False confessions happen and, in most cases, the result is a conviction and long prison sentence. According to experts, in 25 percent of all wrongful conviction exonerations a false confession was a deciding factor. In one study, over 80 percent of false confession exonerations occurred in murder convictions. We recently learned that during the 1980s in Chicago more than 100 men were tortured into confessing to crimes they did not commit, with four ending up on death row and 22 remaining imprisoned today.
False confessions often contain descriptions of the crimes that do not match the crime scene. For example, in the West Memphis 3 case, Jessie Miskelley, Jr. confessed to his involvement in the murder of three eight-year-olds, stating that he was with them at 9:00 a.m., although it was later established that the children were in school at the time, rendering his comments obviously false.
Now, according to The Substance of False Confessions, a law review article based upon a study of 40 false confessions by Professor Brandon L. Garrett of the University of Virginia, we learn that the confessions contained detailed descriptions of the crimes based upon the defendants being fed confidential information from the investigations, in many cases purposely, by police interrogators.
A New York Times article on Professor Garrett”s study pointed out that the majority of the confessions analyzed were elicited from those who were mentally disabled and/or were juveniles. “Of the exonerated defendants in the Garrett study, 26 — more than half — were ”mentally disabled,” under 18 at the time, or both. Most were subjected to lengthy, high-pressure interrogations, and none had a lawyer present.”
One of the false confession exonerees profiled in the study, Jeffrey Descovic, 16 at the time of his arrest, served 15 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison even though DNA testing prior to his trial revealed that another person”s DNA was found on the body of the murder victim. That crucial piece of evidence that eventually led to his exoneration years later had not trumped his false confession in the eyes of the prosecutor, the judge or the jury. The man whose DNA was found on the victim went on to commit other crimes, including the murder of another young girl.