Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I Ritter and I'm Steve Drissy. In our previous episode, we talked about how the interrogation room works. Today we're gonna show you. Steve and I are going to tell you about a young man named Robert Davis. This is a frightening story of a murder investigation that went horribly wrong.
Roberts was one of the first false confession cases I worked on, and I'll never forget it because it taught me how easily an ordinary person can get caught up in a web of injustice. We first learned about Robert Davis back in two thousand eleven. The story came from a local newspaper out of Charlottesville, Virginia. I was in a space at the time where I was looking for false confessions wherever I could find them, and one day a an article about Robert's case turned up in my
news feed. And when I read the article, I was attracted to it for a number of reasons. One was that there was a recording of the entire interrogation process, and that's sort of the gold that everybody was looking for. Can you see how police manipulate an innocent suspect into confessing to a crime they didn't commit. Yeah, I mean, so many people think that's only for extremely young children, that's only for intellectually limited people. But Robert Davis is
every man. He's us. He's a normal, normal guy. Um in every sense, you know, to the extent there is a normal person. Robert Davis could be your neighbor, he could be your your kid's friend. And there's no better illustration of the power of the interrogation room, the way these techniques work, the way they can transform the innocent into the guilty in a matter of hours than this case. After receiving the interrogation video, I knew I had to get involved in this case, and I knew I had
to work on it with Laura. Robert Davis's case was my first case where I became involved as an expert. The interrogation video, you know, it's one of the most coercive videos I've ever seen. It speaks for itself. It's horrible to watch, and it calls out for action in many ways. Robert's case was an early incarnation of the kind of clemency campaign that Laura and I recently mounted.
In the case of Brendan Dacy, using clips from the interrogation to tell what had happened him, bringing in experts from different fields, including law enforcement, to weigh in on what was wrong with that interrogation, and helping to personalize Robert through the media. Robert Davis's story begins in crows A, Virginia, a middle class suburb of Charlotte's film. Robert lived in a small house with his mom, and they were really close.
In the winter of two thousand three, he was a senior in high school and with graduation just a few months away, Robert was looking forward to the next phase of his life. But on the night of February a terrible tragedy happened on Robert's block. Fire broke out in a neighboring house, the home of a young mother and her three children. The fire department is called. They arrive at the scene. It's a snowy night right snowflakes are coming down fast and furious firefighters get there. They battle
through the snow. They put out the fire, and once the fires subdued, they go upstairs to one of the bedrooms, which is where they find the body of the homeowner. A forty one year old woman named Nola Charles. And when they turned Nola's body over, they saw a knife in her back, and suddenly it became very clear that this fire had been set to cover up a murder. Then the firefighters walked down the hallway to look in
some of the other bedrooms. This is a very small house, so it was just a short walk, and under some debris they found the body of Nola's young son, Thomas Charles, and he had died of smoke inhalation. You know, this was a horrific crime anyway you slice it. You know, the murder of a mother, the death of a small child, stabbing an arson to try to cover up the crime. This is something that would have been unheard of in CROs A and just would have been a complete and
total shock to the entire community. An investigation starts and pretty soon the police identify some likely suspects. It's actually two other teenagers with her names are Rocky and Jessica Fugit. Rocky was nineteen. He was also a senior in high school, like Robert Davis, but he was somebody who had a really troubled past. He'd struggled with drug addiction with alcohol action um and he'd gotten in trouble with the police for doing things like leaving dead birds in church sanctuaries.
His sister, Jessica was fifteen, and she had struggled her whole life with mental illness, delusions, hallucinations. She was somebody who really grappled with her own demons, and she was friends with Nola charles teenage daughter Wendy, but Jessica didn't
like Wendy's mom. Jessica was known to have a grudge against Nola Charles, and so based on all this information, the police picked up Rocky in Jessica within only a few days of this fire, and they bring them down to the police station for questioning, and soon enough the two of them confess that they were involved in the killing of Nolah Charles at the setting of the house
on fire. After they confessed, Jessica led the police to a snowy field behind Nola charles home where she and Rocky had buried an iron bar that had been used to bludgeon Nola Charles before she was stabbed, and that iron bar still had Nolah's DNA all over it, so Jessica was able to lead the police to this new evidence that they didn't know about that corroborated her confession. The confessions true. Rocky and Jessica are guilty. They've never
said otherwise. Case closed, And if this was the end of the story, right, we wouldn't be telling it to you. But it's not the end of the story. Because the police were convinced that Rocky and Jessica had not acted alone, and they each started rattling off a list of names other kids in their high school. The police determined that each one of these other high schoolers had an ironclad alibi until the last name on the list, which is
Robert Davis. Robert had been at home alone asleep, not a very good alibi, so the police decided to bring him in for questioning too. Now, from the get go, Robert Davis and Jessica and Rocky being together in the same space committing a horrific crime maiden no sense at all. These two kids picked on Robert, especially Rocky. The idea that Robert would be with them and would commit a murder was absurd and it didn't take a lot of smarts to see that. But nonetheless, right the police go
and pick up Robert Davis. They bring him in for questioning in the middle of the night. Now, before we hear what happens next, I want to stop for a minute and talk to you about how interrogations work. Obviously, the goal is to get the suspect to confess to the crime, but how does that happen exactly. In the last episode, Steve and I shared some of what we've learned from watching many hours of interrogation tapes. But as shocking as what we described is, you should know that
interrogations used to be even worse. A hundred years ago, it was common for police to use physical violence. Innocent and guilty suspects alike were beaten, hung from winds, and otherwise tortured until they confessed just to escape the suffering. Then, starting in the nineteen forties and fifties, reform was in
the air. Physically abusive practices were thrown out. Police were trained to use words instead of fists, and this change seemed like a progressive one at the time, But now we know that psychological interrogation techniques can also be highly problematic. They're very good at persuading actual criminals to admit guilt, but they can also produce false confessions. The manipulation begins
with the interrogation room itself. Like Steve said, these rooms are designed to make the suspect feel isolated, cut off from all sources of support or help. This is the type of room where police brought Robert Davis on February twenty two, two thousand three, at about one o'clock in the morning. He's by himself, He's eighteen years old, and he's sitting in there alone, not knowing what's happening, terrifying
circum stances. And then all of a sudden, with the video camera rolling, the police come into the interrogation room to officers, big burly guys, and they say to him, murg on Ola, Charles, Thomas, Charles, you let me charge with the attempted murder? How the two Charles daughters, Katie and Windy. Now it's really got serious? Has this right?
And literally? You know when you watched Robert react to being accused of murder, you can feel the fear and the panic and the anxiety just radiating off this video and you could just watch his mind spin. What can I do? What can I do to convince these guys I've got the wrong person. And so Robert says to them, what any of us I think in that situation, would say us out all my life right now that I do not know oh this matter, I had nothing to
do with this. I will tell you the polygraph test right now to prove to you that I did not have nothing to do with this. Interrogation trainers teach law enforcement officers that if a suspect affirmatively asks for a polygraph exam, that that's one indicator of innocence. It's not rock solid proof that somebody is innocent, but it's a powerful statement that they have nothing to fear and that they're willing to put their innocence to the test. And
the officers shut them down. They tell them, no, we don't have the polygraph, even though they actually have one in the room next door. Now, why are they refusing to listen to Robert as he's asserting dozens of times his innocence. Well, that's how officers are trained to interrogate. Interrogation is basically a two staged process. The goal of the first stage, which we've just heard a little bit of,
is to bring the suspect down to hopelessness. This officer is telling Robert that it's pointless to say he's innocent because they already know he's guilty. An interrogator's job is to make the suspect feel trapped using every tool available, and as many people don't realize, these tools can include lying is the worst dust. They say to him, we found your DNA in the house from your skin cells that just shed naturally off you. And of course this
is false, right. The house have got up in flames, there was no forensic evidence whatsoever recovered from the scene. It's a complete lie. But in the United States, police are allowed to lie during interrogations. And again you can see radiating off this videotape the terror in Robert's face. Right, how can this be? I've never been in that home. And then the officer says something I have never seen in any other interrogation, and I've seen thousands of hours
