damiens side already has a professional liar.
necromancer
Jeffrey
complaining and trouble over his innocence. Its so inconvenient for the
pro-dp group to deal with. So messy, this innocence thing. Of course
those who hide behind the cowardness of the death penalty, well..don't
confuse them with the facts.
HNBaines wrote:
>
> >From: "Bill Funke" <wf...@mindspring.com>
> >Date: 2/5/99 1:55 PM Central Standard Time
> >Message-id: <79fim2$rpu$6...@camel25.mindspring.com>
> >
> ><Excepted from an article published in the New York Times on Friday,
> >Feb 5, 1999, concerning the journalism students in David Protess'
> >class at Northwestern U doing field work investigating a murder:>
> >-----------------------------------------------
> >
> >Class of Sleuths to Rescue on Death Row
> >Journalism Students Track Down Suspect After Re-enacting Killing
> >
> >By : Pam Belluck
> >Chicago, Feb 4
> >
> >...
> >...{Anthony} Porter caught a break. Two days before he was supposed
> >to be executed for the murder of a young couple in 1982, he was
> >granted a stay...
> >...
> >...With the help of a private investigator, the journalism students
> >and Mr. Protess examined court records, re-enacted his crime and
> >tracked down witnesses. What they found suggested that another man
> >had committed the murders.
> >
>
> >A bunch of college students doing field work for extra credit solved a
> >crime the police, prosecutors, judge, and jury couldn't get right!
> >
>
Chriwor
>>(Maybe we should get these kids to help out with WM3, eh >>guys?)
>
>Sure. You bet. Only a few problems with that.
>
>One, there was a confession.
Jessie Misskelley's coerced false confession was not
and is not admissible evidence against either Damien
Echols nor Jason Baldwin. If their guilt is to be
proved, it must be done so by other means.
(Pity the jurors at the Echols/Baldwin trial were
not so scrupulous, a terrible mistake could have
been avoided.)
>Two there is an independent witness, Narlene Hollingsworth, that
>places Damien and a companion near the murder scene.
She places her cousin Domini Teer with her
current boyfriend, Damien.
Necro conveniently would like you to forget about her
identification of Domini, and to chalk it off as a mistake.
But let's not presume that if she could be mistaken about
her cousin, she could be mistaken about Damien, as well.
Oh, no . . .
>Three he matches the physical description of a man who took >Steve
>Branches photo nearly a month before the murders.
Again Necromancer makes the above assertion, presenting something
which constitues new, never before publically revealed
evidence against Damien Echols, and again he neither
does anything to back it up, nor does he take the
opportunity to answer the simple questions I asked him
about it the first time he posted it.
On the face of it, direct eyewitness testimony from
Mrs. Branch that a man matching Damien's
decription snapped her son's
photo weeks before he turned up dead would
have so bolstered the state's case that I find it
postively incredible that Fogelman and Davis would
have squandered such an opportunity, UNLESS, they were aware that there was
far less to it than meets the eye, and were afraid that it would blow up in
their face. Does Necro care to offer another explanation?
>
>Four, there ARE no bite marks.
Necro has decided that his lay opinion, (oh yes, I forgot,
he's done his "homework") is more valuable than that of
forensic odontologist Dr. Thomas David's. I find it
amusing that, even though Brent Davis had known for months
that the defense was going to put on a forensic odontologist
at the October Echol's hearing to air the view that
the wounds in question were bite marks and that
Echols, nor Baldwin and Misskelley were the makers
of those bites, prosecutor Davis wasn't
able in all that time to find a qualified F.O. anywhere
to dispute it, and had to ask for a long continuance
(going on five months now) to again try to find one whom
wouldn't embarass him on the witness stand too much.
So far, it seems that he's come up with Necromancer.
I'll be eager to watch him testify come March.
>
>Five, Damien was overheard by two other witnesses saying that he had
>murdered those three little boys and was going to pick out two more
>before he got arrested.
The fact that you people stubbornly persist in
characterizing this hearsay
piece of nonsense a " confession", despite
all the logical and circumstantial argments
which undermine not only its credibility but
even relevance (e.g., if it was voiced as a sarcastic
aside, it's relevance would be nil),
makes me truly began to wonder
if perhaps there isn't more to the argument for
Mumia's innocence than I've heretofore presumed
from only a surface inspection. I mean, if the Echol's
case is any indication of the lax standards the pro PD
crows have for what consitutes a confession . . .
>Six, Damien told police only six days after the murder that they
>should look for, among other things, candles. A substance that could
>be candle wax was found on one of the victims.
Asked and answered in a recent , which per
usual Necromancer chooses to ignore
>Damiens side already has a professional liar.
Gee, what a thoughtful argument.
>necromancer
>
>
------------
"It is better that ten guilty persons escape
than one innocent suffer."
-- Sir William Blackstone
Ngrangel
that this man was picked by the students ....
And there isnt any way to be sure that there aren't other Porters going to be
executed tonight or tomorrow night or the next night.
- amanda>Fantastic...
Amanda
frz...@i-2000.com
> You must recognize, of course, that Misskelley's post-conviction statements
> against interest do damage to Richard Ofshe's expert opinion that Misskelley's
> June 1993 confession was coerced.
of course it does not. this second performance was no more factually correct than
the previous fantasy -- for example, jessie never mentioned any biting,
bitemarks... and he never mentioned a fouth person. jessie said byers' penis was
sliced off with on clean stroke, when in reality he was more skinned, the penis was
there, but the skin had been peeled back. jessie simply repeated what he thought
the prosecutors wanted to hear. he got critical facts like the time of day
completely wrong, he has a 72 IQ... and if you really understood anything about
false and coerced confessions, you would be so appalled by this example that you'd
be focusing your obesssion on this travesty of justice. this was big brother at
work against a poor, mentally handicapped teenager.
here is a very interesting (and long) article that i found fascinating. i
understand this Crowe case will be on one of the major network newsmagazines soon.
bill
=======================================
MARK SAUER
STAFF WRITER
29-Nov-1998 Sunday
At lunchtime one summer day in 1991, gunmen entered a Buddhist temple near
Phoenix, ordered six monks, an elderly nun and two followers to lay
face-down on the floor and executed them with shots to the head.
A month later, the Maricopa County sheriff declared the case solved --
three Tucson men had confessed following interrogations lasting up to 21
hours.
That same day, however, a rifle found in the possession of two adolescents
was tested and it proved to be the weapon used in the temple murders.
The youths, who also possessed items stolen from the temple, soon confessed
to robbing and killing the Buddhists, giving police extensive details on
how they planned and carried out the crime.
And the bewildered trio from Tucson went free.
But why would someone confess to a murder he did not commit?
The answer has to do with the psychological pressure of police
interrogation, which in rare cases can result in false confessions.
A controversial area of the law, coerced confessions will get a full airing
in hearings beginning Tuesday in the Stephanie Crowe murder case.
The victim's brother, Michael Crowe, 15, and two of his schoolmates, Aaron
Houser, 16, and Joshua Treadway, 16, are charged with stabbing the
12-year-old Escondido girl to death in her sleep Jan. 21. The three are to
be tried as adults and could go to prison for life if convicted.
Their attorneys say there is no physical evidence tying the boys to
Stephanie's murder and that they lacked a motive.
But what about the boys' confessions?
After initially denying any connection to the girl's murder, Michael Crowe
eventually conceded to detectives that he must have killed his sister,
though he provided almost no details about the crime.
Then Joshua confessed that he stood lookout while Aaron and Michael went
into Stephanie's bedroom and stabbed her.
The statements came following many hours of interrogation by detectives
from both the Escondido and Oceanside police departments.
The two boys quickly recanted, however, claiming detectives coerced their
statements using psychological torture. The upcoming hearing, before
Superior Court Judge John Thompson, will determine whether the confessions
will be suppressed, which could irreparably damage the prosecution's case.
(The defense also insists that Stephanie's killer is a mentally unstable
transient named Richard Tuite, who was in the Crowe's rural Escondido
neighborhood that night beating on doors and entering houses. Police,
however, questioned Tuite, who is in custody on unrelated burglary charges,
and have dismissed him as a suspect.)
"This is one of the most outrageous cases I have ever seen. What was done
to these kids is unbelievable, and it's all right there on videotape," said
Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist at UC Berkeley and a leading expert on
coercion and false confessions. Ofshe has testified for the defense in this
case.
But prosecutors and the detectives who interrogated the three boys insist
they were not coerced into confessing, were not inappropriately
interrogated, and that their rights against self-incrimination were duly
protected.
Authorities say the boys methodically plotted Stephanie's murder during
school lunch breaks, that the motive was sibling rivalry and that the
defendants' interest in medieval fantasy games and knives apparently got
out of hand.
Police and prosecutors also believe they have the murder weapon, a knife
belonging to Houser that was hidden under Treadway's bed. The defense,
however is adamant that no evidence beyond Treadway's confession ties that
knife to the murder scene.
"In the real world, if you sit down and tell someone you committed a
murder, unless you're a lunatic, your statement is to be believed," said
Chris McDonough, an Oceanside detective who helped interrogate the boys.
"The other two confessed, but one of the boys (Houser) said, basically, `I
don't know what you're talking about.' If our tactics were coercive, why
didn't it work with him?" McDonough continued.
Summer Stephan, the deputy district attorney prosecuting the three boys,
said, regarding whether Treadway was coerced, "It is simply not reasonable
to believe that a young man of Treadway's intelligence and cunning would
confess to a crime he did not commit."
`A confession is the most powerful evidence there is, more powerful than
eyewitness accounts, than fingerprints or lie-detector tests," said Saul
Kassin. He is a social psychologist at Williams College in Massachusetts
specializing in the dynamics of police interrogation.
But tactics that work well in getting the guilty to confess, Kassin said,
sometimes work equally well in extracting confessions from the innocent.
Interrogation techniques featuring harsh verbal confrontation of crime
suspects, often combined with trickery, became so powerful that the Supreme
Court in 1966 issued its famous Miranda decision.
