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I'm noticing a pattern here. Coerced false confessions from interrogations of the mentally ill/feebleminded, and children.

There was a much publicized case of a false confession recently in Escondido, California. (Escondido = Spanish for "hidden"). One of the three families victimized was the Treadway family, a Christian family, who unfortunately, were very trusting of the police detectives, and why not? One of the detectives taught youth at his church for over seven years: Oops!

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Detectives presented the Josh-as-patsy scenario to Michael Treadway as he waited for his son outside the interrogation room.

Michael Treadway had no reason to doubt what the detectives were telling him.

A locksmith by trade, he knew some of the detectives investigating the Crowe killing and knew many others in the Escondido Police Department since he had fixed and installed locks for the department for years.

Around 12:30 a.m., Michael Treadway was allowed in to talk to his son as the secret video camera continued rolling:

Michael Treadway: "Listen, son. If Aaron gave you the knife and told you to get rid of it, don't hide it."

Joshua Treadway: "He didn't, though."

Michael Treadway: "I pray to God that this is not the murder weapon. Because if it somehow is, oh my God, I'll be givin' you a hug goodbye."

While Joshua's predicament was clear to Michael Treadway, he was not moved to invoke his son's Miranda rights and contact a lawyer. He says now that not a day goes by that "I don't kick myself in the butt about that."

"This is what I'm being told -- these two boys killed Stephanie and Josh is taking the fall," Michael Treadway said recently. "So the cops paint themselves as his buddies, helping him out of this fix that his friends have put him in.

"We had no experience with this. You watch '60 Minutes,' or '20/20' on TV and these kids spend one night in juvenile hall and they are gang raped or commit suicide in their cells.

"And so my goal was: Keep him out of Juvenile Hall. So you cooperate."

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the police wore him down to the point that he would say anything to please them. Says Steve: "Michael never actually confessed. All he said was that you tell me I did, therefore I must have did this, but I don't remember doing it. That's all he said."

Court TV Host: What if you were taken into police custody? What would you do? What would you say? Do you think that the police could ever get you to admit to perpetrating a crime? What about admitting to a crime you didn't commit? That's what happened to Michael Crowe. He was a 14-year-old boy who was taken into custody by police, who thought he had brutally knifed his 12 year old sister to death. He was interrogated for hours, without a lawyer, without his parents, without even his parents' knowledge that he was being interrogated. He kept maintaining his innocence. But police questioners hammered away at him. And finally, he said to them, if you say I did it, then I did it. Police pursued the case even after, another more likely suspect came to light, a drifter with mental problems who was found to have the blood of the teenage girl on his shirt...

The Interrogation of Michael Crowe will explore the increasingly controversial topic of police interrogation techniques and coerced confessions, and will examine the issue of whether juvenile interrogations should be taped to ensure the authorities follow procedures which are appropriate for juveniles. The film tells the story of the Crowe family, whose 14-year-old son Michael was forced to endure an excruciating police interrogation into the 1998 murder of his 12-year-old sister, Stephanie. Michael repeatedly denied his involvement in her murder, despite hours of intense interrogation without a lawyer or his parents present, but was ultimately coerced into confessing to the crime. The fact that the interrogation was taped proved that the confession was false and kept Michael from going to jail.

PDF File: JOSHUA TREADWAY's Motion regarding COERCED, FALSE CONFESSION

Stephanie Crowe murder case Main Page

The night she was killed.The arrest

CHILDREN TRY TO PLEASE ADULTS. THAT'S A DANGER WHEN POLICE ARE UNSCRUPULOUS

... But the issue of false confessions by children has drawn much wider attention in the wake of the Harris case, in which the two boys were exonerated only after it was determined that they were too young to have produced the semen found on the slain girl's underwear....

Ten years of research of false confessions.

PDF File, False Confessions; Research and Theory (and similarity to Communist interrogation techniques)

Ileana Fuster, Tactics used to elicit confession: drugs and hypnosis

Why Innocent People Confess to Murder

PROVEN FALSE CONFESSIONS

There are four sub-types of proven false confessions: the suspect confessed to a crime that did not happen; the evidence objectively demonstrates that the defendant could not possibly have committed the crime; the true perpetrator was identified and his guilt established; or the defendant was exonerated by scientific evidence.

