BLESS ME...FOR I HAVE CONFESSED

Confession is good for the soul.

In a small windowless jail cell, a defense attorney leans over and talks quietly to his sobbing client.

Dirty icy air is blasted from musty old vents jutting from a mildewed ceiling.

The smell of new floor wax and disinfectant mix with the smell of sweat and fear. The client wipes away his tears and grabs his attorneys hands and burys his face in them.

"Bless me....for I have confessed. "


“Tell me, my client.”

“Two nights ago, at 2:00 am three detectives came to my apartment and held a gun to me and my wife. Then they asked me to come to the police station with them.”

“They asked you?”

“Well, they said if I didn’t go voluntarily, they would arrest my wife as well and take our daughter to CFS. “

“So you went with them?””Of course I did.”

“Tell me more, my client.”

“Well, then they took me to this small room and one cop punched me in my stomach and told me to sit down. Then another cop came in and saw me on the floor and asked what happened. I told him that his partner hit me and he apologized and went to get me a soda.”

“What happened next?”

“The cop who hit me came in and kicked the leg out from my chair and I fell on the floor. Then he got down on the floor and whispered in my ear that if I didn’t say exactly what he wanted, he was going to put me in jail and then go back to my apartment to give the same treatment to my wife. Then the other cop came in with the soda and put me back in the chair.”

“And then what happened?”

“They told me about a shooting, and said I had been identified as the shooter. The bad cop kept telling me what the guy who had been shot looked like, and where the shooting occurred. The good cop kept asking me to repeat it and he was taking notes. Then after an hour the good cop asked me to repeat the whole story while he turned on the tape recorder. “

“Did you confess to the crime, my client?”

"Well before I said anything I asked them what would happen to me. The good cop said that since I didn’t have any priors it shouldn’t be too bad. The bad cop told me to just say what happened or I was going to jail. So I confessed to shooting some guy I don’t even know.”

“Did anyone tell you anything about something called 10-20-life.?”

“No, is that important?”

__________________

This past week, while we were otherwise occupied the blog took off on one of its own tangents as attorneys debated the merits of taped confessions.

The Innocence Project (go here: http://www.innocenceproject.org/causes/falseconfessions.php

has this to say about false confessions:

Even absent those factors, adults also give false confessions due to a variety of factors like the length of interrogation, exhaustion, or a belief that they can be released after confessing and prove their innocence afterward. Though law enforcement must at times employ tactics to extract the truth from uncooperative suspects, police officers, convinced of a suspect's guilt, may occasionally use interrogation tactics so persuasive that an innocent person feels compelled to confess to a crime. In convincing the suspect that the evidence against him is overwhelming, law enforcement may push an innocent suspect to the point where he believes that his fate is sealed with or without a confession. The suspect realizes the injustice inherent in the situation but decides to cooperate, resigned to the notion that a confession will be more beneficial than continuing to claim innocence. The perceived benefits of a false confession may include protection of family members, a more lenient sentence or avoidance of capital punishment, promised deferential treatment by the police or prosecutors, or, in extreme circumstances, avoidance or cessation of physical harm or discomfort. Another inducement to confess may be permission to leave the interrogation room itself, as it is often implied that a suspect is not actually allowed to leave the room until a confession is produced.


There is one way to begin to deal with the problems of false confessions.
If Prosecutors and Judges received training about this problem, including true case histories of innocent defendants convicted with false confessions, then the next time a defense attorney raised the issue, he or she might not be met with the smirks and glares by Judges and Prosecutors who want to clear their case loads.

The fact remains that innocent people confess.

The Innocence Project web site listed above has 20 case histories listed of innocent defendants who confessed to crimes they did not commit.

If innocent people are convicted because of the careless indifference of Judges and Prosecutors, then it will be on their conscience if they take part in sending an innocent person to prison.

Of course, to make this all work, the prosecutor and the Judge need a conscience to begin with.

We cannot end this post without mentioning one of our re-occurring themes that haunts us.

If hundreds of innocent people have been sent to death row, what about the tens of thousands of people serving lengthy sentences who don’t have anyone looking at their cases? Or is it OK to wrongly convict someone of a crime, as long as you don’t kill them?

If Florida keeps limiting payment to $3,500.00 to conflict attorneys to represent someone charged with a life felony, then this problem is going to explode out of control.

If Judges and prosecutors spent one minute a week closing their eyes and imagining being wrongly convicted and sentenced to even 10 years in prison, maybe we could start working towards a solution.

We predict that with all the minimum mandatory sentencing schemes in place, that history will call this period the Dark Ages of criminal justice. Our children or our children's children will wonder what we were thinking about. Just like we can't imagine walking into a restaurant segregated by color, they will wonder how we could do this to innocent people.

See You In Court.