#115 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - Origin Story

our privilege to work there. Some of you may know me and Steve from the Netflix show Making a Murderer, which exposed the unjust case against our client, Brendan Dascy, or you may have heard me on an episode from last season's Wrongful Conviction with Jason flam where Brendan told his own story for the first time. On this podcast series, Steve and I are going to bring you into our world,

the world of False Confessions. We're going to tell you about cases we've worked on, innocent people we've fought for, and our passion for making justice a reality. Today, we'll start with the big question, why would anyone confess to

a crime they didn't commit? Then we'll take you inside the interrogation room to show you how false confessions happen, and finally a little backstory how Steve and I each became obsessed with the problem of false confessions and how we're not going to quit until this problem gets solved. Most people assume that when someone confesses, it's because they're guilty and because they have some sort of inner need to unburn themselves of their guilt and the story that

they're clinging onto. But what we have discovered is that

confessions aren't always true. That in fact, we know of hundreds of cases where someone is brought into an interrogation room, questioned by the police, sometimes for hours, ends up confessing to a crime, often a very brutal crime, a rape or murder or something like that, and they're convicted on the basis of that confession, sent away to prison for years, decades sometimes, and then an organization like our Center on Wrongful Convictions comes along and does DNA testing and discovers,

beyond the shadow of a doubt that the confession is false. We know hundreds of cases like this, and that really gives the lie to this belief that confessions are always true. I think people understand that if you were tortured or you're subjected to the kinds of tactics we saw in Abu Grabe and Guantanamo that under those kinds of physical, abusive, extreme sleep deprivation kind of tactics, yeah, you might say some things, including confessed to some serious crimes you didn't commit.

But most today's modern psychological interrogation techniques are all about talking and words, and so the job of the lawyer or the expert is to try to explain the psychology of interrogations to lay people, to bring them inside the interrogation room so that they can feel the same pressure that the suspect is under and maybe come to understand why they themselves might confess to a crime they didn't commit. Exactly.

Every one of us has a breaking point, and what you see in these false confession cases is the power of the interrogation room, which is focused on identifying that breaking point for the person being interrogated. It's an incredibly powerful space. It's really good at getting true confessions, but also really good at getting false confessions. The first thing that is essential to any interrogation is isolation. Depriving a

suspect from a lifeline. Two loved ones, friends, attorneys, and so police officers take suspects in a room, a specially designed room. It's usually a very small room. It's cramped to the extent there is furniture in the room. It's usually just a couple of chairs, maybe a table pushed to the side, because you don't want the table between the suspect and an interrogator because it can provide a sense of comfort for the suspect and it can minimize

the ability of the interrogator to get into the suspect's face. Uh. There's no natural light in these rooms, no clocks, no telephones, The walls are basically barren, and usually the suspect is positioned in a corner or in a place where getting up and leaving requires the suspect to literally go through the two interrogators who are blocking the pathway to the door. These rooms have been around for many, many decades, but

we're only getting a glimpse into them for the first time. Recently, as more and more confessions have been proven false by d NA, states are starting to require video cameras in interrogation rooms for the first time. Four states still don't require any kind of real time documentation, but because of those states that now require some sort of video camera or audio recording inside the room, we're getting a look for the first time, and what we're seeing is chilling.

So once you have this sense of isolation, what that does is it fosters a dependence. Suspect becomes obliged to do what the interrogator asks him to do, and part of that dependence is built during the early part of an interrogation, which involves some kind of attempt to build trust between the interrogator and the suspect, something that suggests

that the interrogator is here to help the suspect. In fact, the interrogator is the only person between the suspect and perhaps a life sentence or a prosecutor who's going to charge him or her with the death penalty. When people see what happens inside the interrogation room, they're horrified. The techniques that are used. Sure, they're psychological, very few cops

um use physical abuse any longer. But these psychological techniques distort the world so much that suddenly it starts to make sense that you should confess even if you're innocence. And to watch that mind game in real time on these videos is absolutely appalling. What I find interesting is that many people we show these tapes too, they're accepting of the need to use some of these tactics to

get true confessions. But what they find offensive is the way in which police officers feed facts two suspects and actually construct a narrative that isn't really the suspects confession at all. It is the suspect affirming a preconceived theory of the police that is shaped and constructed by the police. It's almost like like rehearsing a play, you know, like scripting a story that this person has to rehearse and

get perfect and then perform for the final confession. And this process, amazingly enough, when we show it to some audiences, they laugh because, you know, if the goal of all of this of interrogation, our justice system is to find truth, this is such a distortion of truth that people laugh at the absurdity of it. And that's heartbreaking. Yeah, absolutely heartbreaking, because you're watching these people's lives be ruined in real

time on these videos. All right, I'm just gonna come out and ask you who shot her in the head? Why didn't you tell us that second? When an entire gator says to Brendan Dascy, all right, I'm just gonna come out and tell you who shot her in the head. It's heartbreaking because there are supposed to be checks and balances in this process, other police officers looking at the tape saying you can't do that. He has to come

up with these facts on his own. And then there are prosecutors who, in reviewing these cases for trial, should know that this confession is unreliable. And then there are judges. They should see these confessions and they should say I'm not letting this go before a jury. This is not the suspects confession. It's constructed by the interrogators. And then there's the jury who also has an opportunity to weigh

in on this. But time and time and time again, it's the power of the confession itself that ends up convicting these people. Too often, their fate is sealed because the systems check that should prevent false confessions from resulting in wrongful convictions don't work. So literally, when you're watching these videos at the interrogation room, you're watching acts of legal suicide, and in the worst cases, you're watching acts

of psychological torture. I mean, there's a class of false confessions. They're called either coerced persuaded, or coerced internalized. But these are cases where police officers attack a suspect's confidence in their own memory of events. The suspect knows they're innocent, but police officers tell them perhaps they committed the crime in a blackout, or were under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or maybe that the trauma of killing a loved one was so painful that they repressed the memory

of what they actually did. All of this crashes the suspects confidence in their own memory, and then police officers give them an explanation or a reason for why they might have committed the crime and not remembered it. At the end of the day, some suspects can't tell the difference between their real memories and their imagined memories, and the imagine memories have been shaped by the interrogator's questioning exactly.

There are cases in which suspects are told that they must have split personalities and the good you doesn't remember what the bad you did. There have been cases where kids children have been falsely told that their loved ones on their deathbeds accused their own children of killing them. Then, of course they believe that their parents would never say such a thing unless it was true, so they begin to construct a narrative that accounts for what they think

the parents had happened. The cases in which children confessed to killing their parents, parents confessed to killing their children, husbands confessed to killing their wives, siblings confessed to killing

their siblings. These are these are the hardest ones to why, just because not only are these suspects being accused of one of the worst crimes imaginable in society, not only are they struggling with trying to remember something that they can't remember, but they're suffering from incredible grief, trauma and trauma.

I mean, when someone close to you is is killed, especially if they've been murdered, and you're being interrogated within hours of discovering the body, you are so vulnerable to suggestion, so vulnerable to manipulation, desperate for help, desperate for a friend, And that's exactly what the interrogator wants you to think he is, and that's exactly, of course, what he's not. I mean, you're seeing the distortion of a mind in

the interrogation room. The poisoning of a memory, the twisting of a world, and the creation of a profound injustice. The tactics, they're basically the same across all of these false confession videos that we have. You see a suspect being brought into an interrogation room, confronted with an accusation, and then it's the job of the interrogators to communicate to them, beyond the shadow of a doubt, we know you're guilty, and there's nothing you can say or do

to convince us otherwise. And sometimes it takes hours of relentless accusation to bring this aspect down to a place of hopelessness. Then it's the job of the interrogators to offer confession as an out, as a way to cut your losses somehow and cling to some shred of hope. So you'll see interrogators say things like, look, there are two kinds of people in this world. There's someone who would commit a horrible crime like this one. Maybe someone who's done this before and is going to go do

