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Richard Leo had agreed to testify
at Rafay Burns
trial in Seattle. The judge would not allow him to testify. We
must ask WHY! | Wilfred Hathway
| Publication bans | The Klassen/Kvello case
| Leo's work on false confessions
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Richard Leo
Experts say false confessions
come from leading questions, young suspects, high-pressure interrogations
BY EDWARD HUMES, The
Orange County Register, Oct. 27, 2004
SANTA ANA, Calif. - (KRT) -
The detective surveyed the grim scene that had pre-empted his
morning coffee - a 12-year-old girl's slim form sprawled in her
bedroom doorway, brown hair still pulled into a neat ponytail,
her jeans and purple T-shirt smeared with blood. He was steeling
himself for the next step in the investigation: confronting his
prime suspect.
Stephanie Crowe had been stabbed
nine times as she lay in bed, her family sleeping down the hall
as she died. Her mom awoke at one point to the sound of a door
creaking, but the house cats were always making little noises
on their nightly prowls, and so she rolled over and returned
to her dreams and a lifetime of if onlys.
There were no signs of forced
entry at the Crowe house. Inside job, the detective concluded.
There had been only one other
killing in Escondido, Calif., that year, but it was nothing like
this horror. This was the sort of thing that ruined a good town,
the sort of thing that had to be solved, and solved fast.
The detective didn't have to
look far for a solution: The family had been in hysterics since
finding Stephanie early that morning - everyone, that is, but
her brother, 14-year-old Michael Crowe. He sat, expressionless,
the detective would later recall, calmly playing a handheld video
game. "Inappropriate grieving," the police later called
it.
His dark hair, parted in the
middle, the detective noted, looked a lot like the strands he
had spotted in Stephanie's cold fingers.
The detective and his partners
at the Escondido Police Department knew what had to be done -
hard, unpleasant but essential. By the time they completed their
many hours of interrogation of Michael Crowe, along with two
friends thought to be accomplices, the police had used lies,
false promises, isolation from parents and attorneys, even threats
of adult prison and predatory older inmates to persuade the teenager
to drop his protestations of innocence.
The detectives told a sobbing,
gasping, pleading Michael that they had blood and lie-detector
evidence proving beyond any doubt that he was the killer - lies,
but convincing to the 14-year-old. Then they suggested he might
have a split personality: a good Michael who would never hurt
a fly, and a bad Michael who had locked away the memory of poor
Stephanie's murder, enabling him to sit there and believe himself
innocent. If he would only just admit it, detectives promised,
they could help him.
In the end, the police got
what they needed to bring the boys to justice: confessions from
Michael and a friend, and enough incriminating statements from
the third boy to file murder charges against them all. Sure,
the interrogations were rough, the videotapes painful to watch,
but such was the difficult path to truth. And so another dreadful
case of violent, antisocial teens in the era of Columbine was
laid to rest.
Except there was one hitch:
The insistent voice of a slim, intense psychology professor from
the University of California, Irvine, kept saying, No, you've
got the wrong guys.
Richard Leo, who has spent
most of his career studying the dynamics of police interrogations
- both the good and the bad - viewed more than 40 hours of videotape
of Crowe, his friends and the Escondido Police. When he was through
with his analysis, he declared the police work in the Crowe case
a textbook example of how not to question suspects, finding that
it amounted to a form of "psychological torture" so
coercive that the boys would have said almost anything to make
it stop.
If you wanted a lab experiment
designed to prove how to bully suspects into falsely confessing
to crimes, Leo concluded in a case that began with Stephanie's
death in 1998 and continues to this day, you couldn't do any
better than what took place in that Escondido police interview
room.
The boys were innocent, Leo
asserted, confessions be damned. And he was right.
Confessions, DNA, fingerprints,
eyewitness testimony, the word of crime victims: These are the
gold standards of criminal investigation, the best and most convincing
tools for bringing the guilty to justice. Who could doubt a person's
guilt with such compelling evidence in hand?
The answer, for most of the
last century, was: no one. But such seemingly ironclad evidence
has come under a new scrutiny from a cadre of researchers at
UCI's School of Social Ecology - psychologists, social scientists
and attorneys, all working in that gray zone where the law, science
and study of the mind intersect. Their research has broken new
ground and established UCI as one of the premier schools for
law and psychology.
Their work has changed the
way DNA evidence is regarded, uncovering grievous mistakes by
crime labs nationwide, compelling others to improve their practices,
freeing innocents from prison and death row.
They have challenged the science
behind 100 years of fingerprint comparisons, rattling forensics
experts worldwide.
Their research has altered
the way we view eyewitness reliability and raised new questions
about "recovered" memories of long-past crimes.
And a "jury lab"
regularly reveals how well - or how poorly - evidence is understood
by ordinary citizens - and why normal people sometimes hear and
see things that just didn't happen.
As lawyers and expert witnesses,
their cases have included O.J. Simpson's, Oliver North's, the
Oklahoma City bombing, and the Catholic Church's child abuse
cases. Along the way, says one of the nation's leading experts
in law and psychology, John Monahan of the University of Virginia
Law School, "UCI ... has leaped to the national forefront."
There are many reasons that
UCI's law, crime and psychology program is now considered among
the two or three best in the nation, Monahan and other experts
in the field say. But most agree that the school's rise to prominence
began in earnest in 2001, when psychologist and memory researcher
Elizabeth Loftus came to town, streaming acclaim and controversy
in her wake.
---Story continues with Elizabeth Loftus
- Expert on false confessions
testifies at Tuite trial
- Judge won't let him
give opinion, says jury to decide
By Mark Sauer, STAFF WRITER,
San Diego Tribune, April 29, 2004
Though prevented by the judge
from giving his opinion, an expert on false confessions and police
interrogations gave jurors plenty of dots to connect during testimony
yesterday in the Richard Tuite murder trial.
Richard Leo testified he has
spent nearly 200 hours analyzing the interrogations by Escondido
detectives of the three teenagers charged with the January 1998
slaying of Stephanie Crowe until her blood was discovered on
Tuite's clothing.
Leo, a criminologist and social
psychologist at the University of California Irvine, said there
is a "wide body of knowledge in psychology" regarding
police interrogations and that "no one disputes that false
confessions occur."
Prosecutors say Michael Crowe
and Joshua Treadway were coerced by detectives during long interrogation
sessions into confessing to Stephanie's slaying. Aaron Houser,
the third teenager originally charged, did not confess during
his 10-hour interrogation.
Leo acknowledged under cross-examination
by defense attorney Brad Patton that even a coerced confession
can be true.
Coerced and false confessions,
often confirmed by DNA tests or other conclusive evidence, typically
contain common elements, Leo said.
One is unusual length. Interrogations
lasting more than four to six hours, especially if food, water,
rest and bathroom breaks are denied, can overpower an innocent
suspect's will, he said. "Tag-teaming" on an individual
suspect by multiple interrogators compounds this effect.
Another is the suspect "being
frightened into submission" by detectives' threats, like
graphic descriptions of prison life, or by false hope given with
a promise of leniency or "help" if he cooperates.
Lying about having incriminating
evidence or using a Computer Voice Stress Analyzer and claiming
it to be infallible are examples of "forceful evidence ploys,"
Leo said, which can elicit an involuntary and false confession.
Prosecutors in the Tuite case
have attempted to show jurors that all of these coercive techniques
were used by Escondido police in the interrogations of Michael
Crowe and Treadway.
There are two basic ways that
suspects are coerced into confessing falsely, Leo said.
A "compliant" false
confession is when a suspect knowingly confesses in the hope
of leniency, to avoid the threat of prison or to end the psychological
strain of an intense interrogation.
More rare is the "internalized"
false confession, Leo said, where police attack a suspect's memory
so successfully that he actually comes to believe he committed
the crime.
In showing the many hours of
interrogation videos, prosecutors have tried to demonstrate that
Treadway gave a compliant false confession while Crowe became
convinced by detectives that he had killed his sister Stephanie
during a blackout, which is why he remembers nothing about the
crime.
Under questioning by Patton,
Leo said there is nothing inherently coercive about police pressuring
suspects in isolated interrogation rooms, lying about incriminating
evidence or implying things will go easier if they cooperate.
But if legitimate interrogation
techniques cross the line into coercion, Leo said, the cumulative
effect can be devastating.
Leo acknowledged that it's
up to a judge or jury to decide whether interrogators went too
far and a false confession resulted.
That is why San Diego Superior
Court Judge Frederic Link ruled Leo could not share his opinion
of the Crowe and Treadway interrogations that's a question
for the jury to decide.
At Tuite's preliminary hearing
last year, however, Leo told a different judge that Treadway's
two interrogation sessions totaling 20-plus hours represented
the "most egregious example" of a coerced confession
he had seen among the 1,000 interrogations he has studied.
In other testimony, Aaron Houser
conceded he told Escondido police in 1998 that Michael Crowe
had a "make-believe hit list" of people he would like
to kill.
Under questioning by Patton,
Houser said the first person on the list "might, for example,
be a teacher who gave him a bad grade." Asked if Crowe included
"Mexicans on the list," Houser replied the reference
came from an incident in middle school when bullies belonging
to a Mexican gang roughed Crowe up in the locker room.
No family members were on the
"fantasy" list, Houser said in reply to a question
from Deputy Attorney General Jim Dutton.
Testimony in Tuite's trial,
now in its 11th week, could wrap up next week with final arguments
coming as soon as May 10, according to discussions among the
attorneys and Judge Link.
Mark Sauer: (619) 293-2227;
mark.sauer@uniontrib.com
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell