#193 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - SPECIAL UPDATE

These kinds of lies are known risk factors for false confessions. But here's the breaking news. Someone is finally doing something about it. For the first time in US history, bills have just been introduced in three states to prohibit police from lying during interrogations. It's happening right now in New York, Oregon, and my home state Illinois. I support these bills, and

I hope you will too. In fact, we pulled together today's special episode just so I could introduce you to three heroes who were working together to make sure we make change. I'll be joined first today by New York Exonerie Marty tank Cliff. He falsely confessed to murdering his own parents when he was just seventeen. Then you'll hear from Illinois State Senator Robert Peters. He's the sponsor of Illinois Senate Bill twenty one twenty two, which would ban

deception during interrogation. Finally, you'll hear from an old friend of mine, Dave Thompson. He's an experienced interrogator and police trainer who's with us all the way in our fight to end false confessions. I'm going to start with our guest, Marty tank Cliff. Murty woke up one fall morning and found his dad in another room, severely beaten and barely alive. Unbeknownst to Marty at the time, his mom had all been attacked in a different part of the house. In fact,

she had already died because of her injuries. Like anyone would do, Marty called the police. But that's when an already terrible situation got even worse. So thank you so much for joining us, all three of you today. This is such an important topic and I'm so glad we're here to talk about this. I want to start things off by hearing from my friend Marty tank Cliffe. Right, Marty, you've got one of the most incredible stories of wrunful conviction and false confession that I've ever heard and lies

about the evidence are at the heart of it. So let's bring our listeners back. You're seventeen years old, You're living with mom and dad in Long Island, New York, and what happens from there. September seven, nineteen eighty eight, was supposed to be my first day of my senior of high school, and the night before, my father held a high stakes poker game with his business partner, Jerry

Steuerman and others. And on September seventh, I woke up found that my house was unlocked, lights were on, and I walked through the house and discovered my father bleeding in his office chair, which is where the poker game happened the night before. Unbeknownst to you and your mom was in another room and had actually been blunted to death herself. I discovered my mom after that, but I knew my father was alive because I performed first aid.

I could hear him breathing. I called nine one one, and shortly thereafter the police showed up, and I wanted to go to the hospital, but law enforcement wanted information who they thought was responsible. And you know, we all said, my family, my friends, everybody said, Jerry Stuhman. Jerry Stuhman, and he happened to be there the night before. Tell me a little bit about what happened the night before. You've mentioned this. So the night before there was a

high stakes poker game that included Jerry Stuhman. And Jerry Stuhman was my father's business partner, who, unbeknownst to me at that time, had threatened to cut my father's throat out, his tongue out weeks before my father started demanding money back from Jerry Steuerman, and it was so bad that my father had told the family attorney, Jerry's not gonna fuck with me because I know where the bones are buried.

I didn't know any of that back then. The only thing I knew was that there were some problems with Jerry Steuerman. And I knew there were no problems with me or my parents. I mean, we had a loving relationship, grew up in a great neighborhood, great family, traveled everything with my parents, so I knew there was no problems with us. But the police, I guess, weren't so sure. They brought it down to police headquarters and what happens. I really wasn't clothed, I was barefoot, was wearing shorts

in a sweatshirt, and I was separated from family. I wasn't brought to the hospital. I was driven forty five minutes away by Detective James McCready. I was brought up to police headquarters in a windowless room that had a desk, empty file cabinet, two metal chairs, no phone, no windows, and you know, the questioning started, you know, where were you the night before? Who do you think was responsible?

And that seemed to go on forever until there was a point where McCready left the room and he left the door open and you could hear him saying, really, great, really, that's amazing, that's great news. Wait till I tell Marty. And he came back in and he said, Marty got great news and bad news. He said. The great news is they pumped your father full of adrenaline. He woke up and he said, you committed the murders. You attacked your mother and your father. Just tell us you did that,

because your father just said you did that. I mean, they continued by saying, listen, Marty, we have your hair and your mother's hands. Just tell us what we want to hear. Your father would want that. That's incredible. How did you react to those lies, Marty? My initial guard response was like, I'll take a lot detector, like I