Before proceeding with an interrogation, police must "Mirandize" a suspect
-- warn him that he has the right to remain silent and to have an attorney
present. Even with the warning, many people don't realize that they can
simply refuse to talk to police about a crime, Kassin said.
"The first thing the average person says is, `I would never confess to a
crime I didn't commit,' " Kassin said. "But people don't understand the
kind of intense pressure suspects are under in the course of an
interrogation.
"Police and prosecutors will say in no uncertain terms that they cannot get
someone who is innocent to confess. In fact, I spoke with a detective
recently who said, `I have never taken a false confession.' I asked him,
`How do you know?' "
Coercion expert Ofshe said innocent suspects who succumb to the pressure of
interrogation and confess usually do so for one of two reasons: Their faith
in their own innocence and memory is so badly shaken that they come to
believe they may have actually committed the crime; or, they fear they will
be convicted based on the evidence police claim to have against them and
that the consequences of refusing to confess will be more severe.
In the second instance, Ofshe said, confessing can actually be a rational
choice for an innocent suspect if he believes he will be convicted anyway
and "have the book thrown at him."
Ofshe, along with Richard Leo, a professor of criminology at UC Irvine,
documents the Phoenix temple case and dozens of other false confessions in
an article in the current Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology,
published by the Northwestern University School of Law.
Included are these:
After twice failing a polygraph test, a man confessed in 1990 to Austin,
Texas, police that he killed his girlfriend after she was reported missing
by friends and presumed dead. Not long afterward, she turned up alive in
Tucson, Ariz.
Two suspects confessed to Los Angeles police in 1987 to a double murder
and robbery after being accused by a gang member being questioned about
another killing. Charges were dropped when it was discovered that one had
been in San Diego County Jail and the other in a California Youth Authority
camp when the crime was committed.
And in 1996, a Sitka, Alaska, man confessed to raping and murdering a
17-year-old girl. He had been drinking heavily the night of the murder
and, after having "disturbing flashbacks," went to police himself wondering
if he could have been involved. But DNA revealed he was not the rapist.
Hairs and fingerprints found at the scene were not his, and several
witnesses placed him at a party aboard a boat when the crime occurred. The
man was acquitted at trial.
The way to best guard against false confessions, according to Ofshe, Leo
and Kassin, is to videotape them -- as was done in the Crowe case -- so
judges and juries can see what happened for themselves.
Police interrogations work best in a spare, uninviting environment free
from telephones, pagers, intercoms and other distractions. The suspect must
feel uncomfortable, according to David Vessel, a New Mexico-based FBI agent
who has taught interrogation techniques for the past 10 years.
The detective must immediately establish control of the situation. The
idea, according to social-psychologist Kassin, is "to render the suspect
helpless, to make him feel socially isolated with no communication possible
with anyone he is familiar with and trusts."
"This makes him feel anxious and stressed," Kassin said. "Then you confront
this person with the charges against him and absolutely refuse to take no
for an answer -- do not allow him to make denials, to claim innocence; box
him in at every turn."
Detectives often come at the suspect in waves of "good cops" and "bad
cops," psychologically pursuing him relentlessly for hours. The weapons
they use are pieces of evidence.
Detectives will tell a suspect he failed the lie-detector test, that his
fingerprints were discovered on the murder weapon, that witnesses saw him
fleeing the scene, that the victim's blood was found on his clothing, and
so on.
None of this needs to be true, however.
"No, there is nothing that says we have to be truthful when interrogating
suspects," said Frank Christensen, a 26-year veteran of the San Diego
Police Department.
"But for good detectives who have done their homework, lying to a suspect
about the evidence is really a last-resort type of thing."
According to their attorneys, the three Escondido boys accused of murdering
Stephanie Crowe were told several lies regarding evidence and the strength
of the case against them.
The defense contends this use of "a ruse," as the prosecution calls it, was
highly coercive in getting both Crowe and Treadway to falsely confess.
Prosecutor Stephan, meanwhile, said such misstatement of evidence is
clearly admissible by law. And, she said, it would not lead an innocent
person to confess.
The idea in confronting a suspect with the evidence, whether real or not,
is to make it clear that the case can be made without his confession, but
that things will go easier for him if he tells the truth and confesses.
Detectives also commonly try to "minimize the crime" when interrogating a
suspect, Kassin said.
"The detective will blame the victim or an accomplice. They tell the
suspect they don't think the crime is really that big a deal, or that the
consequences of confessing might not be as severe as one might think -- all
of which is perfectly legal to say."
According to defense attorneys, this was done repeatedly in the
interrogation of both Treadway and Crowe.
For example, Escondido Detective Ralph Claytor said to Crowe during his
interrogation: "I'm not real sure how familiar you are with the system, but
kind of the way it works is if the system has to prove it, yeah, it's jail.
If they don't, then it's help."
Prosecutor Stephan argues in her court brief, however, that the detectives
truthfully outlined to the suspects the likely consequences of failing to
tell the truth.
The guilty suspect who waives his Miranda rights and talks may believe he
can outwit or outlast the police and foil the interrogation -- which is not
uncommon, according to the FBI's Vessel.
That is precisely what Michael Crowe and Joshua Treadway were doing,
according to Prosecutor Stephan. Crowe "masterfully attempted to manipulate
the detectives," the prosecutor wrote in her brief for Tuesday's hearing.
That Treadway "was able to perform such a skilled acting job negates his
claim that his will was overborne by police," she added.
The innocent suspect, meanwhile, may feel he has nothing to lose and can
clear the matter up by cooperating with police -- which is why Crowe,
Treadway and Houser all agreed to be interrogated at length, according to
their attorneys.
"Interrogations are for closing the case, not making the case," said
Christensen. "Only after you have interviewed all (surviving) victims, all
witnesses and the coroner, and have completely processed the crime scene --
only after you have all possible ducks in a row, do you go in and
interrogate the primary suspect."
He added that, "the veracity of the suspect's (confession) statement has to
be substantiated through other avenues. You need physical evidence to
substantiate what this person is telling you."
Though the law allows police to lie to suspects about evidence, they are
forbidden to make promises of leniency, or to make threats, in order to
obtain a confession.
Courts have established that explicit promises or threats are clearly
coercive and render a resulting confession invalid.
"But detectives go a long way toward stepping up to, if not over, that line
by implying leniency or threatening severe punishment with these
techniques," Kassin said.
Detectives used promises and threats to extract confessions from Michael
Crowe and Joshua Treadway, according to their attorneys.
But the prosecution says detectives stayed within bounds and simply offered
truthful, sound advice to the boys about the consequences of what they were
saying.
In her motion to have all statements made by Joshua Treadway to police
suppressed, attorney Mary Ellen Attridge cites testimony from Escondido
Detective Claytor showing police concluded on the morning of Stephanie's
murder that the killer "came from within the house."
The reason: Police believed that all the windows and doors at the Crowe
house were locked, and there was no sign of forced entry.
But this was a mistaken belief, Attridge said, since the sliding-glassdoor
in the parents' bedroom was unlocked, as was Stephanie's bedroom window.
In addition, an Escondido police officer working the crime scene believed
that Michael Crowe was "inappropriately bereaved," though he had never met
the boy before. The officer reported his impression to detectives and
"thus, Michael Crowe became the primary suspect in Stephanie's murder,"
according to Attridge.
Michael Crowe was interrogated for several hours in four sessions Jan. 21,
22 and 23.
The boy, who had been separated from his parents and was housed (along with
his 10-year-old sister) at Polinsky Center for abused and neglected
children, had no parent, attorney or other advocate present during his
interrogation.
While that is legal, it likely would not have happened if the FBI or San
Diego police had been investigating the case, according to detectives with
both agencies.
"The golden rule with juveniles is to at least have the parents there in
the waiting room and be constantly talking with them, telling them what is
going on," said the SDPD's Christensen. "And juveniles are read their
Miranda rights before we ask them their name."
Vessel of the FBI said, "It is our policy to have someone there, a parent
or guardian -- some adult -- who will represent the child's interests, to
insure the child's will is not overborne by the interrogation process."
According to law, confessions -- especially those by juveniles -- must be
voluntary, the product of the suspect's free will and rational choice.
Attridge said this was definitely not the case with Michael Crowe and
Joshua Treadway -- a contention fiercely opposed by the police and
prosecution.
Michael was read his Miranda rights at the outset of his interrogation.
For many hours, the boy denied that he had killed his sister, insisting
that he had been home sick from school the previous two days, had gotten up
at 4:30 a.m. for Tylenol and a glass of milk -- two hours before
Stephanie's body was found -- and noticed nothing amiss before going back
to bed.
But during the second interrogation session, Michael began to waffle a bit
in his denials after being subjected to Detective McDonough's Computer
Voice Stress Analyzer, which supposedly denotes deception in the voice.
Michael failed his encounter with the machine, which has been called
scientifically unfounded by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
Because of that failure, Michael started to wonder aloud, according to the
transcript of his interrogation, whether he may actually have had a hand in
Stephanie's murder, even though he said he had absolutely no recollection
of it:
Detective Claytor: "What's the worst you can imagine right now?"
Michael: "I'm crazy. There's someone else inside of me and I don't know who
they are. I don't know what they do. I don't -- if what you're saying is
true, it's like there's another person in me and I don't remember ... I
wish I could help you, but I don't know what happened."
After being told over and over that he is the killer, and that "an
avalanche of evidence is going to come tumbling down" upon him, Michael
says:
"Why are you doing this to me? I didn't do this to her. I couldn't. God.
God. Why? I can't even believe myself anymore. I don't know if I did it or
not. I didn't, though."
The key to a valid confession, Ofshe believes, is the "post-confession
narrative," in which a suspect who has said, "I did it," provides details
matching the facts of the crime.
A confession lacking in details the killer would know, such as where the
body was found, what the victim was wearing, what was used to bind the
hands, the location of the murder weapon, etc., should be considered
unreliable, he said.
