child abuse by pig
probably the most depressing feed in my blog reader is bluhm blog, centering on false confessions and wrongful convictions. false confessions tax the skill of defense lawyers as they seek to explain difficult subtlety and seemingly impossible reality to the usual dullards composing the jury, and the slovenly sadists on the bench and beyond.
if looking to be seriously bummed out by the human condition, here’s a good starting post.
[…] Most recently, the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth was asked to submit an amicus brief in the case of Thomas Cogdell, a 12 year old boy who was convicted of murdering his younger sister in Camden, Arkansas in 2006. The boy’s confession was patently false, the product of police coercion that reduced him to an incoherent mess. He had a breakdown of sorts after being repeatedly accused of the crime and told that the crime had to have been committed by him or his mother. The interrogation is one of the most riveting examples of psychological torture I have ever seen. There is no physical abuse and much of what the cops did was probably legal and permissible when used to question adult suspects. But when police use the same high pressure tactics on children that they use on adults, they not only risk traumatizing a child but they risk obtaining a false confession. In Thomas’s case, after his breakdown, they turned off the cameras, fed him a meal, and then questioned him further before he finally confessed. They rehearsed the story with him, brought him back in and put his “statement” on tape. When his mother was finally allowed to see him, you can hear him whisper to her that he made the whole thing up.
Thomas’s DNA was not on the sewing tape used to bind his sister (another male’s was) nor were his fingerprints or DNA on the bags that were placed over her head to suffocate her. He also could not lead the police to where his mother’s wallet had been tossed. To the extent that some of the facts in his confession were consistent with crime evidence, we’ll never know whether the police fed him those facts during the dinner break because they stopped recording.
Thomas was tried and convicted of the murder and the conviction was upheld on appeal. Dorcy Corbin of the Public Defender Commission took the case to the Arkansas Supreme Court which reversed the conviction on the ground that police had not properly secured Thomas’ waiver of his constitutional rights because Thomas expressed a lack of understanding of the word “waiver” and the police gave him an erroneous definition. He is free today but prosecutors have not formally announced whether they will seek to retry him. A retrial is unlikely, however, as the State has no case without the confession. […]