The case of the Norfolk Four will be featured on PBS”s “Frontline” on November 9th. In the piece, one can watch the confession of Derek Tice, one of the men convicted of rape and murder of a Norfolk, Virginia, woman in 1997. Mr. Tice, along with three fellow sailors, served up to 11 years in prison before Tim Kaine, Virginia”s governor, granted them conditional pardons. They were freed last summer. It is shocking to listen to the young man clearly admit to the brutal crime and go on to provide details of the murder, even implicatng his friends. Even more troubling is why three other young men would confess as well to a brutal crime none of them committed. The answer can be found in part in the techniques used by police interrogators to gain convictions, techniques that are effective on the innocent as well as the guilty. In this case, law enforcement relied on the sailors’ confessions to secure their convictions, and disregarded DNA evidence that pointed to another man, Omar Ballard, who confessed to the crime himself while serving prison time for another rape.
A troubling aspect of many false confession cases is that, like Tice, defendants appear to actually possess detailed knowledge of the crime. A recent study of over forty false confessions by Professor Brandon L. Garrett of the University of Virginia School of Law found that contamination was present in every single one of the confessions he studied. Police interrogators apparently simply fed confidential information about the crime to the suspect being questioned.
The show will include an interview with decorated former New York City police detective Jay Salpeter, whose investigative work led to the exoneration of Martin Tankleff in Long Island in 2007, and who has uncovered new evidence in the case of Damien Echols, who is on death row in Arkansas. If anyone doubts the ability of police interrogators to obtain a confession from an innocent person, Salpeter demonstrates to producer Ofra Bikel just how easy it can be.
For more on the Norfolk Four case, read Jeffrey Toobin”s article in the New Yorker.