Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [134]
37 Quoted in Sara Rimer, “Convict’s DNA Sways Labs, Not a Determined Prosecutor,” The New York Times, February 6, 2002.
38 ”The Case for Innocence,” a Frontline special for PBS by Ofra Bikel, first aired October 31, 2000. Transcripts and information available from the PBS Frontline Web site at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/case/ etc/tapes.html.
39 Drizin and Leo, “The Problem of False Confessions in the Post-DNA World,” p. 928, note 200 on that page; note 2.
40 In a famous case in North Carolina, where a victim identified the wrong man as the man who raped her, DNA was eventually traced to the true perpetrator; see James M. Doyle (2005), True Witness: Cops, Courts, Science, and the Battle Against Misidentification. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sometimes, too, a “cold case” is solved with DNA evidence. In Los Angeles in 2004, detectives working in the newly formed cold case unit got samples of semen from the body of a woman who had been raped and murdered years earlier, and checked them against the state’s database of DNA from convicted violent felons. They got a match to Chester Turner, who was already in prison for rape. The detectives kept submitting DNA samples from other unsolved murders to the lab, and every month they got another match with Turner. Before long, they had linked him to twelve slayings of poor black prostitutes. Amidst the general exhilaration of catching a serial killer, District Attorney Steve Cooley quietly released David Jones, a retarded janitor with the mental age of a child, who had spent nine years in prison for three of the murders. If Turner had murdered only those three women, he would still be at large and Jones would still be in prison. But because Turner killed nine other women whose cases were unsolved, Jones was the lucky beneficiary of the efforts of the cold case unit. Justice, for him, was a by-product of another investigation. No one, not even the cold case investigators, had any motivation to check Jones’s DNA against the samples from the victims during those long nine years. But the new team of detectives had every motivation to solve old unsolved crimes, and that is the only reason that justice was served and Jones was released.
41 Deborah Davis and Richard Leo (2006), “Strategies for Preventing False Confessions and their Consequences,” in M. R. Kebbell and G. M. Davies (eds.), Practical Psychology for Forensic Investigations and Prosecutions. Chichester, England: Wiley, pp. 121–149. See also the essays in Saundra D. Westervelt and John A. Humphrey (eds.) (2001), Wrongly Convicted: Perspectives on Failed Justice. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
42 Quoted on the PBS show Frontline, “The Case for Innocence,” October 31, 2000.
43 D. Michael Risinger and Jeffrey L. Loop (2002, November), “Three Card Monte, Monty Hall, Modus Operandi and ‘Offender Profiling’: Some Lessons of Modern Cognitive Science for the Law of Evidence,” Cardozo Law Review, 24, p. 193.
44 Davis and Leo, “Strategies for Preventing False Confessions…,” p. 145; note 41.
45 McClurg, “Good Cop, Bad Cop”; note 19. McClurg’s own suggestions for using cognitive dissonance to reduce the risk of police lying are in this essay.
46 Saul M. Kassin and Gisli H. Gudjonsson (2004), “The Psychology of Confession Evidence: A Review of the Literature and Issues,” especially the section on “Videotaping Interrogations: A Policy Whose Time Has Come,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5, pp. 33–67. See also Drizin and Leo, “The Problem of False Confessions…,” note 2; Davis and O’Donohue, “The Road to Perdition,” note 28.
47 Quoted in Jerome, “Suspect Confessions,” p. 31; note 5.
48 Thomas P. Sullivan (2004), “Police Experiences with Recording Custodial Interrogations.” This study, with extensive references on the benefits of recordings, is posted on the Internet at http://www.law.northwestern.edu/ wrongfulconvictions/Causes/custodialInterrogations.htm. However, further research has shown that the camera angle