didn't do anything. But it also came to the point where it was a kind of I guess you could say, like the floor under me just fell out, and kind of was like, well, if my father said I did it, maybe I did. Because my father's never lied to me, and police aren't supposed to lie to you, So I know I didn't do anything, but you're my father's saying that it was me and the copter saying was made. But I was brought up to trust the police, believe in them, and brought up to that they're not going

to lie to you. They're they're your friends, they're gonna help you exactly. In fact, your dad was police commissioner, wasn't it. He was the police commissioner for the incorporated village of belt Hare where we live. And you start to doubt your own memory because you so trust the word of these authority figures, right, these police officers who are telling you what another authority figure your dad supposedly said without a doubt without a doubt. You kind of

start going back and forth in your head. You kind of say, wait a minute, I know I didn't do anything, but they're saying I did. Screaming in your face, yelling at you, saying you know, Marty, we know you did this,

and your father is saying you did this. Some people, Marty is some people that I've talked to, say, you know what, if I was being interrogated, right, if I was inside the interrogation room and I was innocent and police lied to me, it would be so easy to see through those lies, right, to not be influenced by those lies? Is it so easy when it's you in the moment? No farthest thing from that. I mean, you know, I wasn't somebody who was thirty who had lived a life.

I was a kid. I was a kid who was raised to trust your family and cops, and in this situation, one of them failed me. And it's so eventually you confessed. Eventually they said I confessed. What the reality was is that they didn't record anything, they ordered tape anything, and

everything they said I said proved forensically to be wrong. Right, But you gave the series of statements that eventually the officers said amounted to a confession, right, and that was a huge part of the evidence that was used against you to secure your conviction in the murder of your own parents, which you ended up serving seventeen years in prison for before being exonerated. I mean, it's an incredible story, and it's one in which lies about the evidence are

at the absolute bottom. I just want to know, Marty, when afterwards did you begin to realize that you had been lied to? There were two points for me. One was when I had an opportunity to make a phone call to a family member and the family member said, did you tell them that you did it? And I was like, they made me. That was the only thing I could say that they're doing that phone call. But hours later, when I met with a family member and

an attorney, I went into much more detail. And back then somebody, you know, one of them said, we were afraid of this because they knew what Suffolk County's history was, and they knew that once I was isolated, that this was bound to happen. Wow, and what end? What was it like to understand that you've been lied to you by these authority figures right by these police officers. When you grew up trusting, I mean back then, it was still this disbelief. I mean it was almost like I

was on Twilight Zone. There was no way that I could be waking up that should have been one of the best days of my life to literally turning into a living hell. That destroyed my life, my family's life, the community for you know, for years, and nobody should ever go through this. I mean, this is I mean just because they lied to me. You know, if you didn't lie, if you did your job, if you told the truth, if you would have just electronic you recorded where went out in that room, I may not have

spent almost eighteen years in prison. Senator I want to bring you in. No, this is Senator Robert Peters from Illinois. Yeah, I mean, I guess the best way to react to this is what happened to Marty's damn shame and I'm sorry that you had to go through that, Marty. And what is so painful is that it's not surprising. We

see this all the time. They look at you and they say, you're young, you don't really know any better, You're in a state of crisis, and they, instead of caring about figuring out what happened in this moment of pain and trauma. They became assured of their own answer. And so you know, the bill that you know I'm carrying in the Senate is built off of the fact

that countless people roughly the same age as Marty or younger. Now, this happens to older folks, but the reason why young folks are targeted is because there's a power dynamic play and a limitation and how many rights you actually have or understand to have, And it's it's not about people's safety, and it's not about trying to solve or figure out the trauma that's happened. And at some point it becomes purely about winning the game in which you've solved something supposedly.

