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“ABCNEWS.com : Why Would@Pirnocent Man Confess? © Page 2 of 4 Heroin Was confessions. * Kickball N ; i . . With Adults Of the 110 exonerations due to post-conviction DNA evidence in recent years, 27 included confessions as evidence, according to the non-profit legal clinic Innocence Project. "That number is really shocking,” said Richard Ofshe, a leading expert on false confessions and University of California at Berkeley professor. Systemwide, no one Sear knows how often phony confessions occur. | "In my wildest fears | do not imagine the number can be 20 percent. On the other hand, | [x] Ins if that's the result to come out of the Innocence Project, that's really scary," Ofshe said. ‘cr Indeed, dubious confessions have surfaced in several recent exonerations, reopened cases and police abuse lawsuits. The infamous Central Park Jogger case, thought long solved, will go to court again in October even though five teens who confessed already served their sentences. Now, a convicted rapist-murderer says he committed the brutal 1989 rape and beating of a New York City woman. In an interview to air on ABCNEWS’ Primetime on Thursday, the man, Matias Reyes, says no one else was involved: "I was alone that night.” x In Detroit last month, Eddie Joe Lloyd was freed from prison after 17 years for the brutal 1985 rape and murder of a teenage girl. Despite the lack of physical evidence, Lloyd was convicted based heavily on a taped confession he made to Detroit police while he was in a mental hospital. a Aman who spent more than 15 years in prison before DNA tests exonerated him filed a civil rights complaint earlier this month in Norristown, Pa., against the prosecutors and two former detectives who took his confession. Why Admit Something You Didn't Do? Falsely admitting to a crime may seem unfathomable to those who have never stepped inside a police interrogation room. Experts say the young, old, mentally or emotionally disabled, and people with substance abuse problems are particularly vulnerable to coercion. In Corethian Bell's case, he suffers from mild retardation and has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Grieving his mother's death made him even more susceptible to police tactics, his lawyers say. "| have read a number of police interrogation manuals and it's clear they've become sophisticated in playing on psychological weaknesses. That's their business, trying to get a confession,” said Peter Brooks, a Yale University professor and author of Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. "An effectively carried out police interrogation is well-designed to induce a response." But under certain circumstances, police techniques could wear down many who may initially believe in the power of their innocence, experts say. During interrogations, police usually create stress and a sense of urgency. Suspects are often isolated in rooms especially designed for questioning, and may be deprived of food or sleep. "The goal is to break the suspect down,” said Saul Kassin, a Williams College psychology professor who has studied false confessions for more than 20 years. "You want the suspect to want to get out of there.” With stress levels elevated, police confront the suspect, accusing him or her of the crime. Often, police falsely represent evidence, perhaps by telling the suspect that his fingerprints were found at the scene, when they weren't, or that he failed a lie detector test or his friends gave him up. Courts have upheld such police deception of suspects. file://G:\falseconfessions020925 html 9/25/02