1. The Suspect Confessed to a Crime That Did Not Happen

Police interrogators may extract a confession to a crime that did not, in fact, occur. In Austin, Texas in 1990, after twice failing a polygraph test, Billy Gene Davis confessed that he killed his ex-girlfriend; she subsequently turned up alive in Tucson, Arizona. Even if the underlying event did in fact occur, police may induce a confession to a non-existent crime. In 1993, Phoenix, Arizona police elicited a confession from Christina Mason to killing her three-month-old infant by letting another woman inject the child with heroin and cocaine to prevent it from crying. The autopsy, however, revealed no drugs other than Tylenol in the baby's body, and the medical examiner concluded that the likely cause of death was pneumonia or a viral infection.

2. The Defendant Could Not Have Committed The Crime

Police may extract a confession from an individual who could not have committed the crime. In 1987, Los Angeles, California police interrogators elicited false confessions from two suspects--Ruben Trujillo and Pedro Delvillar--to the same double murder and robbery. Yet both men were in police custody (one in a county jail and the other at a California Youth Authority facility) for other crimes when the murders occurred. In another example of flawed interrogation, police in Laguna Beach, California obtained a confession to arson from Jose Soto Martinez in 1993, but prosecutors dismissed charges when they discovered that Martinez had been in a Mexican prison at the time of the arson. Similarly, in 1986 Montana police elicited a false confession to a sexually motivated killing from Ivan Reliford, but later discovered that Reliford was in custody when the crime was committed.

The cases in this study reveal many reasons why someone could not have committed the crime to which he confessed. In 1973, Connecticut State Police elicited a confession from Peter Reilly to killing and mutilating his mother. After a jury trial, conviction, and then reversal by an appellate court, the prosecutor handling the second trial discovered that the former prosecutor's files contained documents showing that Reilly arrived at the scene of the murder only minutes before the police and thus could not have committed the crime.

In 1982, James Harry Reyos confessed in New Mexico that he had killed a Catholic priest a year earlier. The victim died between 7 p.m. and midnight in Odessa, Texas, but gas receipts and an eyewitness established that Reyos was in Roswell, New Mexico (200 miles away) at 8 p.m. that evening, and a speeding ticket proved that he was also in Roswell shortly after midnight. To have committed the murder, Reyos would have had to drive 200 miles to the murder site, kill the priest in no more than one minute and speed 215 miles back to where he received the speeding ticket--in four hours (averaging well over 100 miles an hour on narrow, country roads). Eventually the state's attorney handling Reyos' appeal conceded that Reyos could not have committed the crime.

In 1995, in Portland, Oregon, police extracted false confessions from Rick Nieskins and Christopher Cole to the 1991 murder of John Sewell. Both men were charged with homicide, and both spent thirteen months in jail awaiting trial--even though two other men had been convicted of Sewell's murder in 1991 and had always maintained that they acted alone. Prosecutors eventually dropped charges against Nieskins after records showed that he could not have committed the crime because he was at a homeless shelter in Seattle at the time of the killing. Once they acknowledged Nieskins' false confession, prosecutors admitted that Cole also could not have been involved in the crime and dropped charges against him.

3. The True Perpetrator Was Identified and His Guilt Established

Police may elicit a confession that is proven false when the true perpetrator is identified. Sometimes this occurs fortuitously when police encounter the perpetrator in connection with another crime and obtain a demonstrably reliable confession. In 1979, after twenty-one hours of interrogation by West Virginia State Police, Paul Reggetz confessed to murdering his wife and two children. Reggetz spent eleven months in pre-trial incarceration before one of his neighbors confessed. In 1990, Suffolk County, New York police interrogated Anthony Atkinson for three-and-a-half hours before he confessed to murder and sodomy. Later, two other men confessed to the crime, and charges against Atkinson were dismissed. In 1994, Guy Lewis confessed to Memphis, Tennessee police to shooting and killing his girlfriend. The prosecutor was preparing to bring charges against him when Tony Hedges and Michael Maclin were arrested and each confessed to the murder. In 1996, Robert Moore confessed to the capital murder and robbery of a taxi driver after Nassau County, New York detectives interrogated him for twenty-five hours. Moore was released only because police happened to arrest one of the actual killers on unrelated charges, and he confessed and identified his two co-perpetrators. In 1996, in Daytona Beach, Florida, police extracted a confession to capital murder and robbery from Donald Shoup, a mentally handicapped teenager. While Shoup was awaiting trial, the true killer confessed.

In one of the century's most dramatic and disturbing false confession cases, prosecutors dismissed charges against three false confessors after routine detective work identified the true killers. In 1991, during interrogations that lasted up to twenty-one hours, Maricopa County Sheriffs in Phoenix, Arizona coercedfalse confessions from Leo Bruce, Mark Nunez, and Dante Parker to the mass murder of nine persons at a Buddhist temple. While prosecutors were preparing capital cases against the defendants, a ballistics test was carried out on a rifle that was picked up for testing the same day that Bruce, Nunez, and Parker were interrogated. It proved to be the murder weapon. The rifle had been in the possession of Jonathan Doody and Alex Garcia the night of the murder. Searches led to the discovery of loot in the possession of both Doody and Garcia. Both adolescents confessed to the murders, and Garcia supplied the police with a detailed account of how he and Doody planned and carried out the killings.

Garcia not only confessed to the nine Temple murders, but also to murdering Alice Marie Cameron shortly before being arrested for the Temple murders. The police delayed doing the ballistics test on the rifle that led to Garcia's arrest because they were occupied first with coercing false confessions from Bruce, Nunez, and Parker and then with the media storm and public protests against the police that followed the disputed confessions. To make matters even worse, Maricopa County Sheriffs had also extracted a confession to Cameron's murder from George Peterson, a mentally ill adult, during a sixteen hour interrogation. When Garcia admitted to the Cameron murder fourteen months later, Peterson was awaiting trial for capital murder for the same crime.

4. The Defendant Was Exonerated By Scientific Evidence

Police may elicit a confession that is conclusively proven false by scientific evidence. In 1996, police in West Palm Beach, Florida elicited a confession to capital murder from Martin Salazar, but prosecutors dropped charges when the defense discovered that fingerprint evidence clearing Salazar had been withheld by the police and the prosecutor. During an interrogation in 1980, Chicago police reshaped a dream by Steven Linscott into a murder confession, but DNA testing established his innocence many years later. In 1983, Virginia police elicited several confessions from Earl Washington--including one to the rape and murder of Rebecca Williams. In 1993, DNA evidence established that Washington could not have been responsible for any of these crimes. In 1996, in Sitka, Alaska, Richard Bingham confessed to being the lone rapist and killer of seventeen-year-old Jessica Baggen. DNA testing excluded Bingham as the source of the semen found in the victim. The foreign hair found on the victim's body was not Bingham's nor was the fingerprint found on a cigarette pack at the crime scene. Bingham was also unable to describe the unusual properties of the physical scene where the body was found nor the unusual way in which the victim had been silenced. Bingham was acquitted at trial.

Notwithstanding the numerous examples of proven false confessions reported in this article, it is difficult to establish conclusively that a defendant's confession is false even when the evidence of innocence is compelling. Once a suspect has confessed, it is rare for the crime to evaporate, for the true perpetrator to be apprehended, for police or prosecutors to discover that the defendant could not have committed the crime, or for scientific evidence to exonerate him. The standard for inclusion into the proven false category--established innocence--is a formidable barrier.

Probable false confessionsTammy Lynn Harrison: In 1979, following several days of intensive interrogation by Duncanville, Texas police Lieutenant Robert Moore, Tammy Lynn Harrison, a seventeen-year-old, signed a confession to stabbing her mother to death. Moore coerced Harrison's confession by repeatedly telling her that she would die in the electric chair if she did not confess. There was no physical or other evidence connecting Harrison to the crime, and she steadfastly maintained her innocence, repudiating her post-admission narrative while making it. After the trial judge ruled Harrison's confession inadmissible, the prosecutor dismissed all charges for lack of evidence. Shortly after the confession was suppressed, the Duncanville Police Department fired Lieutenant Moore.

In 1983, Pulaski County, Arkansas sheriffs extracted a confession from Barry Lee Fairchild, a mentally handicapped African-American...There was no independent evidence connecting Fairchild to the crime; in fact, blood, hair and semen failed to positively link Fairchild to the crime. Fairchild maintained his innocence and insisted that he confessed only because Sheriff Tommy Robinson and Deputy Sheriff Larry Dill physically beat, assaulted, and threatened him. Fairchild's videotaped confession statement shows him looking away from the camera and responding to the prompting of others in the room. In 1990--seven years after Fairchild's conviction on capital murder charges--thirteen African-American men publicly disclosed that, like Fairchild, they too had been detained for questioning about the Mason murder and were tortured. One of these men, Michael Johnson, reported that he heard sheriffs in the next room torture Fairchild into confessing. Two former Pulaski County Sheriff Deputies...have admitted that physical assault and abuse were common interrogation tactics at the time of Fairchild's arrest. Nevertheless, all of Fairchild's legal appeals failed, and he was executed on August 31, 1995.

Luis Roberto Benavidez

In 1992, in Simi Valley, California, Luis Roberto Benavidez confessed to the slaying of Marcos Anthony Scott more than two years earlier. Benavidez claimed that he confessed only because his interrogators threatened to send his girlfriend to prison for the murder and place their two-year-old daughter in a foster home if he did not confess.

Linda Stangel In 1995, Oregon State Police coerced Linda Stangel into confessing to shoving her boyfriend, David Wahl, off a trail 320 feet above the Oregon Coast. After Wahl's death, Oregon State Police lured Stangel from her home state, Minnesota, back to Portland by secretly funding her trip (via Wahl's family) to attend Wahl's memorial service. After Stangel arrived in Portland, the police transported her to the scene of the alleged crime, several hours away. Knowing that Stangel was terrified of heights, two detectives obliged her to walk up the narrow, steadily rising bluff trail from which they presumed her boyfriend had fallen. Stangel broke down in apparent fear of the cliff edge as they climbed the trail. Despite considerable pressure from the police, Stangel maintained her innocence prior to being manipulated up the trail, and consistently told police that she had last seen Wahl when he went off to take a walk along the coast. To escape the immediate stress of the narrow and terrifying heights, Stangel confessed to accidentally pushing her boyfriend off the cliff.

Nine more cases of mentally handicapped adults' false confessions after threats that not confessing would earn them the death penalty.

When police came to the halfway house that Steven Linscott worked at in Oak Park, he told them he had a dream the night before in which he saw a man attack and kill a black woman. Some of the details of the dream were similar to a murder that happened the night before to a white woman living next door. The police took the "dream" as a confession and eventually Linscott was convicted of the rape and murder of the woman. He spent three and a half years in prison before his conviction was overturned when tests showed that the DNA left at the scene belonged to someone other than Linscott. Charges against him were dropped, but the State has never admitted that Linscott is innocent.

The prosecutor in Linscott's case was now Judge John Morrissey, who has recently been criticized for ridiculing requests for DNA testing of evidence, including a refusal to allow Ronald Jones (above) DNA testing performed on evidence. DNA testing at a later date would show he was uninvolved in the rape.

Steven Linscott was a Bible student at the time he was questioned and arrested. He later wrote a book, Maximum Security. Linscott told his dream to the police, and though many facets of the dream didn’t match the evidence in the case, the Oak Park police started the machinery for what was a virtual "frameup" of the would-be missionary candidate. The fact that the victim belonged to a Hindu-type cult and the accused was an active evangelical may have been significant.

Justice Denied; Some Examples of Apparently False Confessions Perhaps the most famous recent case is Paul Ingram's, a police officer from Olympia, WA. He was subjected to 23 interrogations over five months of hypnotism and coercion by his church minister to confess, provided with graphic crime details, and influenced by a police psychologist who told him that sex offenders often repress memories of their crimes. Ingram received a 20-year jail sentence and is currently imprisoned for crimes he did not commit and which probably never happened.

Former police commander Jon Burge was in charge of the Sanchez investigation which was conducted at a time when his torture ring at Area 2 was in full operation. In 1986, Burge had not yet been publicly exposed nor fired for torture. Aaron did not know who Burge was at the time, but merely described him as the "red haired officer." The officers who beat and suffocated Aaron-- particularly James Pienta--were subsequently exposed as being participants in Burge's torture ring; these officers were involved in other incidents of Area 2 torture. Additionally, the torture techniques applied against Aaron-- the suffocation bagging and the gun threat-- were the same techniques utilized by Burge, Pienta and the officers involved in other torture cases.

b) Aaron's etchings-- in the bench of the interrogation room-- were photographed, verifying their existence. On May 7, 1986, Detectives Pienta and Marley wrote a memo to Burge, warning him of the existence of the etchings. Aaron's current defense team at the Peoples Law Office has obtained this memo. On May 27, 1986, one of Aaron's then defense team; members, Ike Carrothers, came to Area 2 in an attempt to photograph the etchings; he was blocked by Burge who required Carrothers to obtain authorization from the State Attorney's office. On May 29, 1986, Arnold Ross Victor went to Area 2 with a court order on behalf of the defense team and photographed the etchings.

c) The same officers involved in Aaron's interrogation tortured co-defendant, Eric Caine. Like Aaron, Caine was taken to Area 2 as a suspect in the Sanchez murders. Detectives Pienta and Marley beat him and Detective Madigan shattered his eardrum; emergency room staff verified the evidence of his torture. These officers attempted to force Caine to implicate Aaron in the crime in addition to "confessing" his own alleged involvement. Caine stated that, at one point while he was at Area 2, police took him by Aaron who looked like he had been brutalized. Additionally, Michael Arbuckle, another suspect in the Sanchez murder, was threatened with electrocution by police and pressured to implicate Aaron.

d) On August 12 and 23, September 1 and 7, 1994, Aaron was personally evaluated by Dr. Antonio Martinez, an expert in treating torture victims, to determine if he had been tortured. Dr. Martinez determined Aaron had been tortured during his interrogation at Area 2. He also determined Aaron exhibited "six categories of psychological markers which qualify under Post Traumatic Stress Disorder..."

e) The content of the; "confession"-- aside from; how it was produced-- is not credible. According to the "confession," the Sanchezes were killed in the early morning hours of April 18, 1986. In contrast, one of the Sanchezes neighbors, Ophelia Loy, stated that she saw Vincente Sanchez raking the lawn at 3:00 PM on April 18, 1986. Ms. Loy reported this finding in a Medical Examiner's Report dated April 19, 1986, but she was never summoned to testify in court at the trial.

Prosecutorial Misconduct (Collaboration with Police Torture, Witness Intimidation, Use of Perjured Testimony, and Possible Destruction of Evidence)

: Assistant State Attorney Peter Troy wrote Aaron's alleged "confession" and attempted to have him sign it; Aaron refused. Troy knew Aaron had been tortured and this "confession" was not legitimate. Nonetheless, Troy stood by the "confession" when Aaron went to trial. According to a 1998 affidavit by Marva Hall, Aaron's trial prosecutor, Jack Hynes, threatened to have her locked up if she did not testify against Aaron. Though she explained to Hynes that her alleged statement to the police on April 21, 1986, implicating Aaron was false, Hynes nonetheless pressured her to testify against him. Hall has since recanted this testimony on three separate occasions, most recently in her 1998 affidavit. Hall was the state's star witness-- the only "civilian" witness-- against Aaron. This fact is underscored again in an October 4, 1998, article by Steve Mills in the Chicago Tribune.

Fingerprint evidence was uncovered from a cassette recorder on the victim's back porch by two CPD evidence technicians on April 19, 1986. Chicago police officer Herman Kluth testified as an expert on fingerprint comparisons at Aaron's trial, noting that the impressions did not match Aaron or Caine. ; Kluth further testified that the prints were compared with other possible suspects and that these results were in an "evidence envelope." Aaron's current defense team recently subpoenaed the CPD to release this evidence; the team planned to have its own expert run a print comparison in order to determine who the prints may match, thereby pointing to the real killer. However, this evidence was now 'missing' from the CPD's files.; The defense team also sought to obtain this evidence from the State Attorney's file, the evidence was again "missing." This evidence envelope also contained six photos of three different bloody shoe prints found on the kitchen floor of the victims house.

URGENT ACTION NEEDED, Ex-cop gets gets put in lockup for exposing corruption… Political Prisoners in the USA? – yes!

Patrick Swiney was convicted of a double murder on June 12, 1989, by the courts after exposing drug deals and money laundering by county officials. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Who is Patrick?

Letter from Patrick to the American people