Michael provided police virtually nothing in this regard, Prosecutor
Stephan said. She added that when pressed for details, he simply said that
"all he felt was rage and that he could not remember what exactly
happened."
He resisted attempts by detectives to suggest that evidence indicated he
killed his sister until almost the end of the interrogation.
But then there is a 13-minute pause on the videotape. Detectives continue
talking to him off-camera, however, and when the tape comes back on, not
only has Michael's story changed, so has his demeanor -- he now agrees with
detectives' assertions that he must have killed Stephanie.
Stephan said that Michael was placed under arrest for his sister's killing
during this pause, and that is what changed him.
But the defense contends that the boy changed dramatically because he was
told his mother and father now believed he killed Stephanie and never
wanted to speak to him again.
Superior Court Judge Laura Hammes, who carefully reviewed the interrogation
videotapes last summer during a three-week hearing, agreed with the
defense.
If detectives did tell Michael his parents believed he was the killer and
disowned him for it, that statement was not true, Attridge said.
It is clear from the transcript, however, that what happened during this
off-camera discussion had a profound effect.
"I completely blocked myself out," Michael said near the end of his
interrogation. "And I wouldn't even know that I did it if she wasn't dead.
It just as easily could have been a dream ... I can't remember."
Joshua Treadway, Michael Crowe's best friend, was interrogated the first
time for 10 hours straight, beginning at 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 27.
He admitted to Escondido detectives Claytor and Mark Wrisley that he had
stolen a knife, which he had admired, from a collection owned by his
schoolmate, Aaron Houser.
This admission certainly got their attention. But Joshua insisted the theft
occurred on Jan. 16, five days before Stephanie Crowe was found murdered
and said it could not have been the murder weapon because it had been under
his bed ever since.
Around 4:30 a.m., however, McDonough arrived from Oceanside with
his Computer Voice Stress Analyzer. He tested whether Joshua was telling
the
truth about the knife and determined that he wasn't, after telling the
suspect that the machine was "98 percent accurate."
The boy also was told by police that tests showed the knife that had been
in his possession all that time was indeed the murder weapon, and that both
Michael Crowe and Aaron Houser had blamed him for Stephanie's slaying.
Detectives also told Joshua and his father -- a locksmith who knew and
trusted the Escondido officers since he did the lock work at the police
station -- that a warrant had been prepared charging Joshua with murder.
They even took a mug shot of the boy holding a placard describing his
murder charge.
But the detectives' claims -- that the voice machine was infallible, the
knife was definitely the murder weapon, Michael Crowe and Aaron Houser had
implicated Joshua, and a murder warrant for his arrest was being sworn out
-- were all untrue.
All of which, defense attorney Attridge contends, was highly coercive in
getting Joshua to tell the detectives what he believed they wanted to hear.
By 7:30 the next morning, Joshua -- who complained that he was exhausted,
hungry, thirsty, needed to use the bathroom and wanted to see his father
again -- had told detectives that Aaron Houser had given him the knife on
Jan. 25, three days after the murder, and told him "to get rid of it."
The detectives congratulated the boy for "finally telling the truth." His
demeanor toward his interrogators throughout the overnight session was
friendly. The transcript shows he was clearly trying to satisfy the
voice-stress machine as well as the detectives.
Despite the supposed murder warrant hanging over him, Joshua was allowed to
go home with his father.
On Feb. 10, 13 days after his first interrogation, police called Joshua's
father and said they wanted to talk to his son again to "tie up some loose
ends."
The interview would take about 45 minutes at Escondido police headquarters,
Michael Treadway says he was told, and he drove his son back to the police
station. Instead, the boy was questioned for eight hours.
Unlike the previous, overnight session, Joshua was not allowed to see his
father during this interrogation. And he was not read his Miranda rights
until very near the end of the interrogation, according to the transcript
of the videotaped session.
Again, Joshua was repeatedly told by detectives that Michael Crowe and
Aaron Houser had implicated him in Stephanie's murder, that he had failed
the voice-stress test, that he was lying when he said he'd stolen the knife
days before the murder, that the knife was indeed the murder weapon and,
finally, that he was lying when he said he wasn't at the Crowe house that
night.
In the middle of this session, during which Joshua's father was made to
wait in the lobby one floor below the locked interrogation room, the boy
broke down and sobbed uncontrollably.
His fears were summed up in an exchange with McDonough, operator of the
voice-stress machine:
Treadway: "But I'm just saying, I don't know, as a kid coming in here to
the police station and talking is a really scary thing."
McDonough: "I respect that."
Treadway: "And, you know, taking these tests and everything and ... if I
didn't start talking, you know, had the capability of being, of goin' to
prison."
Over the next few hours, Joshua proceeded to tell detectives that he had
overheard Michael Crowe and Aaron Houser plan Stephanie's murder, that he
had agreed to accompany Houser to the Crowe house that night and had stood
watch in the kitchen while the other two boys went in the girl's bedroom
and stabbed her.
Prosecutor Stephan argues that these details about the crime, that were
lacking in Michael Crowe's statement, show that Treadway's confession was
not coerced.
Defense attorney Attridge counters that these details do not match the
facts of the crime and prove that Joshua invented the story to please the
detectives and end the interrogation.
Judge Hammes' review of the boys' confessions came during a hearing on
whether they should be tried as adults. Hammes agreed that prosecutors had
met the "low level of a legal standard" -- a strong suspicion of the boys'
possible involvement.
But she also released them from Juvenile Hall and stated: "If this were a
court trial, these boys would be not guilty."
Hammes said that in their hours of interrogation, the detectives again and
again "took something normal" that one of the boys had said "and began to
turn and twist."
"Every time I started to look at something that the boys gave up in the
terms of admitting something, you could find the trail going back through
and watch it happen," Hammes said from the bench.
At one point during the proceedings, Hammes "opined that she did not see
any court finding these statements to be admissible as a matter of law,"
defense attorney Attridge notes in a motion prepared last summer for a
bail-review hearing.
In Attridge's recent motion to suppress Treadway's confession, the attorney
states: "The behavior of the Escondido Police Department, as well as the
behavior of Det. Chris McDonough (of Oceanside), is a textbook example of
the sort of police misconduct that results in coerced, inadmissible and
false statements."
But McDonough doesn't see it that way.
"It hasn't been my experience that you can make an innocent person confess
to murder, and that's certainly not what happened in this case," he said.
"These videotaped confessions speak for themselves and a jury will decide
that issue (of coercion). That is not my job to decide that. My job is to
seek the truth."
************************************************************
MARK SAUER
STAFF WRITER
29-Nov-1998 Sunday
At lunchtime one summer day in 1991, gunmen entered a Buddhist temple near
Phoenix, ordered six monks, an elderly nun and two followers to lay
face-down on the floor and executed them with shots to the head.
A month later, the Maricopa County sheriff declared the case solved --
three Tucson men had confessed following interrogations lasting up to 21
hours.
That same day, however, a rifle found in the possession of two adolescents
was tested and it proved to be the weapon used in the temple murders.
The youths, who also possessed items stolen from the temple, soon confessed
to robbing and killing the Buddhists, giving police extensive details on
how they planned and carried out the crime.
And the bewildered trio from Tucson went free.
But why would someone confess to a murder he did not commit?
The answer has to do with the psychological pressure of police
interrogation, which in rare cases can result in false confessions.
A controversial area of the law, coerced confessions will get a full airing
in hearings beginning Tuesday in the Stephanie Crowe murder case.
The victim's brother, Michael Crowe, 15, and two of his schoolmates, Aaron
Houser, 16, and Joshua Treadway, 16, are charged with stabbing the
12-year-old Escondido girl to death in her sleep Jan. 21. The three are to
be tried as adults and could go to prison for life if convicted.
Their attorneys say there is no physical evidence tying the boys to
Stephanie's murder and that they lacked a motive.
But what about the boys' confessions?
After initially denying any connection to the girl's murder, Michael Crowe
eventually conceded to detectives that he must have killed his sister,
though he provided almost no details about the crime.
Then Joshua confessed that he stood lookout while Aaron and Michael went
into Stephanie's bedroom and stabbed her.
The statements came following many hours of interrogation by detectives
from both the Escondido and Oceanside police departments.
The two boys quickly recanted, however, claiming detectives coerced their
statements using psychological torture. The upcoming hearing, before
Superior Court Judge John Thompson, will determine whether the confessions
will be suppressed, which could irreparably damage the prosecution's case.
(The defense also insists that Stephanie's killer is a mentally unstable
transient named Richard Tuite, who was in the Crowe's rural Escondido
neighborhood that night beating on doors and entering houses. Police,
however, questioned Tuite, who is in custody on unrelated burglary charges,
and have dismissed him as a suspect.)
"This is one of the most outrageous cases I have ever seen. What was done
to these kids is unbelievable, and it's all right there on videotape," said
Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist at UC Berkeley and a leading expert on
coercion and false confessions. Ofshe has testified for the defense in this
case.
But prosecutors and the detectives who interrogated the three boys insist
they were not coerced into confessing, were not inappropriately
interrogated, and that their rights against self-incrimination were duly
protected.
Authorities say the boys methodically plotted Stephanie's murder during
school lunch breaks, that the motive was sibling rivalry and that the
defendants' interest in medieval fantasy games and knives apparently got
out of hand.
Police and prosecutors also believe they have the murder weapon, a knife
belonging to Houser that was hidden under Treadway's bed. The defense,
however is adamant that no evidence beyond Treadway's confession ties that
knife to the murder scene.
"In the real world, if you sit down and tell someone you committed a
murder, unless you're a lunatic, your statement is to be believed," said
Chris McDonough, an Oceanside detective who helped interrogate the boys.
"The other two confessed, but one of the boys (Houser) said, basically, `I
don't know what you're talking about.' If our tactics were coercive, why
didn't it work with him?" McDonough continued.
Summer Stephan, the deputy district attorney prosecuting the three boys,
said, regarding whether Treadway was coerced, "It is simply not reasonable
to believe that a young man of Treadway's intelligence and cunning would
confess to a crime he did not commit."