of interrogations. I can't lie about the evidence, Robert. I mean, talk about a whopper. Not only can he lie during the interrogations, but he can lie about the evidence. And he's lying about a lie exactly, talk about a mind fuck. Let's just drop the F word, drop the it's appropriate in this case, right, I mean, this is the psychological game that twists the world for people in the box, and it works. Now, let's take a moment to remember
that Robert is going through this ordeal completely alone. At eighteen years old, he's legally an adult, but even if he were younger, in most states, it's perfectly legal to question a child without notifying their parents or guardian. This is a desperate situation, and like anyone would, Robert asks for the best protector he has. He asks for his mom, but that request is turned around and used to break him down, even for their co operation coation. Then they
do something especially insidious. The lead investigator says that he had just had a phone call with Robert's mother and his mother was crying hysterically on the phone, you know, And this investigator tells Robert, your mom wants you to cooperate. Your mom is saying, Robert, you know, tell the truth, so that I can help you to go on with your life, all right, to save your life exactly. And of course that's all made up, right. He didn't actually
have this conversation with a mother at all. It's horrible to watch the police twist a mother child relationship into a bludgeon to be used in the interrogation room. It's a disgusting employ deeply manipulative, and it's it's very hard to watch. There are other moments that are just you know, classic threats of punishment and promises of leniency and the calculated choice of words on the part of this officer have always intrigued me. And I'm trying to keep you
from the most ultimate punishment and you're not helping. He refuses to say death penalty. He uses the words ultimate punishment as if that's somehow less direct a threat. You know, it's an effort to dance around something that everybody knows is true, which is Robert is fighting for his life
in this interrogation room. The moment when all of these psychological techniques, all of this mind funk finally takes hold and Robert looks up at these officers from the corner of the interrogation room and he says, that's the climax of the entire interrogation. What can I say I did to get me out of this. Once the suspect has been brought down to hopelessness, once their will has been broken, that's when the second stage of interrogation begins. This is
the moment when the suspect is offered a choice. What's going to happen if they don't confess, and what will happen if they do. For Robert, option number one looks pretty terrible. The ultimate punishment or best case scenario ninety years in prison. But on the other hand, the police tell Robert that if he confesses his involvement in the crime, if he cooperates, the judge will go easy on him. He might get his few as five to ten years in prison, and at the very least, they tell him
he'll save his own life. The interrogators have finally achieved their goal to make confessing look like the best choice Robert has. So you can see Robert breaking down. But he has a problem. He's never been in that house, he's never been with these people. He doesn't know who the people are that are accusing him of these crimes. Even if he wants to confess to this cry, he has no idea of what happened. So now the game becomes not convincing Robert that he has to confess, but
rather simply telling him what to say. And so that's how the final few hours of this interrogation are spent. Robert starts out not even knowing who his accomplices are, and they have to give him the names Rocky and Jessica. Okay, so Robert adopts those. Yes, I was there with Rocky and Jessica, and we went in the back door of the home. No. In fact, the evidence of the scene was that the entry had occurred through the front door, so the officers have to correct that. No, Robert, the
three of you went through the front door. Then he's telling a story in which he and Rocky and Jessica are down on the first floor of the home and he Robert stays down there during the attack. But of course Nola Charles body was found in an upstairs bedroom. He's getting it wrong again. So again, no, no, Robert, you were upstairs. We know you were upstairs. You have to say you were upstairs. And this goes on and on and on. I got somebody else, Cluverner, you didn't
know that you that one. And the amazing thing is that while the officers are feeding Robert all of his information, correcting his mistakes. While they're doing it, there's a level of self awareness because they say to him Robert, you realize that if I have to tell you what you did, that defeats the purpose, and then they do it anyway. After Robert creates this confession and seals his own fate, he looks up at these officers and he says, do you think by me telling you all this, it's going
to get me home? And the officer looks at him and says, no, you're not going to go home. You'll see a judge on Monday. And Robert looks at him and says, I'm lying to you. Upon all of this, it is the clearest recantation I have ever seen, and the most immediate. I mean, he hasn't left the interrogation
room yet. He thought he's going to go home, back to his mom, back to his high school life, and instead he is handcuffed and led out of that room to a jail cell, where he's booked for double murder and arson, and where in fact he's staring at decades in prison. Robert Davis couldn't afford to hire a lawyer, so the court appointed one for him. And when that happens, some people get a lawyer, like Lynn Kachinsky, the guy
