The University of Colorado Law School continued its monthly lecture series April 10 with an online talk about wrongful convictions. Hundreds of viewers tuned in to the Zoom presentation from Clinical Professor of Law Ann England and Anne-Marie Moyes, program director at the Korey Wise Innocence Project, an organization hosted at the law school devoted to exonerating the wrongfully convicted.
Wrongful convictions occur in as many as 5% of all criminal cases, according to England, and the widespread adoption of DNA testing in the 1990s led to a wave of exonerations. Korey Wise, namesake and donor to the legal aid project at CU Law, was one of more than 360 people exonerated through DNA testing. Wise served 12 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of rape in the Central Park jogger case of 1989.
England and Moyes focused on three of the most common contributing factors in cases resulting in DNA exonerations: witness misidentification, flawed forensic evidence and false confessions.
According to England, false confessions were a factor in 29% of the cases. The idea that someone would confess to a crime they didn’t commit — especially without the threat of physical violence — is hard for many people to grasp, Moyes said, but most false confessions come through psychological coercion.
Police are trained in the Reid Technique, an interrogation method that critics say leads to a high rate of false confession. After isolating the suspect, Moyes said, police make the suspect feel hopeless through tactics such as lying about evidence and shutting down attempts at denial, making it seem like a confession is the only option. Attempts to get a confession are often accompanied by implied promises of leniency.
False confessions are often retracted right after an interrogation stops or the suspect gets an attorney, Moyes said, but once a false confession has been made, it’s almost impossible to win at trial, even when there’s exculpatory evidence. “Juries can’t rationalize why they would confess,” she said. False confessions can also be very detailed, Moyes added, since the suspect learns a lot about the crime through the interrogation process.
Long interrogations and interrogations of vulnerable people, especially juveniles and people with cognitive impairments or mental illness, are more likely to produce false confessions, Moyes said, adding that a study of 125 false confessions found an average interrogation length of 16 hours.
Marty Tankleff, wrongfully convicted in New York state in 1990 for the murder of his parents, is an example of how interrogation practices can produce false confessions, according to Moyes.
During interrogation, police lied to then-17-year-old Tankleff, saying his father had woken up in the hospital and accused him of the crime.
Although there was mounting evidence a business partner of Tankleff’s father was behind the killings, Moyes said, police focused their investigation on the son, who spent 17 years in prison before being exonerated.
Eyewitness misidentification is a contributing factor in 70% of cases resulting in DNA exonerations, said England, who talked about how a witness’s memory can be influenced by new information.
She likened memories to files on a computer; each time a memory “file” is opened, it is vulnerable to being edited or corrupted.
Details revealed during an investigation or through the media can weave themselves into a witness’s memories, resulting in false identifications, England said, adding that repeated exposure to a suspect through police lineups or court proceedings can also influence how witnesses remember crimes.
Racial bias can play a role in misidentification, she said, noting that studies show people have a harder time identifying people from other races or even age groups than their own. Stress, weapons and simple disguises like a hat or sunglasses can also make it hard for victims to remember or identify their attackers, she added.
Flawed forensic science, the final factor the speakers discussed, was present in 45% of cases that led to DNA exonerations, according to data presented by England.
“If you paid attention to TV alone, you would think forensic science is magic — it can solve any case with absolute certainty,” said Moyes. “But the truth is, the more we examine the state of forensics in the United States, the more we learn that it is not nearly as reliable as we’d hoped.”
In a report commissioned by Congress, the National Academy of Sciences had this to say in 2009 about forensic sciences in the U.S.: “With the exception of nuclear DNA analysis… no forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source.” Moyes noted the NAS findings don’t necessarily mean all the methods are “junk science,” just that there hadn’t been scientific validation studies for any of the methods, including fingerprint analysis.
However, Moyes pointed out two disciplines, hair microscopy and bite mark analysis, that had been “wholly discredited” as unscientific. In some cases, they have been wrong in determining whether a hair or bite wound came from a human or animal. Fortunately, DNA testing of hair has been routine in law enforcement in recent decades, eliminating reliance on visual comparisons of hair samples.
Courts continue to find bite mark analysis admissible, Moyes said, though it has become much less common. Moyes used the case of Ray Krone, who was wrongfully convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to death in Arizona, as an example of the harm bite mark analysis could cause.
Experts said Krone, who had been at the same bar as the victim on the night of the crime, must have committed the murder because his crooked teeth matched a bite mark on the victim, Moyes said, but he was eventually exonerated by DNA evidence.
But even DNA isn’t foolproof, Moyes cautioned, especially in cases where DNA was transferred or mixed with that of another person. She mentioned a couple “chilling examples.” In one, DNA was found on a murdered Yale University graduate student whose body was found behind a wall in a laboratory. The DNA was found to match that of a construction worker who had worked at the lab but died two years before the crime.
Another example was the case of Lukis Anderson, a California man who was charged with murder after his DNA was found on the hand of the victim.
Anderson, who suffered from alcoholism and had a history of blackouts, couldn’t account for where he was at the time of the crime. But he turned out to have an “iron-clad alibi,” Moyes said, as medical records revealed he had been in the hospital the night of the murder. The EMT who brought Anderson to the hospital had later responded to the murder, and Anderson’s DNA was accidentally transferred to the victim.
England wrapped up with an overview of the process of “litigating innocence” for the wrongfully convicted.
There are many barriers to overturning a wrongful conviction, including tight timelines and complicated petitions that are almost always filed pro se.
Many prisoners who file want to argue the facts, she added, but appellate courts are looking for legal reasons the case should be reconsidered.
— Jessica Folker