`A confession is the most powerful evidence there is, more powerful than
eyewitness accounts, than fingerprints or lie-detector tests," said Saul
Kassin. He is a social psychologist at Williams College in Massachusetts
specializing in the dynamics of police interrogation.
But tactics that work well in getting the guilty to confess, Kassin said,
sometimes work equally well in extracting confessions from the innocent.
Interrogation techniques featuring harsh verbal confrontation of crime
suspects, often combined with trickery, became so powerful that the Supreme
Court in 1966 issued its famous Miranda decision.
Before proceeding with an interrogation, police must "Mirandize" a suspect
-- warn him that he has the right to remain silent and to have an attorney
present. Even with the warning, many people don't realize that they can
simply refuse to talk to police about a crime, Kassin said.
"The first thing the average person says is, `I would never confess to a
crime I didn't commit,' " Kassin said. "But people don't understand the
kind of intense pressure suspects are under in the course of an
interrogation.
"Police and prosecutors will say in no uncertain terms that they cannot get
someone who is innocent to confess. In fact, I spoke with a detective
recently who said, `I have never taken a false confession.' I asked him,
`How do you know?' "
Coercion expert Ofshe said innocent suspects who succumb to the pressure of
interrogation and confess usually do so for one of two reasons: Their faith
in their own innocence and memory is so badly shaken that they come to
believe they may have actually committed the crime; or, they fear they will
be convicted based on the evidence police claim to have against them and
that the consequences of refusing to confess will be more severe.
In the second instance, Ofshe said, confessing can actually be a rational
choice for an innocent suspect if he believes he will be convicted anyway
and "have the book thrown at him."
Ofshe, along with Richard Leo, a professor of criminology at UC Irvine,
documents the Phoenix temple case and dozens of other false confessions in
an article in the current Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology,
published by the Northwestern University School of Law.
Included are these:
After twice failing a polygraph test, a man confessed in 1990 to Austin,
Texas, police that he killed his girlfriend after she was reported missing
by friends and presumed dead. Not long afterward, she turned up alive in
Tucson, Ariz.
Two suspects confessed to Los Angeles police in 1987 to a double murder
and robbery after being accused by a gang member being questioned about
another killing. Charges were dropped when it was discovered that one had
been in San Diego County Jail and the other in a California Youth Authority
camp when the crime was committed.
And in 1996, a Sitka, Alaska, man confessed to raping and murdering a
17-year-old girl. He had been drinking heavily the night of the murder
and, after having "disturbing flashbacks," went to police himself wondering
if he could have been involved. But DNA revealed he was not the rapist.
Hairs and fingerprints found at the scene were not his, and several
witnesses placed him at a party aboard a boat when the crime occurred. The
man was acquitted at trial.
The way to best guard against false confessions, according to Ofshe, Leo
and Kassin, is to videotape them -- as was done in the Crowe case -- so
judges and juries can see what happened for themselves.
Police interrogations work best in a spare, uninviting environment free
from telephones, pagers, intercoms and other distractions. The suspect must
feel uncomfortable, according to David Vessel, a New Mexico-based FBI agent
who has taught interrogation techniques for the past 10 years.
The detective must immediately establish control of the situation. The
idea, according to social-psychologist Kassin, is "to render the suspect
helpless, to make him feel socially isolated with no communication possible
with anyone he is familiar with and trusts."
"This makes him feel anxious and stressed," Kassin said. "Then you confront
this person with the charges against him and absolutely refuse to take no
for an answer -- do not allow him to make denials, to claim innocence; box
him in at every turn."
Detectives often come at the suspect in waves of "good cops" and "bad
cops," psychologically pursuing him relentlessly for hours. The weapons
they use are pieces of evidence.
Detectives will tell a suspect he failed the lie-detector test, that his
fingerprints were discovered on the murder weapon, that witnesses saw him
fleeing the scene, that the victim's blood was found on his clothing, and
so on.
None of this needs to be true, however.
"No, there is nothing that says we have to be truthful when interrogating
suspects," said Frank Christensen, a 26-year veteran of the San Diego
Police Department.
"But for good detectives who have done their homework, lying to a suspect
about the evidence is really a last-resort type of thing."
According to their attorneys, the three Escondido boys accused of murdering
Stephanie Crowe were told several lies regarding evidence and the strength
of the case against them.
The defense contends this use of "a ruse," as the prosecution calls it, was
highly coercive in getting both Crowe and Treadway to falsely confess.
Prosecutor Stephan, meanwhile, said such misstatement of evidence is
clearly admissible by law. And, she said, it would not lead an innocent
person to confess.
The idea in confronting a suspect with the evidence, whether real or not,
is to make it clear that the case can be made without his confession, but
that things will go easier for him if he tells the truth and confesses.
Detectives also commonly try to "minimize the crime" when interrogating a
suspect, Kassin said.
"The detective will blame the victim or an accomplice. They tell the
suspect they don't think the crime is really that big a deal, or that the
consequences of confessing might not be as severe as one might think -- all
of which is perfectly legal to say."
According to defense attorneys, this was done repeatedly in the
interrogation of both Treadway and Crowe.
For example, Escondido Detective Ralph Claytor said to Crowe during his
interrogation: "I'm not real sure how familiar you are with the system, but
kind of the way it works is if the system has to prove it, yeah, it's jail.
If they don't, then it's help."
Prosecutor Stephan argues in her court brief, however, that the detectives
truthfully outlined to the suspects the likely consequences of failing to
tell the truth.
The guilty suspect who waives his Miranda rights and talks may believe he
can outwit or outlast the police and foil the interrogation -- which is not
uncommon, according to the FBI's Vessel.
That is precisely what Michael Crowe and Joshua Treadway were doing,
according to Prosecutor Stephan. Crowe "masterfully attempted to manipulate
the detectives," the prosecutor wrote in her brief for Tuesday's hearing.
That Treadway "was able to perform such a skilled acting job negates his
claim that his will was overborne by police," she added.
The innocent suspect, meanwhile, may feel he has nothing to lose and can
clear the matter up by cooperating with police -- which is why Crowe,
Treadway and Houser all agreed to be interrogated at length, according to
their attorneys.
"Interrogations are for closing the case, not making the case," said
Christensen. "Only after you have interviewed all (surviving) victims, all
witnesses and the coroner, and have completely processed the crime scene --
only after you have all possible ducks in a row, do you go in and
interrogate the primary suspect."
He added that, "the veracity of the suspect's (confession) statement has to
be substantiated through other avenues. You need physical evidence to
substantiate what this person is telling you."
Though the law allows police to lie to suspects about evidence, they are
forbidden to make promises of leniency, or to make threats, in order to
obtain a confession.
Courts have established that explicit promises or threats are clearly
coercive and render a resulting confession invalid.
"But detectives go a long way toward stepping up to, if not over, that line
by implying leniency or threatening severe punishment with these
techniques," Kassin said.
Detectives used promises and threats to extract confessions from Michael
Crowe and Joshua Treadway, according to their attorneys.
But the prosecution says detectives stayed within bounds and simply offered
truthful, sound advice to the boys about the consequences of what they were
saying.
In her motion to have all statements made by Joshua Treadway to police
suppressed, attorney Mary Ellen Attridge cites testimony from Escondido
Detective Claytor showing police concluded on the morning of Stephanie's
murder that the killer "came from within the house."
The reason: Police believed that all the windows and doors at the Crowe
house were locked, and there was no sign of forced entry.
But this was a mistaken belief, Attridge said, since the sliding-glassdoor
in the parents' bedroom was unlocked, as was Stephanie's bedroom window.
In addition, an Escondido police officer working the crime scene believed
that Michael Crowe was "inappropriately bereaved," though he had never met
the boy before. The officer reported his impression to detectives and
"thus, Michael Crowe became the primary suspect in Stephanie's murder,"
according to Attridge.
Michael Crowe was interrogated for several hours in four sessions Jan. 21,
22 and 23.
The boy, who had been separated from his parents and was housed (along with
his 10-year-old sister) at Polinsky Center for abused and neglected
children, had no parent, attorney or other advocate present during his
interrogation.
While that is legal, it likely would not have happened if the FBI or San
Diego police had been investigating the case, according to detectives with
both agencies.
"The golden rule with juveniles is to at least have the parents there in
the waiting room and be constantly talking with them, telling them what is
going on," said the SDPD's Christensen. "And juveniles are read their
Miranda rights before we ask them their name."
Vessel of the FBI said, "It is our policy to have someone there, a parent
or guardian -- some adult -- who will represent the child's interests, to
insure the child's will is not overborne by the interrogation process."
According to law, confessions -- especially those by juveniles -- must be
voluntary, the product of the suspect's free will and rational choice.
Attridge said this was definitely not the case with Michael Crowe and
Joshua Treadway -- a contention fiercely opposed by the police and
prosecution.
Michael was read his Miranda rights at the outset of his interrogation.
For many hours, the boy denied that he had killed his sister, insisting
that he had been home sick from school the previous two days, had gotten up
at 4:30 a.m. for Tylenol and a glass of milk -- two hours before
Stephanie's body was found -- and noticed nothing amiss before going back
to bed.
But during the second interrogation session, Michael began to waffle a bit
in his denials after being subjected to Detective McDonough's Computer
Voice Stress Analyzer, which supposedly denotes deception in the voice.
Michael failed his encounter with the machine, which has been called
scientifically unfounded by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
Because of that failure, Michael started to wonder aloud, according to the
transcript of his interrogation, whether he may actually have had a hand in
Stephanie's murder, even though he said he had absolutely no recollection
of it:
Detective Claytor: "What's the worst you can imagine right now?"
Michael: "I'm crazy. There's someone else inside of me and I don't know who
they are. I don't know what they do. I don't -- if what you're saying is
true, it's like there's another person in me and I don't remember ... I
wish I could help you, but I don't know what happened."
After being told over and over that he is the killer, and that "an
avalanche of evidence is going to come tumbling down" upon him, Michael
says:
"Why are you doing this to me? I didn't do this to her. I couldn't. God.
God. Why? I can't even believe myself anymore. I don't know if I did it or
not. I didn't, though."
The key to a valid confession, Ofshe believes, is the "post-confession
narrative," in which a suspect who has said, "I did it," provides details
matching the facts of the crime.
A confession lacking in details the killer would know, such as where the
body was found, what the victim was wearing, what was used to bind the
hands, the location of the murder weapon, etc., should be considered
unreliable, he said.
Michael provided police virtually nothing in this regard, Prosecutor
Stephan said. She added that when pressed for details, he simply said that
"all he felt was rage and that he could not remember what exactly
happened."
He resisted attempts by detectives to suggest that evidence indicated he
killed his sister until almost the end of the interrogation.
But then there is a 13-minute pause on the videotape. Detectives continue
talking to him off-camera, however, and when the tape comes back on, not
only has Michael's story changed, so has his demeanor -- he now agrees with
detectives' assertions that he must have killed Stephanie.
Stephan said that Michael was placed under arrest for his sister's killing
during this pause, and that is what changed him.
But the defense contends that the boy changed dramatically because he was
told his mother and father now believed he killed Stephanie and never
wanted to speak to him again.
Superior Court Judge Laura Hammes, who carefully reviewed the interrogation
videotapes last summer during a three-week hearing, agreed with the
defense.
If detectives did tell Michael his parents believed he was the killer and
disowned him for it, that statement was not true, Attridge said.
It is clear from the transcript, however, that what happened during this
off-camera discussion had a profound effect.
"I completely blocked myself out," Michael said near the end of his
interrogation. "And I wouldn't even know that I did it if she wasn't dead.
It just as easily could have been a dream ... I can't remember."
Joshua Treadway, Michael Crowe's best friend, was interrogated the first
time for 10 hours straight, beginning at 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 27.
He admitted to Escondido detectives Claytor and Mark Wrisley that he had
stolen a knife, which he had admired, from a collection owned by his
schoolmate, Aaron Houser.
This admission certainly got their attention. But Joshua insisted the theft
occurred on Jan. 16, five days before Stephanie Crowe was found murdered
and said it could not have been the murder weapon because it had been under
his bed ever since.
Around 4:30 a.m., however, McDonough arrived from Oceanside with
his Computer Voice Stress Analyzer. He tested whether Joshua was telling
the
truth about the knife and determined that he wasn't, after telling the
suspect that the machine was "98 percent accurate."
The boy also was told by police that tests showed the knife that had been
in his possession all that time was indeed the murder weapon, and that both
Michael Crowe and Aaron Houser had blamed him for Stephanie's slaying.
Detectives also told Joshua and his father -- a locksmith who knew and
trusted the Escondido officers since he did the lock work at the police
station -- that a warrant had been prepared charging Joshua with murder.
They even took a mug shot of the boy holding a placard describing his
murder charge.
But the detectives' claims -- that the voice machine was infallible, the
knife was definitely the murder weapon, Michael Crowe and Aaron Houser had
implicated Joshua, and a murder warrant for his arrest was being sworn out
-- were all untrue.
All of which, defense attorney Attridge contends, was highly coercive in
getting Joshua to tell the detectives what he believed they wanted to hear.
By 7:30 the next morning, Joshua -- who complained that he was exhausted,
hungry, thirsty, needed to use the bathroom and wanted to see his father
again -- had told detectives that Aaron Houser had given him the knife on
Jan. 25, three days after the murder, and told him "to get rid of it."
The detectives congratulated the boy for "finally telling the truth." His
demeanor toward his interrogators throughout the overnight session was
friendly. The transcript shows he was clearly trying to satisfy the
voice-stress machine as well as the detectives.
Despite the supposed murder warrant hanging over him, Joshua was allowed to
go home with his father.
On Feb. 10, 13 days after his first interrogation, police called Joshua's
father and said they wanted to talk to his son again to "tie up some loose
ends."
The interview would take about 45 minutes at Escondido police headquarters,
Michael Treadway says he was told, and he drove his son back to the police
station. Instead, the boy was questioned for eight hours.
Unlike the previous, overnight session, Joshua was not allowed to see his
father during this interrogation. And he was not read his Miranda rights
until very near the end of the interrogation, according to the transcript
of the videotaped session.
Again, Joshua was repeatedly told by detectives that Michael Crowe and
Aaron Houser had implicated him in Stephanie's murder, that he had failed
the voice-stress test, that he was lying when he said he'd stolen the knife
days before the murder, that the knife was indeed the murder weapon and,
finally, that he was lying when he said he wasn't at the Crowe house that
night.
In the middle of this session, during which Joshua's father was made to
wait in the lobby one floor below the locked interrogation room, the boy
broke down and sobbed uncontrollably.
His fears were summed up in an exchange with McDonough, operator of the
voice-stress machine:
Treadway: "But I'm just saying, I don't know, as a kid coming in here to
the police station and talking is a really scary thing."
McDonough: "I respect that."
Treadway: "And, you know, taking these tests and everything and ... if I
didn't start talking, you know, had the capability of being, of goin' to
prison."
Over the next few hours, Joshua proceeded to tell detectives that he had
overheard Michael Crowe and Aaron Houser plan Stephanie's murder, that he
had agreed to accompany Houser to the Crowe house that night and had stood
watch in the kitchen while the other two boys went in the girl's bedroom
and stabbed her.
Prosecutor Stephan argues that these details about the crime, that were
lacking in Michael Crowe's statement, show that Treadway's confession was
not coerced.
Defense attorney Attridge counters that these details do not match the
facts of the crime and prove that Joshua invented the story to please the
detectives and end the interrogation.
Judge Hammes' review of the boys' confessions came during a hearing on
whether they should be tried as adults. Hammes agreed that prosecutors had
met the "low level of a legal standard" -- a strong suspicion of the boys'
possible involvement.
But she also released them from Juvenile Hall and stated: "If this were a
court trial, these boys would be not guilty."
Hammes said that in their hours of interrogation, the detectives again and
again "took something normal" that one of the boys had said "and began to
turn and twist."
"Every time I started to look at something that the boys gave up in the
terms of admitting something, you could find the trail going back through
and watch it happen," Hammes said from the bench.
At one point during the proceedings, Hammes "opined that she did not see
any court finding these statements to be admissible as a matter of law,"
defense attorney Attridge notes in a motion prepared last summer for a
bail-review hearing.
In Attridge's recent motion to suppress Treadway's confession, the attorney
states: "The behavior of the Escondido Police Department, as well as the
behavior of Det. Chris McDonough (of Oceanside), is a textbook example of
the sort of police misconduct that results in coerced, inadmissible and
false statements."
But McDonough doesn't see it that way.
"It hasn't been my experience that you can make an innocent person confess
to murder, and that's certainly not what happened in this case," he said.
"These videotaped confessions speak for themselves and a jury will decide
that issue (of coercion). That is not my job to decide that. My job is to
seek the truth."
************************************************************
MARK SAUER
STAFF WRITER
29-Nov-1998 Sunday
At lunchtime one summer day in 1991, gunmen entered a Buddhist temple near
Phoenix, ordered six monks, an elderly nun and two followers to lay
face-down on the floor and executed them with shots to the head.
A month later, the Maricopa County sheriff declared the case solved --
three Tucson men had confessed following interrogations lasting up to 21
hours.
That same day, however, a rifle found in the possession of two adolescents
was tested and it proved to be the weapon used in the temple murders.
The youths, who also possessed items stolen from the temple, soon confessed
to robbing and killing the Buddhists, giving police extensive details on
how they planned and carried out the crime.
And the bewildered trio from Tucson went free.
But why would someone confess to a murder he did not commit?
The answer has to do with the psychological pressure of police
interrogation, which in rare cases can result in false confessions.
A controversial area of the law, coerced confessions will get a full airing
in hearings beginning Tuesday in the Stephanie Crowe murder case.
The victim's brother, Michael Crowe, 15, and two of his schoolmates, Aaron
Houser, 16, and Joshua Treadway, 16, are charged with stabbing the
12-year-old Escondido girl to death in her sleep Jan. 21. The three are to
be tried as adults and could go to prison for life if convicted.
Their attorneys say there is no physical evidence tying the boys to
Stephanie's murder and that they lacked a motive.
But what about the boys' confessions?
After initially denying any connection to the girl's murder, Michael Crowe
eventually conceded to detectives that he must have killed his sister,
though he provided almost no details about the crime.
Then Joshua confessed that he stood lookout while Aaron and Michael went
into Stephanie's bedroom and stabbed her.
The statements came following many hours of interrogation by detectives
from both the Escondido and Oceanside police departments.
The two boys quickly recanted, however, claiming detectives coerced their
statements using psychological torture. The upcoming hearing, before
Superior Court Judge John Thompson, will determine whether the confessions
will be suppressed, which could irreparably damage the prosecution's case.
(The defense also insists that Stephanie's killer is a mentally unstable
transient named Richard Tuite, who was in the Crowe's rural Escondido
neighborhood that night beating on doors and entering houses. Police,
however, questioned Tuite, who is in custody on unrelated burglary charges,
and have dismissed him as a suspect.)
"This is one of the most outrageous cases I have ever seen. What was done
to these kids is unbelievable, and it's all right there on videotape," said
Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist at UC Berkeley and a leading expert on
coercion and false confessions. Ofshe has testified for the defense in this
case.
But prosecutors and the detectives who interrogated the three boys insist
they were not coerced into confessing, were not inappropriately
interrogated, and that their rights against self-incrimination were duly
protected.
Authorities say the boys methodically plotted Stephanie's murder during
school lunch breaks, that the motive was sibling rivalry and that the
defendants' interest in medieval fantasy games and knives apparently got
out of hand.
Police and prosecutors also believe they have the murder weapon, a knife
belonging to Houser that was hidden under Treadway's bed. The defense,
however is adamant that no evidence beyond Treadway's confession ties that
knife to the murder scene.