who botched Brendon Daisy's case in Wisconsin. But for Robert, this was a moment when he finally got some amazing luck because the lawyer appointed to defend him with a man who's dedicated his life to fighting for people without a voice. My name is Steven Rosenfield, been practicing law for forty three years. I'm a civil rights lawyer. Steve Rosenfield is one of my heroes nine two. And when Steve looks at the tape, he sees everything that we've
just talked about. He sees that police officers browbeat a teenager into confessing to a crime that he didn't even know how to describe, and that they were the ones who scripted this confession. Steve threw himself into this case with a passion of a father who saw how worthless this confession was, but who also saw the stakes. The real stakes here were the rest of this eighteen year
old's life. So the job of a good lawyer, when faced with a confession is to try to do everything in their power to keep that evidence out of the trial and to argue that that confession was involuntary and unreliable. Ball and that's exactly what Steve did. Our goal was to keep the confession out because it was coerced and did not reflect what really happened on the night of
the murders. Steve litigated this case, fought hard for Robert hired a psychological expert to talk about the tactics that were used by police officers, and he pointed out all of the highlights that we've been talking about. I was able to call our expert witness, and he went through the kinds of factors that lend themselves towards false confessions. Why a young man, having been threatened with a death sentence might say that he had done something when in
fact he had not. And if you want to understand the problem of false confessions, why this happened so much white people are convicted on the basis of confessions like this one, it's because too many judges believed that the law does not clearly prohibit even threats that someone will face death if they don't confess right, even cases where they have to be told exactly what to say by their interrogators. This judge didn't think the law prohibited that
and allow this confession of evidence. And when that happened, of course, then Robert Davis had a horrible choice to make. Knowing Steve, he was very clear and honest with Robert about what the options were and what the chances are of his being convicted. Confessions are powerful. There was a more than likely chance of him being convicted, and with a conviction surely would have come a very half day sentence.
We were guessing that it would have been a huge number of years or life sentences for the killing of the child and the mother. Do I go to trial and risk being sent to prison for the rest of my life for something I didn't do? Or do I accept an offer that the prosecution has made to me. If I plead guilty to one count of murder, I will be to twenty three years. Robert was eighteen years old when he was arrested, so that would mean that he could get out at the age of forty one.
He would still have a life, half a life, half a life. He could have a family, he could have some future. Right. It's a horrible choice, but it's the kind of choice that defendant's face in courtrooms around the country every single day. Robert chose the deal. He entered a plea of guilty in exchange for those twenty three years horribly difficult, deeply unjust decision that he was forced to make, but also one that I can't fault him for in the slightest I think any of us in
that position would probably do the same thing. But what Steve said to robertuce I will not give up on you. I will continue to investigate this case. Steve Rosenfield promised Robert Davis that he would walk with him, that he would stay with him, he would visit him in prison, he wouldn't forget him. And Steve also said to him, Look, I know you didn't commit this crime, and I know you don't want to say an open court that you did. There is something called an Alfred plea that will enable
you to save face. You've got someone proclaiming their innocence, but who doesn't have the power of resources, ability, legal standing to fight the evidence against them. So they cry, uncle, I'm innocent, but I can't fight this. That's what an Alfred plea is. We've seen it in many other wrongful conviction cases, most prominently in the West Memphis three case. One of the consequences is that you can't sue the
state for violating your civil rights. The Alfred plea disqualifies you from recovering any compensation for the years, sometimes decades, you've spent in prison. It's a tool of injustice. Should not exist, but it does, and that's the tool that was used to secure Robert Davis's twenty three year prisons ends. Steve Rosenfield kept his promise even while Robert served his time. Steve continued pounding the pavement looking for new evidence of
Robert's innocence. He even reached out to family members of Rocky and Jessica Fugit, who were both serving life sentences in prison. Steve never gave up hope that one day Rocky and Jessica might come forward and tell the truth. And then one day that hope arrived in the mail. After about eight years, I received a letter from the boy who said that his conscience was bothering him and would I come down and visit him? And he told us the truth. He told us that he and his
sister were the only two present. He came up with the idea of framing Robert because he thought it could help at his sentencing if the prosecutor was pleased with his cooperation. It was like manna from heaven right the accuser of Robert Davis. We can'ts and says I was wrong. I feel terrible about it. Help me make this right. The only hope that Robert had was if the governor of Virginia would step in and issue a pardon. And
so that's Steve Rosenfield's plan. Let's go to the governor, Let's tell him about Rocky's recantation, and let's highlight all the problems with this interrogation. Now, a local Charlottesville newspaper called The Hook wrote an article about steve clemency campaign for Robert. And that's the article that showed up in your news feed, right, Steve exactly. I read that story and I reached out to Steve and I said, what
