Tagged: interrogation

They’re Not on Your Side

When we were kids, the police were the good guys.  They were who you could turn to if you got lost.  They were the ones who protected us from the bad guys.  They were on our side. When we were kids, of course, we learned a simplified version of reality....

Why Innocent People Confess — Update

Last month, we wrote a piece here on reasons why innocent people wind up confessing to crimes they didn’t commit.  It’s a horrible thought, yet it happens far too often.  (For tips on defending cases involving a confession, see our CLE lecture over at West Legal Ed Center.) Anyway, there’s a...

Temporary Incomprehension

The blawgosphere was atwitter recently over that Kentucky murder trial where the defendant had confessed, but claimed it was a false confession, due to “sleep-deprived psychosis” from drinking too much coffee.  The jury didn’t buy it (here’s a short article on it). Did that case remind anyone else of this...

Why Innocent People Confess

It should come as no surprise to anyone with any experience in criminal law that perfectly innocent people will sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit.  Perhaps they were in a suggestible state, and the police led them to believe they’d done it.  Maybe they were broken by the...

Can Yoo Be Sued?

In the early days of the War on Terrorism, the Bush administration wanted to know what interrogation techniques were legal.  So it asked the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel for a memo on what could and could not be done to prisoners.  Staff lawyer John Yoo was tasked with doing...

How the Court Should Rule in Shatzer

The Supreme Court heard a very important argument this week in the case of Maryland v. Shatzer. It was one of those situations where the oral argument makes a huge difference in the outcome of the case. We read the briefs earlier this month, and remarked to colleagues that both...

Thought Police?

Guilt or innocence, one might say, is all in the mind. After all, there are very few crimes that can be committed without the requisite mens rea, or mental state. If we’re going to punish someone, their acts cannot have been mere accident. We want to know that they had...