You know, Senator I think you're exactly right, Marty. You spoke about County, New York, right where this happened to you. But of course we know of hundreds and hundreds of cases of false confession around the country, one hundred alone in Illinois, one hundred and fifty when you combine Illinois and New York, and those numbers are all in all probability, just the tip of the iceberg. Because these cases are

just now starting to come to light. Marty, you've heard the Senator talk about the need to ban lives, about the evidence in the interrogation room. Does what he said resonate with you? First of all, thank you Senator for trying to push this legislation through because more, Marty, Tank does have to be protected. And you know, I think about how challenging it was for me, and I think about all the young men and women in minority communities, the abuse that I went through. I can't even fathom

what someone else goes through in a regular basis. It's me This legislation has to be passed. I mean universally, it has to be passed. So at this point I want to bring in my good friend Dave Thompson, who's here with us as well. Dave is the president of wick Lander Zulaski. You train police across the country and across the globe, and you've also conducted a few interrogations yourself. Dave,

how many would you say you done? Yeah, quite a few hundred interrogations, I'd say, Laura, kind of across multiple sectors and across multiple jurisdictions. Wow, So there really is no one better for me to ask, Ben, do cops really need to lie during interrogations? No, there's other methods that they can be trained in which which we can discuss the law needs to change, and we also know it increases the fear of innocent people like Marty just

just describe. And for detectives who are investigating somebody who is a guilty subject who does confess to a crime, but they used a tactic like this, all that does is potentially contaminate that confession and maybe jeopardize the reliability of a true confession as well. So it's really a very high risk, low reward strategy. Okay, So if police officers don't need to lie, then why do they do it? I think the simple answer is that's how they've been trained,

and that's what they're allowed to do. It's not investigators, for the most part, doing something that they feel is unethical or unwarranted. If they're doing something that they've used for decades, they've been trained in that technique and maybe unaware of the negative implications as technique has on both innocent subjects and to the reliability of a true confession.

So if we look at what's the root cause, what's the reason that we lie about evidence in the first place, and it's because if that evidence doesn't exist, we have this bias or this belief that the person sitting in front of us is the guilty party, but the evidence isn't there, which means we don't have enough to actually prove they're the guilty party. So we rely on this fictitious piece of information to persuade the suspect to tell us their guilty versus let the investigation stand on its own.

And even furthermore, you know, innocent people they hear that there's this perspective of evidence. Right if I said, in an arson case, you know, we have video footage of you starting the fire, and that doesn't exist, an innocent person might think, well, I hope they have video footage because it'll clear my name. So almost that fictitious presentation of evidence incentivize as an innocent person just say fine, yeah I did it, because they hope that that evidence

will prove that they didn't. Just to kind of find out that evidence doesn't exist in the first place. So I think Marty brought up one fact that investigators said, hair right, his hair in his mother's hand. And so let's say in a confession, somebody like Marty says, well, yeah, I guess you know, she must have grabbed my hair

during whatever whatever happened. Well, now the subject giving that information in a confession, did they say that because they were actually part of the crime they remember that happening, or did they say that because that's what the investigators fact fed to them during the interview. So they're just agreeing to it. When you have somebody of a youthful age, they're looking at how do I escape this immediate situation

and get back to safety. And that's what results in the false confession is I have faith that this evidence is going to prove my innocence to be true. Let me say whatever I need to get the hell out of the room and get back to safety and let the lawyers figure it out afterwards. Unfortunately, we see what that has turned into. I would imagine that when people sign up to be police officers, right when they joined

police forces, they want to be the good guys. And then at a certain point, police officers who become interrogators learn that as a part of their job they're expected to lie. Are there some cops out there who maybe aren't come with them? First of all, the goal in most investigators are well intended to try to represent a victim, or a victim's family, or whoever might have been harmed

in one of these cases. And so when you go into an investigation or an interrogation and you have this predisposed belief of who the guilty suspect is, and you've been trained that lying about evidence is a strategical way to get to a confession, then yeah, that's that's what

a lot of officers are focused on. However, I think there's an overwhelming discomfort, especially with new detectives, to be put into a position where their own integrity is in jeopardy, where they know, if I lie to somebody about the evidence today, what does that do for my credibility tomorrow. I think there's a overwhelming support of law enforcement for more clear direction and distinction about what should be done so we can still solve cases, but do it in

the most ethical and scientifically based way. Tell me, Dave, what does an interrogation look like if you take away lies about the evidence, it looks like asking open ended questions, a conversation where the investigator doesn't have a goal of a confession but has a goal of obtaining actionable and reliable information less of having confirmation bias and tunnel vision, non coercive evidence based interview methods that are progressively gaining

traction across the United States. Senator, I want to go back to you for just one minute. You've introduced this bill, of course, in your home state of Illinois, and you're in great company because there are similar bills that have been introduced in New York, where Marty is from, and in Oregon as well, other bills that would ban lying about the evidence in the interrogation room. What does it mean to you to be part of this national ground

swell for change? Wow? So I think that I always think, like when we try to make changes to something systemach, you can't just go it alone. And so to me, it's not just having it be Illinois, New York, or organ but to see it across the country. Right. But I also think it's just important that if we can do this in Illinois, a complex state, same with organ, same with New York, other states should try to follow and do the same thing. I think that's well said.

And Dave in how many states is deception to use during interrogations? I mean the Supreme Court law is allowing it to be used across the United States. We've seen a lot of jurisdictions starting to move forward away from that proactively. Right, we can start training officers now, and we have been on methods that you don't need to use those tactics, and we start to look outside the United States. You know, the UK has banned deception for

decades in their interview models. Canada has been moving away from it. So this is not a new problem by any means. It's just finally a solution to that problem. I think it is. It's a free, groundbreaking solution to this problem. Senator, you have introduced Illinois Senate Bill twenty one twenty two, which would band deception in the interrogation room. Where do we go from here? How can people get involved in supporting your effort to band deception. Let's put

pressure on legislators. Let's shine a light on Illinois. There's a model for rare live whether that's Montana or Florida. Take this bill as piece of model legislation and say that this is something that needs to happen in your states. So let me repeat that Montana or Florida should have their own version of this bill. Absolutely absolutely. People can follow you on social media. Senator Robert Peters is your name.

They can follow me at Laura and I Writer on Twitter or Instagram for tips on how to get involved in supporting the Illinois effort as well as the crucial New York and Oregon efforts as well. Marty, I want to let you close this out. You've been extraordinarily successful despite all of these odds stacked against you in your life. Since your exoneration, You've become a practicing attorney, you have become an adjunct professor. Can you become an inspiration for change?

And I think that's what we're talking about today on this podcast. What does it mean to you that your story can and has inspired people like Dave, people like Senator Peters to fight for real change. I just want to say two things very quickly. One is that when you interroget an innocent person, you get a false confession, you arrest them. Do you've allowed the criminal party to

remain free to commit additional crimes on our community? And you know this bill should be highlighted that it's not just about the coercion, it's really about the safety of everyone involved. And you know, if my voice can help make change somewhere, then you know, maybe my suffering was meant to be somewhere. As weird as it sounds, but there really shouldn't be any more Marty tank clifts, there are.

You know, very few people get to suffer the way I have and be able to achieve what I've been able to achieve, you know, And for me, it's about education. It's about retraining and refocusing everyone's perspectives on the system. And thank you to Senator Peters and Dave Thompson. We're making a difference. And you know, if we can make a change in Illinois, we can do it universally and

we can protect our kids. And just to make the record clear, I'm an adjunct professor at Georgetown not Law School, and I teach the class that Georgetown is nickname making an exonoree where we use undergraduate students to reinvestigate cases. And what's amazing is some of those students have been through tragedies that we've spoken about today, either directly or indirectly. And to me, that's the next generation of freedom fighters for us. Well. Inspired by you, Marty very much, and

by you Senator Peters and by you Daves. Thank you all so much for joining us today. It has been a fascinating conversation. Best of luck with everything that each one of you is doing to change the world, make a difference, like Marty says, and most importantly, make sure that we're advancing this fight against wrongful convictions. Thank you

all right, take care, guys. That's all the time we have, but I hope you get just how important it is to support Illinois State Senate Bill twenty one twenty two. There will be a vote on the bill Friday, April sixteenth, so we need you to weigh in now. Sign up to get involved at Innocence Project dot org, slash pledge, or tweet your support to the Illinois Senate Democrats at ill send deems that's I L S E N D E MS to learn how to support similar efforts in

New York, Oregon and other states. You can also follow me at Laura and I Rider on Instagram or Twitter. Be well everyone, and thanks again to our guests. Wrongful Conviction and False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one. Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flam and Kevin Wardace. This episode was produced by Riva Goldberg and Connor Hall.

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