"In the real world, if you sit down and tell someone you committed a
murder, unless you're a lunatic, your statement is to be believed," said
Chris McDonough, an Oceanside detective who helped interrogate the boys.
"The other two confessed, but one of the boys (Houser) said, basically, `I
don't know what you're talking about.' If our tactics were coercive, why
didn't it work with him?" McDonough continued.
Summer Stephan, the deputy district attorney prosecuting the three boys,
said, regarding whether Treadway was coerced, "It is simply not reasonable
to believe that a young man of Treadway's intelligence and cunning would
confess to a crime he did not commit."
`A confession is the most powerful evidence there is, more powerful than
eyewitness accounts, than fingerprints or lie-detector tests," said Saul
Kassin. He is a social psychologist at Williams College in Massachusetts
specializing in the dynamics of police interrogation.
But tactics that work well in getting the guilty to confess, Kassin said,
sometimes work equally well in extracting confessions from the innocent.
Interrogation techniques featuring harsh verbal confrontation of crime
suspects, often combined with trickery, became so powerful that the Supreme
Court in 1966 issued its famous Miranda decision.
Before proceeding with an interrogation, police must "Mirandize" a suspect
-- warn him that he has the right to remain silent and to have an attorney
present. Even with the warning, many people don't realize that they can
simply refuse to talk to police about a crime, Kassin said.
"The first thing the average person says is, `I would never confess to a
crime I didn't commit,' " Kassin said. "But people don't understand the
kind of intense pressure suspects are under in the course of an
interrogation.
"Police and prosecutors will say in no uncertain terms that they cannot get
someone who is innocent to confess. In fact, I spoke with a detective
recently who said, `I have never taken a false confession.' I asked him,
`How do you know?' "
Coercion expert Ofshe said innocent suspects who succumb to the pressure of
interrogation and confess usually do so for one of two reasons: Their faith
in their own innocence and memory is so badly shaken that they come to
believe they may have actually committed the crime; or, they fear they will
be convicted based on the evidence police claim to have against them and
that the consequences of refusing to confess will be more severe.
In the second instance, Ofshe said, confessing can actually be a rational
choice for an innocent suspect if he believes he will be convicted anyway
and "have the book thrown at him."
Ofshe, along with Richard Leo, a professor of criminology at UC Irvine,
documents the Phoenix temple case and dozens of other false confessions in
an article in the current Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology,
published by the Northwestern University School of Law.
Included are these:
After twice failing a polygraph test, a man confessed in 1990 to Austin,
Texas, police that he killed his girlfriend after she was reported missing
by friends and presumed dead. Not long afterward, she turned up alive in
Tucson, Ariz.
Two suspects confessed to Los Angeles police in 1987 to a double murder
and robbery after being accused by a gang member being questioned about
another killing. Charges were dropped when it was discovered that one had
been in San Diego County Jail and the other in a California Youth Authority
camp when the crime was committed.
And in 1996, a Sitka, Alaska, man confessed to raping and murdering a
17-year-old girl. He had been drinking heavily the night of the murder
and, after having "disturbing flashbacks," went to police himself wondering
if he could have been involved. But DNA revealed he was not the rapist.
Hairs and fingerprints found at the scene were not his, and several
witnesses placed him at a party aboard a boat when the crime occurred. The
man was acquitted at trial.
The way to best guard against false confessions, according to Ofshe, Leo
and Kassin, is to videotape them -- as was done in the Crowe case -- so
judges and juries can see what happened for themselves.
Police interrogations work best in a spare, uninviting environment free
from telephones, pagers, intercoms and other distractions. The suspect must
feel uncomfortable, according to David Vessel, a New Mexico-based FBI agent
who has taught interrogation techniques for the past 10 years.
The detective must immediately establish control of the situation. The
idea, according to social-psychologist Kassin, is "to render the suspect
helpless, to make him feel socially isolated with no communication possible
with anyone he is familiar with and trusts."
"This makes him feel anxious and stressed," Kassin said. "Then you confront
this person with the charges against him and absolutely refuse to take no
for an answer -- do not allow him to make denials, to claim innocence; box
him in at every turn."
Detectives often come at the suspect in waves of "good cops" and "bad
cops," psychologically pursuing him relentlessly for hours. The weapons
they use are pieces of evidence.
Detectives will tell a suspect he failed the lie-detector test, that his
fingerprints were discovered on the murder weapon, that witnesses saw him
fleeing the scene, that the victim's blood was found on his clothing, and
so on.
None of this needs to be true, however.
"No, there is nothing that says we have to be truthful when interrogating
suspects," said Frank Christensen, a 26-year veteran of the San Diego
Police Department.
"But for good detectives who have done their homework, lying to a suspect
about the evidence is really a last-resort type of thing."
According to their attorneys, the three Escondido boys accused of murdering
Stephanie Crowe were told several lies regarding evidence and the strength
of the case against them.
The defense contends this use of "a ruse," as the prosecution calls it, was
highly coercive in getting both Crowe and Treadway to falsely confess.
Prosecutor Stephan, meanwhile, said such misstatement of evidence is
clearly admissible by law. And, she said, it would not lead an innocent
person to confess.
The idea in confronting a suspect with the evidence, whether real or not,
is to make it clear that the case can be made without his confession, but
that things will go easier for him if he tells the truth and confesses.
Detectives also commonly try to "minimize the crime" when interrogating a
suspect, Kassin said.
"The detective will blame the victim or an accomplice. They tell the
suspect they don't think the crime is really that big a deal, or that the
consequences of confessing might not be as severe as one might think -- all
of which is perfectly legal to say."
According to defense attorneys, this was done repeatedly in the
interrogation of both Treadway and Crowe.
For example, Escondido Detective Ralph Claytor said to Crowe during his
interrogation: "I'm not real sure how familiar you are with the system, but
kind of the way it works is if the system has to prove it, yeah, it's jail.
If they don't, then it's help."
Prosecutor Stephan argues in her court brief, however, that the detectives
truthfully outlined to the suspects the likely consequences of failing to
tell the truth.
The guilty suspect who waives his Miranda rights and talks may believe he
can outwit or outlast the police and foil the interrogation -- which is not
uncommon, according to the FBI's Vessel.
That is precisely what Michael Crowe and Joshua Treadway were doing,
according to Prosecutor Stephan. Crowe "masterfully attempted to manipulate
the detectives," the prosecutor wrote in her brief for Tuesday's hearing.
That Treadway "was able to perform such a skilled acting job negates his
claim that his will was overborne by police," she added.
The innocent suspect, meanwhile, may feel he has nothing to lose and can
clear the matter up by cooperating with police -- which is why Crowe,
Treadway and Houser all agreed to be interrogated at length, according to
their attorneys.
"Interrogations are for closing the case, not making the case," said
Christensen. "Only after you have interviewed all (surviving) victims, all
witnesses and the coroner, and have completely processed the crime scene --
only after you have all possible ducks in a row, do you go in and
interrogate the primary suspect."
He added that, "the veracity of the suspect's (confession) statement has to
be substantiated through other avenues. You need physical evidence to
substantiate what this person is telling you."
Though the law allows police to lie to suspects about evidence, they are
forbidden to make promises of leniency, or to make threats, in order to
obtain a confession.
Courts have established that explicit promises or threats are clearly
coercive and render a resulting confession invalid.
"But detectives go a long way toward stepping up to, if not over, that line
by implying leniency or threatening severe punishment with these
techniques," Kassin said.
Detectives used promises and threats to extract confessions from Michael
Crowe and Joshua Treadway, according to their attorneys.
But the prosecution says detectives stayed within bounds and simply offered
truthful, sound advice to the boys about the consequences of what they were
saying.
In her motion to have all statements made by Joshua Treadway to police
suppressed, attorney Mary Ellen Attridge cites testimony from Escondido
Detective Claytor showing police concluded on the morning of Stephanie's
murder that the killer "came from within the house."
The reason: Police believed that all the windows and doors at the Crowe
house were locked, and there was no sign of forced entry.
But this was a mistaken belief, Attridge said, since the sliding-glassdoor
in the parents' bedroom was unlocked, as was Stephanie's bedroom window.
In addition, an Escondido police officer working the crime scene believed
that Michael Crowe was "inappropriately bereaved," though he had never met
the boy before. The officer reported his impression to detectives and
"thus, Michael Crowe became the primary suspect in Stephanie's murder,"
according to Attridge.
Michael Crowe was interrogated for several hours in four sessions Jan. 21,
22 and 23.
The boy, who had been separated from his parents and was housed (along with
his 10-year-old sister) at Polinsky Center for abused and neglected
children, had no parent, attorney or other advocate present during his
interrogation.
While that is legal, it likely would not have happened if the FBI or San
Diego police had been investigating the case, according to detectives with
both agencies.
"The golden rule with juveniles is to at least have the parents there in
the waiting room and be constantly talking with them, telling them what is
going on," said the SDPD's Christensen. "And juveniles are read their
Miranda rights before we ask them their name."
Vessel of the FBI said, "It is our policy to have someone there, a parent
or guardian -- some adult -- who will represent the child's interests, to
insure the child's will is not overborne by the interrogation process."
According to law, confessions -- especially those by juveniles -- must be
voluntary, the product of the suspect's free will and rational choice.
Attridge said this was definitely not the case with Michael Crowe and
Joshua Treadway -- a contention fiercely opposed by the police and
prosecution.
Michael was read his Miranda rights at the outset of his interrogation.
For many hours, the boy denied that he had killed his sister, insisting
that he had been home sick from school the previous two days, had gotten up
at 4:30 a.m. for Tylenol and a glass of milk -- two hours before
Stephanie's body was found -- and noticed nothing amiss before going back
to bed.
But during the second interrogation session, Michael began to waffle a bit
in his denials after being subjected to Detective McDonough's Computer
Voice Stress Analyzer, which supposedly denotes deception in the voice.
Michael failed his encounter with the machine, which has been called
scientifically unfounded by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
Because of that failure, Michael started to wonder aloud, according to the
transcript of his interrogation, whether he may actually have had a hand in
Stephanie's murder, even though he said he had absolutely no recollection
of it:
Detective Claytor: "What's the worst you can imagine right now?"
Michael: "I'm crazy. There's someone else inside of me and I don't know who
they are. I don't know what they do. I don't -- if what you're saying is
true, it's like there's another person in me and I don't remember ... I
wish I could help you, but I don't know what happened."
After being told over and over that he is the killer, and that "an
avalanche of evidence is going to come tumbling down" upon him, Michael
says:
"Why are you doing this to me? I didn't do this to her. I couldn't. God.
God. Why? I can't even believe myself anymore. I don't know if I did it or
not. I didn't, though."
The key to a valid confession, Ofshe believes, is the "post-confession
narrative," in which a suspect who has said, "I did it," provides details
matching the facts of the crime.
A confession lacking in details the killer would know, such as where the
body was found, what the victim was wearing, what was used to bind the
hands, the location of the murder weapon, etc., should be considered
unreliable, he said.
Michael provided police virtually nothing in this regard, Prosecutor
Stephan said. She added that when pressed for details, he simply said that
"all he felt was rage and that he could not remember what exactly
happened."
He resisted attempts by detectives to suggest that evidence indicated he
killed his sister until almost the end of the interrogation.
But then there is a 13-minute pause on the videotape. Detectives continue
talking to him off-camera, however, and when the tape comes back on, not
only has Michael's story changed, so has his demeanor -- he now agrees with
detectives' assertions that he must have killed Stephanie.
Stephan said that Michael was placed under arrest for his sister's killing
during this pause, and that is what changed him.
But the defense contends that the boy changed dramatically because he was
told his mother and father now believed he killed Stephanie and never
wanted to speak to him again.
Superior Court Judge Laura Hammes, who carefully reviewed the interrogation
videotapes last summer during a three-week hearing, agreed with the
defense.
If detectives did tell Michael his parents believed he was the killer and
disowned him for it, that statement was not true, Attridge said.
It is clear from the transcript, however, that what happened during this
off-camera discussion had a profound effect.
"I completely blocked myself out," Michael said near the end of his
interrogation. "And I wouldn't even know that I did it if she wasn't dead.
It just as easily could have been a dream ... I can't remember."
Joshua Treadway, Michael Crowe's best friend, was interrogated the first
time for 10 hours straight, beginning at 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 27.
He admitted to Escondido detectives Claytor and Mark Wrisley that he had
stolen a knife, which he had admired, from a collection owned by his
schoolmate, Aaron Houser.
This admission certainly got their attention. But Joshua insisted the theft
occurred on Jan. 16, five days before Stephanie Crowe was found murdered
and said it could not have been the murder weapon because it had been under
his bed ever since.
Around 4:30 a.m., however, McDonough arrived from Oceanside with
his Computer Voice Stress Analyzer. He tested whether Joshua was telling
the
truth about the knife and determined that he wasn't, after telling the
suspect that the machine was "98 percent accurate."
The boy also was told by police that tests showed the knife that had been
in his possession all that time was indeed the murder weapon, and that both
Michael Crowe and Aaron Houser had blamed him for Stephanie's slaying.
Detectives also told Joshua and his father -- a locksmith who knew and
trusted the Escondido officers since he did the lock work at the police
station -- that a warrant had been prepared charging Joshua with murder.
They even took a mug shot of the boy holding a placard describing his
murder charge.
But the detectives' claims -- that the voice machine was infallible, the
knife was definitely the murder weapon, Michael Crowe and Aaron Houser had
implicated Joshua, and a murder warrant for his arrest was being sworn out
-- were all untrue.
All of which, defense attorney Attridge contends, was highly coercive in
getting Joshua to tell the detectives what he believed they wanted to hear.
By 7:30 the next morning, Joshua -- who complained that he was exhausted,
hungry, thirsty, needed to use the bathroom and wanted to see his father
again -- had told detectives that Aaron Houser had given him the knife on
Jan. 25, three days after the murder, and told him "to get rid of it."
The detectives congratulated the boy for "finally telling the truth." His
demeanor toward his interrogators throughout the overnight session was
friendly. The transcript shows he was clearly trying to satisfy the
voice-stress machine as well as the detectives.
Despite the supposed murder warrant hanging over him, Joshua was allowed to
go home with his father.
On Feb. 10, 13 days after his first interrogation, police called Joshua's
father and said they wanted to talk to his son again to "tie up some loose
ends."
The interview would take about 45 minutes at Escondido police headquarters,
Michael Treadway says he was told, and he drove his son back to the police
station. Instead, the boy was questioned for eight hours.
Unlike the previous, overnight session, Joshua was not allowed to see his
father during this interrogation. And he was not read his Miranda rights
until very near the end of the interrogation, according to the transcript
of the videotaped session.
Again, Joshua was repeatedly told by detectives that Michael Crowe and
Aaron Houser had implicated him in Stephanie's murder, that he had failed
the voice-stress test, that he was lying when he said he'd stolen the knife
days before the murder, that the knife was indeed the murder weapon and,
finally, that he was lying when he said he wasn't at the Crowe house that
night.
In the middle of this session, during which Joshua's father was made to
wait in the lobby one floor below the locked interrogation room, the boy
broke down and sobbed uncontrollably.
His fears were summed up in an exchange with McDonough, operator of the
voice-stress machine:
Treadway: "But I'm just saying, I don't know, as a kid coming in here to
the police station and talking is a really scary thing."
McDonough: "I respect that."
Treadway: "And, you know, taking these tests and everything and ... if I
didn't start talking, you know, had the capability of being, of goin' to
prison."
Over the next few hours, Joshua proceeded to tell detectives that he had
overheard Michael Crowe and Aaron Houser plan Stephanie's murder, that he
had agreed to accompany Houser to the Crowe house that night and had stood
watch in the kitchen while the other two boys went in the girl's bedroom
and stabbed her.
Prosecutor Stephan argues that these details about the crime, that were
lacking in Michael Crowe's statement, show that Treadway's confession was
not coerced.
Defense attorney Attridge counters that these details do not match the
facts of the crime and prove that Joshua invented the story to please the
detectives and end the interrogation.
Judge Hammes' review of the boys' confessions came during a hearing on
whether they should be tried as adults. Hammes agreed that prosecutors had
met the "low level of a legal standard" -- a strong suspicion of the boys'
possible involvement.
But she also released them from Juvenile Hall and stated: "If this were a
court trial, these boys would be not guilty."
Hammes said that in their hours of interrogation, the detectives again and
again "took something normal" that one of the boys had said "and began to
turn and twist."
"Every time I started to look at something that the boys gave up in the
terms of admitting something, you could find the trail going back through
and watch it happen," Hammes said from the bench.
At one point during the proceedings, Hammes "opined that she did not see
any court finding these statements to be admissible as a matter of law,"
defense attorney Attridge notes in a motion prepared last summer for a
bail-review hearing.
In Attridge's recent motion to suppress Treadway's confession, the attorney
states: "The behavior of the Escondido Police Department, as well as the
behavior of Det. Chris McDonough (of Oceanside), is a textbook example of
the sort of police misconduct that results in coerced, inadmissible and
false statements."
But McDonough doesn't see it that way.
"It hasn't been my experience that you can make an innocent person confess
to murder, and that's certainly not what happened in this case," he said.
"These videotaped confessions speak for themselves and a jury will decide
that issue (of coercion). That is not my job to decide that. My job is to
seek the truth."
************************************************************
craig_...@ftb.ca.gov
against interest do damage to Richard Ofshe's expert opinion that Misskelley's
June 1993 confession was coerced.
In article <19990209145032...@ng34.aol.com>,
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
Chriwor
>You must recognize, of course, that Misskelley's post-conviction statements
>against interest do damage to Richard Ofshe's expert opinion that
>Misskelley's
>June 1993 confession was coerced.
On the surface, yes, but not only until you recognize that
the same factors ( a borderline retarded IQ, a highly
suggestible personality) would still obviously be in place
for Jessie at the time he gave the second statement.
When you add to these conditions
that Jessie had just been told he was going to spend the rest
of his life in jail, and that a campaign of persuasion
had been waged upon him ever since his conviction
to turn state's evidence in return for getting that sentence
reduced, it becomes hardly a stretch to
imagine why such a frankly simple-minded person
would resort to, once again, telling the authorities what
they wanted to hear.
One might argue that it does not refute what Dr. Ofshe
says, but actually provided yet another example of the
processes he outlines at work.
necroticandnewrotic
>You must recognize, of course, that Misskelley's post-conviction statements
>against interest do damage to Richard Ofshe's expert opinion that Misskelley's
>June 1993 confession was coerced.
Well I know that and you know that. Apparently Bill can't concede
that. Not surprising.
A voluntary confession is held in a different light, but would still
not be admitted because he had counsel and it was WAAAAY over 48 hours
since his apprehension.
I said that a while back and I think Chris missed it.
What is pertinent is that on more than one occassion Jessie has proven
that he was there. There was one piece of physical evidence that never
came out at the trial.
Jessie not only knew exactly where it was at but could describe it on
terms that he could never have possibly done if he hadn't first hand
knowledge of it.
Two people checked it out. It was precisely where he said it would be
and was exactly what he said it was.
>
>In article <19990209145032...@ng34.aol.com>,
> chr...@aol.com (Chriwor) wrote:
>> Necroranter (the man with a thousand aliases) wrote:
>>
>> >>(Maybe we should get these kids to help out with WM3, eh >>guys?)
>> >
>> >Sure. You bet. Only a few problems with that.
>> >
>> >One, there was a confession.
>>
>> Jessie Misskelley's coerced false confession was not
>> and is not admissible evidence against either Damien
>> Echols nor Jason Baldwin. If their guilt is to be
Wasn't coerced. He wasn't even a suspect. They had no idea that he was
actually involved. Nobody had seen him near the murder site.
At that point the only person that had been placed less then thirty
yards away was Damien. Narlene Hollingsworth saw him between Blue
Beacon and Loves truck stop.
>> proved, it must be done so by other means.
>> (Pity the jurors at the Echols/Baldwin trial were
>> not so scrupulous, a terrible mistake could have
>> been avoided.)
No mistake to it. Damien and Jason did it. Check your facts.
>>
>> >Two there is an independent witness, Narlene Hollingsworth, that
>> >places Damien and a companion near the murder scene.
>>
>> She places her cousin Domini Teer with her
>> current boyfriend, Damien.
>> Necro conveniently would like you to forget about her
>> identification of Domini, and to chalk it off as a mistake.
>> But let's not presume that if she could be mistaken about
>> her cousin, she could be mistaken about Damien, as well.
>> Oh, no . . .
Let's see. Now we have to add Narlene to the list of conspirators. Her
and Jessie. Yes....yes....of course. I can CERTAINLY see a conspiracy
shaping up here.
So Jessie said that Damien was there, Narlene saw him near there, two
girls here him claim he murdered the boys. YUp. Its a cabal. Sure
'nuff.
>>
>> >Three he matches the physical description of a man who took >Steve
>> >Branches photo nearly a month before the murders.
>>
>> Again Necromancer makes the above assertion, presenting something
>> which constitues new, never before publically revealed
>> evidence against Damien Echols, and again he neither
>> does anything to back it up, nor does he take the
>> opportunity to answer the simple questions I asked him
>> about it the first time he posted it.
Give me a fucking break Chris. The note is on legal pad. It was from
Steve's mother. If you want a copy I will find the sonofabitch and
post it.
Are you accusing me of lying about it?
>> On the face of it, direct eyewitness testimony from
>> Mrs. Branch that a man matching Damien's
>> decription snapped her son's
>> photo weeks before he turned up dead would
>> have so bolstered the state's case that I find it
>> postively incredible that Fogelman and Davis would
>> have squandered such an opportunity, UNLESS, they were aware that there was
>> far less to it than meets the eye, and were afraid that it would blow up in
>> their face. Does Necro care to offer another explanation?
You cast a lot of aspersions for a guy who hasn't been thru the case
file. It's in there. Instead of relying on all the bullshit wm3 feeds
you why don't you bother to come to West Memphis and see for yourself?
Are you afraid?
>> >
>> >Four, there ARE no bite marks.
>>
>> Necro has decided that his lay opinion, (oh yes, I forgot,
>> he's done his "homework") is more valuable than that of
>> forensic odontologist Dr. Thomas David's. I find it
If he is half as honest as Brent Turvey is I can think of a few
reasons why I don't trust him.
>> amusing that, even though Brent Davis had known for months
>> that the defense was going to put on a forensic odontologist
>> at the October Echol's hearing to air the view that
>> the wounds in question were bite marks and that
>> Echols, nor Baldwin and Misskelley were the makers
>> of those bites, prosecutor Davis wasn't
>> able in all that time to find a qualified F.O. anywhere
>> to dispute it, and had to ask for a long continuance
>> (going on five months now) to again try to find one whom
>> wouldn't embarass him on the witness stand too much.
>> So far, it seems that he's come up with Necromancer.
>> I'll be eager to watch him testify come March.
I am not involved in the criminal preparation of this case. I know you
didn't bother checking the case file. That should be enough to worry
you for now.
>> >
>> >Five, Damien was overheard by two other witnesses saying that he had
>> >murdered those three little boys and was going to pick out two more
>> >before he got arrested.
>>
>> The fact that you people stubbornly persist in
>> characterizing this hearsay
>> piece of nonsense a " confession", despite
>> all the logical and circumstantial argments
>> which undermine not only its credibility but
>> even relevance (e.g., if it was voiced as a sarcastic
>> aside, it's relevance would be nil),
>> makes me truly began to wonder
>> if perhaps there isn't more to the argument for
>> Mumia's innocence than I've heretofore presumed
>> from only a surface inspection. I mean, if the Echol's
>> case is any indication of the lax standards the pro PD
>> crows have for what consitutes a confession . . .
Voluntary confessions of somebody who isn't a suspect are usually not
a big problem. We don't get many of them around here.
>>
>> >Six, Damien told police only six days after the murder that they
>> >should look for, among other things, candles. A substance that could
>> >be candle wax was found on one of the victims.
>>
>> Asked and answered in a recent , which per
>> usual Necromancer chooses to ignore
Of course. Damien knew something that nobody else (including the
police) did. True proof of his innocence.
>>
>> >Damiens side already has a professional liar.
Brent Turvey?
>>
>> Gee, what a thoughtful argument.
>>
necromancer - glad you think so.
>> >
>> >
>>
>> ------------
>> "It is better that ten guilty persons escape
>> than one innocent
>suffer."
>>
>> -- Sir William Blackstone
>>
>
necroticandnewrotic
>craig_...@ftb.ca.gov wrote:
>
>> You must recognize, of course, that Misskelley's post-conviction statements
>> against interest do damage to Richard Ofshe's expert opinion that Misskelley's
>> June 1993 confession was coerced.
>
>of course it does not.
Sure. Right.
>this second performance was no more factually correct than
>the previous fantasy -- for example, jessie never mentioned any biting,
So far you have Brent Turvey and another quacks word they are bite
marks. I've got two other experts who've looked at high resolution
enlargments of twenty autopsy pictures that say they aren't bite
marks.
No bite marks Bill.
>bitemarks... and he never mentioned a fouth person. jessie said byers' penis was
What a coincidence? There are no fourth persons.
>sliced off with on clean stroke, when in reality he was more skinned, the penis was
>there, but the skin had been peeled back. jessie simply repeated what he thought
>the prosecutors wanted to hear. he got critical facts like the time of day
>completely wrong, he has a 72 IQ... and if you really understood anything about
You confess to a capital crime and see how steady you are "Bill".
>false and coerced confessions, you would be so appalled by this example that you'd
>be focusing your obesssion on this travesty of justice. this was big brother at
>work against a poor, mentally handicapped teenager.
What happened to retard Bill? Getting politically correct on us now?
Let's ignore some other things Bill. No swipes or wipes leading into
the treeline. No low velocity blood spatters either. What's that mean
Bill? Take your time. We got a lifetime to think about it.
Why no blood on the banks? Ever try and move a mutilated body without
leaving a blood trail Bill? Now try and move three of them. Then tell
me that they moved three bodies along that bridge or the path and
didn't leave a trail at all. They are called swipes and wipes Bill. A
wipe is when new blood is moved to another surface.
A swipe is moving another object not coated with blood thru blood that
is already on a surface. No swipes. No wipes. No low velocity blood
spatters leading into the woods.
Murders occured in the woods. Period. Your boys took the time to clean
up the site. Wouldn't have made much sense to clean up a site that
wasn't used for the murder would it?
Remember when I said that the search of the woods didn't start until
after 8 Bill?
It didn't. Not a single fucking soul went into the woods until after
nearly 8:45pm. The police weren't even notified until 8:17pm. Not
until Diane Moore came over to Mark Byers house while the police were
there did they know that the boys were even together.
Nobody knew to search the woods until Mark and Ryan went halfway down
the block asking neighbors if they had seen the boys.
I've read four statements that account for Mark Byers time all the way
from 5:30 pm until 2:30 the next morning.
So much for the Mark Byers "dunnit" version. Your attempts at putting
Mark into the case are pathetic.
necromancer
frz...@i-2000.com
So far you have Brent Turvey and another quacks word they are bite
marks. I've got two other experts who've looked at high resolution
enlargments of twenty autopsy pictures that say they aren't bite
marks.
=================================
quacks huh? I assume you are confused by real experts Shaun, not
local yokels like Perretti who isn't even board certfied... So do
you have two more witchfynders??
How about Narlene Hollingsworth... (Domini's cousin who said she
saw Damien AND Domini together!!) she is pretty reliable!
Dr Joseph Cohen is a board certfied forensic pathologist from New
York City, he's an M.D> who has done over 1300 autopsies,
consulted on over a 1000 other cases, has testified in court 50-60
times... and prior to his testimony in october, each of those
times was for the prosecution. he was worked on many cases where
the victims were found in water (including btw, the TWA flight
that crashed off Long Island a couple years ago). He referred to
several parts of Peretti's testimony as "pure speculation, "rather
absurd," and "misleading" among other things. And Dr Thomas
David is a board certified forensic odontoligist, he also has
impeccable credentials.
So far Shaun, the most confident arguments I've heard are from
you, based on your having a few beers with a couple of your
cousins at the university while they tell you everything they know
about luminol and biting (in about the time it took the divers to
miraculously recover a knife form a lake), and based on your
apparent unethical access to the evidence. You spent a couple
hours, and now you spout off your tripe about void patterns and
such.... I can't wait to see Brent put you up on the witness
stand. You are a fool.
Bill
necroticandnewrotic
>craig_...@ftb.ca.gov wrote:
>
>> You must recognize, of course, that Misskelley's post-conviction statements
>> against interest do damage to Richard Ofshe's expert opinion that Misskelley's
>> June 1993 confession was coerced.
>
>of course it does not. this second performance was no more factually correct than
>the previous fantasy -- for example, jessie never mentioned any biting,
So far "Bill" y'all are the only ones mentioning any biting. Brent
Turvey want's to play semantics over the admissibility of Luminol in
trial.
That's fine. This isn't a trial. It's a hearing. So far no juris
prudence excludes luminol in a hearing. I expect this is just going to
be a whole lot of fun for you in March.
It's also kind of a bullshit game on Turvey's part. He can play "let's
pretend", but the Luminol shuts the door on wether or not the bank of
the ditch was the murder scene.
Void patterns don't just FALL OUTTA THE SKY. Alien's don't do it, and
iron particles don't just LINE THEMSELVES UP at the whim of WMPD.
But you go on believing that if you want.
Y'all don't deal with facts very well, you know?