can we do to help? And as we talked, I noticed that Steve had hired a psychological expert for Robert's case, but he didn't have an expert who could really look at the interrogation and say, these are the kinds of tactics that lead to coerced and unreliable confessions. I volunteered our assistance in doing that. I had done some expert work,
and I wanted Laura start doing some expert work. So I assigned Laura the lead role in analyzing this interrogation, but we also offered Steve other ways in which to publicize and highlight Robert's plight. I had worked with a number of producers on NBC's Dateline Show, and I reached out to them and I said, this is gold. We have a videotaped interrogation from start to finish. You can actually see on this tape how someone confesses to a
crime they didn't commit. And we also reached out to other experts in the law enforcement field to look at Robert's interrogation and to weigh in on all the things that police officers did wrong. I mean, that's the thing right. We knew that we needed to elevate Robert's story and bring a community of different people to get other to push all in their different ways against a system that's
designed to keep people in prison. We knew that public opinion would rally around Robert Davis once people saw this story. We knew that people inside Virginia would care about the way interrogations were being conducted in their state and would hopefully press the governor to do the right thing in Robert's case. And then one more thing happened more men
from Heaven. It was Jessica fu Jets. I received a letter from her saying that she knew that she had done wrong by framing Robert and that she wanted to make amends for that. That's when we started to really believe there was a chance of getting Robert Davis out of prison. I met with Governor mccaulliff. We talked for
about forty minutes. I suggested to him that he grant at least a conditional pardon and then revisit the case in a year, and that was the grounds under which Governor mccaulliff agreed to release Robert, deciding that with the statements of the two kids, there was a much better likelihood that he would have been found not guilty. That's been twelve years of incarceration for Roberts and suddenly, a
few days before Christmas, he's allowed to go home. It's an incredible moment where you can you can hear the joy in his voice and in his mother's voice as they embrace for the first time after Robert is freed. It was beautiful, just beautiful. I'm home, like I can reach out and not touch nothing. I don't see no gates now, I don't see no fences. As a part of dateline documenting Robert's release, they go and speak to the chief of the Albemarle County Police Department and they
asked him how he feels about Robert Davis's release. I will say this, I believe that the confession is an unreliable confession. Using terms like the ultimate punishment, length of the interview, those kinds of things would be clearly not
done today. He was embarrassed by what he saw, and this was somebody from the same police department, um in the same community, reflecting back on what he saw when he looked at the tape, and with that admission of a mistake, the Governor of Virginia a year later granted Roberts that full pardon based on actual innocence. He exonerated him. Robert and I have maintained a close relationship all of
these years. He's just such a great kid. I called the kid mid thirties now, he has an extended family, wonderful friends. He's highly thought of in the community. He's a sweet guy with a big heart. He's very optimistic about the future. And this has been in spite of having spent his form out of years in prison, So by and large he uses every day to enjoy and put behind him some of that ugly past. That's the thing.
I mean. We'd watched on that interrogation video Robert be transformed from just an innocent member of the community into a confessed murderer, and now thirteen years later we could watch him be transformed back and it was a beautiful thing to watch, the retelling of the story the right way. Hey, Robert and Laura, how are you doing. I'm doing well. How are you? I'm good, I'm good. You just got off work today, Hunt, what are you doing for a job you day? I'm doing electric work, working for the
five days. Amazing, fantastic. I heard you got engaged recently to your congratulations so much. And she's got a daughter. I here, so you're the stepdad. That's a lot of responsibility. It is a lot of responsibility, but I definitely enjoy it great. The one question we're always asking our work is why would anyone confess to a crime that they didn't commit? And when you watch the video of Robert Davis, it's a perfect answer to the question, why would anyone
confess to a crime they didn't commit. The answer is because they're interrogated like this. When you're fighting a wrongful conviction, what you are doing, at the end of the day is trying to rewrite the story that's been told about your clients. You're rewriting history, right, You're changing the legacy of what happened. And the story that led to the conviction is a story of guilt, a story of harm, of damage, of pain, and of someone who at the end of the day deserves to be locked up in
a cage for the rest of their life. That's the story that when you fight a wrongful conviction, that you have to change. Thanks so much for joining us. I hope you'll come back next week when we'll be telling the story of Chicago's own Central Park jogger case, known as the Dicks Moore five. The Dicks Moore five were a group of teenage boys who confess to the rape and murder of their own classmate, and we're convicted despite
some of the strongest evidence of innocence. Imaginable 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 Drizen. 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