it again, right, a real monster. We all know what happens to people like that. They're never going to see the light of day again. But then there are other kinds of people in this world, people just like you or me, regular ordinary, good folks just trying to live their life, trying to do the right thing. People who maybe they just make a bad decision, a bad choice, they snap in a moment of stress or frustration. Um, we've all made mistakes. I've made a mistake in my life,

haven't you. And we all know what happens to good people who just make mistakes. Right, people want to help them. If you just made a mistake, here, the judge will look at you and want to help you. The prosecutor will understand you better. You have a reason to hope. So which one is it? Are you the monster or

are you the person who just made a mistake. That's the choice that the person in the interrogation room has, and every single one of us will choose to tell a story of miss ache in the hopes that it will result in help. And of course, when you confessed to that time you didn't commit in the hopes that everyone will want to help you, it doesn't help you

at all. It seals your fate. In October of two thousand and seven, I got a phone call on the other end of the line were several attorneys who I knew and respected, and they said to me, do you know about the case of Brendan Dassy? And I said, yes, of course I know about the case. Stephen Avery was the first person exonerated by DNA evidence in Wisconsin. It was huge news. And then he got charged with the murder of photographer named Teresa Halbach in two thousand and five.

And he had a nephew named Brendan Dassy, a sixteen year old nephew who had confessed to participating in that crime with his uncle Stephen, and both of them had been convicted and sentenced to life. And so I knew the basic background of the case. And they said to me, would you represent Brendan Dassy on appeal? And this is the kind of work that I was called to do. It was the kind of work that I was doing. But I said to them, send me the interrogation videos.

So when the tapes arrived, I looked at them and I decided I was going to get involved. But I wanted a gut check. I wanted someone else to tell me what they saw. I had worked with one student before on a false confession case, and I assigned her to look at these recordings, and that student was Laura, and I writer, that's right. This is about twelve years ago or so, and my last year of law school, I decided on a whim to sign up for your

class Stave on Unwrongful Convictions. Tell the truth. It wasn't You didn't sign up from my class. Thought I was signing up for someone else's class on wrongful Convictions. But I ended up in your class, and I decided to

stick around because it got interesting real fast. Right And about a month in, Steve, you know, you called me into your office and you said, I've just gotten involved in this case out of Wisconsin involving a sixteen year old boy with intellectual limitations who confessed to a murder that I don't think he committed. And you handed me the interrogation videos of Brendan Dascy, the same videos that like eight years later would go on to be featured

in Making a Murderer. And I watched them from start to finish, and my heart broke. We know he did something else? To what else did he do? It? Her extremely extremely important to tell us this. Trust to believe you, because I saw two seasoned adult interrogators questioning a sixteen year old, intellectually limited boy manipulating him into confessing to a murder that he couldn't even describe. Did you see whether cell phone of hers? Oh? Do you know whether

she had a camera? Oh? I couldn't shake the feeling of wanting to jump into the video screen and get myself between Brendan and those interrogators who were manipulating him into confessing to a crime he so clearly didn't commit. That was literally a life changing moment for me. I graduated from law school and within months I was back at Northwestern working alongside Steve to build the Center on Wrongful Convictions and to help represent Brendan and other kids

just like him. Ever since, you know, every once in a while you come across a student, and Laura was a brilliant writer. I mean, let's just be honest, she was a better writer than I was. Gonna get that into writing again, But she really didn't know a lot about the subject of false confession. She was, in a sense, like an uneducated jury member looking at that tape for the first time, and she was hooked from that point on.

