Police confessions

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jul/Aug 2002 by Mills, Steve

Records review shows cops using illegal, coercive tactics to nail innocent people

In late winter of 2001, the Chicago Tribune began to re-investigate the criminal prosecution of four teenagers for a 1986 rape and murder of a medical student.

The paper's findings would ultimately help the four men prove their innocence and, for the three who remained in prison, win their release.

Two of the men had confessed, police had said, but the newspaper's investigation showed that those confessions were false.

Over the past several years, the Tribune has investigated and reported on several individual cases where defendants were said to have confessed, only to be exonerated.

But it was the findings in the re-investigation of the murder of Lori Roscetti that provided the impetus for the Tribune to undertake a groundbreaking examination of 10 years of murder cases in Chicago and Cook County. That investigation showed how police close murder cases with questionable confessions that imprison the innocent and let the guilty go free.

The series, "Cops and Confessions," was reported and written by Ken Armstrong, Steve Mills and Maurice Possley and was published over four days in December 2001. The series was edited by Projects Editor Bob Blau and his deputy, George Papajohn.

The goal was the same as it was in previous Tribune series that examined the criminal justice system: to document the scope and the depth of problems that so far have been told anecdotally, and that authorities have dismissed as isolated.

The conclusion: that in nearly 250 cases between 1991 and 2000, police in Chicago and Cook County had obtained dubious confessions.

As in past series, we also wrote about key figures appearing to be emblematic of the problem, such as the veteran detective who had a dozen cases in which he obtained confessions that ended with the confession being suppressed or the defendant being found not guilty.

We also reinvestigated a single case - that of a teenager who the police said had confessed to taking part in a double murder even though records showed that he was in jail when the murders took place. We found new evidence, including crucial documents, to support his innocence.

Prosecutors say that they have begun a reinvestigation.

Another youth we wrote about - a young mentally ill man who had made a videotaped confession to the brutal murder of his mother - already has been released. DNA tests connected the murder to another man. Motions to suppress

When we started the series, we knew it would be difficult. After all, the interrogation room remains one of the most difficult places to penetrate.

It was all the more difficult for us because the police refused to cooperate with our investigation in any way. Our requests for interviews, records, training manuals - even a tour of the police academy -were turned down.

But scores of interviews with murder defendants and their families, lawyers and judges, enabled us to present a vivid portrait of the inside of police interrogation rooms and report on what happens there.

More than that, though, using thousands of court and computer records, we were able to statistically document the extent of the problem.

It worked like this: First, we identified defendants who had been acquitted or had their charges dropped before trial. From those, we isolated cases where police and prosecutors said they obtained a confession from the defendant.

To do this we examined computerized docket sheets in more than a thousand cases, searching for motions to suppress a defendant's statement. Then, through interviews and other record searches, including searching the actual court files, we determined which of those statements contained an admission that made the defendants culpable for murder.

We also examined more than 10,000 appellate court opinions for the 10-year period, looking for cases where a defendant's confession was thrown out by a higher court. Most appellate court orders were available only on microfilm or paper, so we had to search them one by one - a painstaking process that took weeks to complete.

Admissions of guilt

The project was particularly difficult because there were no transcripts available to help reconstruct what happened in court. Since acquittals are not appealed, no transcripts are prepared. Similarly, no transcripts were prepared for cases where the charges were dropped. Also, some of the statements were given orally, so there was no signed admission to examine.

A confession was defined as a statement, made to police and prosecutors, in which the defendant admitting killing the victim or participating in the crime in a way that could make him eligible for murder charges. This included cases where a person is held accountable under the law even if he didn't fire a shot or otherwise kill someone.

Instances in which the defendant made what authorities call a false exculpatory statement- in which the defendant professes innocence, but provides details that can be proven false - were not counted in our analysis.