By the way, I only told Steve like two years ago that I had mistakenly signed up for his class broke my heart. Um No, I mean, what can I say? This is all totally clean slate for me. I really did know nothing about criminal law, and and what I saw broke everything I thought I knew about our justice system. And as I continued working with Steve over the years, you know, I mean, there's no there's no better mentor on the planet than Steve Drisen. He lifts others around

him up, that's what he does. And um, you know, little by little, as I learned from him, as I absorbed his passion for justice and his seven dedication to speaking for people without a voice, you know, I was the fortunate beneficiary of his mentorship and it's something I'll be forever grateful for. You know, I think it's important to note Laura had a brilliant legal mind, But for me, it was when she met Brendon for the first time and there was a sort of instant connection between the

two of them that sealed the deal. For me. I knew that I needed to keep her on this case whatever I could do, because that connection, the ability to relate to a client under these circumstances, is so important. Well,

I mean that's the thing. It's one thing to watch the videotape, but it's another thing to actually meet the person whose life you saw being dismantled, and to hear the stories of suffering and to understand them not just as a character in a in a in a video or a case, um, but as a full human with a life and a family and friends and dreams and hopes and the kinds of plans that all of us have. When you meet someone like that and you're the lawyer and it's your job to help them, you can't walk

away from that. You just can't do it, um. And I, you know, haven't walked away since. One of the questions people ask us all the time is how we and others like us have the strength to continue fighting these injustices day in and day out. Colleagues in our office, many of them are doing similarly gut wrenching work, and so when our office is functioning at its best, there is a lot of support there. Our office also is often a home and a place of solace for our clients.

So we see some of our success stories walking around and that helps prop us up, you know, but it's it's hard. So for me as a sort of therapeutic way to rid myself of some of these cases, but more importantly to educate others. Was to do two things. To write about them and then to speak publicly and to spread this knowledge around as much as possible. And that's what I've been doing for the past twenty or twenty five years, and that's what Laura has been doing

since she's been involved in this work. Yeah, I mean, you know, the work is hard, and of course it's stressful, but it's the victories that keep us going. Right, There's no better feeling than watching someone you personally have believed in and fought for, usually for years. No better feeling in the world than watching them walk out of prison finally here I mean shod guilty feeling of giving birth, of giving life back, helping this person rediscover and recapture

the life that's been taken unjustly from them. It's an incredible feeling, um, and that's that's what keeps us going. I think the times we're able to do that, those moments will stick with you for the rest of your life. False confession stories are life changing to hear. I mean literally, it was a story of a false confession that changed the course of my life, transformed my own personal trajectory, and that's what I want to do with this podcast.

I want to share these stories because there's no better way to understand the need to reform the system than to hear about these injustices and to get fired up to view this as a call to action. I've been telling these stories for twenty years and trying to reach larger and larger audiences. So for me, that's what this is about. It's another opportunity to try to prevent someone else from suffering where Brendan Dascy has suffered exactly. You know.

One of the amazing things is after making a murder came out, all of a sudden, people around the globe started caring about the criminal justice system for the first time, I mean millions of people. We want to amplify those feelings. We want to keep that energy flowing because it's already starting to result in important reforms around the United States and around the globe. We got to keep that going. These stories are powerful vehicles for justice, and that's why

we're here telling these stories today. We can fix this, but we need to fix it together. The first story we're going to tell in this podcast is the story of a Virginia man named Robert Davis. When I first learned about Robert Davis's case, Laura had just come back into the fall to Northwestern Law School, and she was beginning to show signs of being a rising star in

this field. And one of the things I wanted to do is to not only give her the Robert Davis tapes, but to let her run with them, let her analyze this case as an expert. A lot of people, I think, watched Making a Murderer and thought that's a Manitowa County problem. That's something that just happened to Brandon, And that's not the case. This has happened to hundreds of people around the country that we know of, and surely there are

thousands that we don't know of. And we wanted to start with Robert Davis because Robert's an everyday ordinary guy right comes from a stable family and a good home and got caught up in the same forces of interrogation that Brendon Dancy did and ended up confessing to an equally serious, heinous crime that he, like Brendan, didn't commit. There's no better illustration of the point that we all can be broken by interrogation than Robert Davis's story. So

join us next week and thanks for listening. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to our executive producer Jason Flom and the team at Signal Company Number one Executive producer Kevin Wardace, Senior Producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura ni Rider and you can

follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen. For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction