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False Confessions

By Steve Hall

"What causes people to give false confessions?" is the title of a Chicago Tribune report by Lisa Black and Steve Mills, Tribune reporters.  It appeared in the Sunday edition.After 14 hours of interrogation in a small, windowless room, Kevin Fox simply gave up. He knew he hadn't sexually assaulted or murdered his 3-year-old daughter, but police had rejected his requests for a lawyer and told him they would arrange for inmates to rape him in jail, according to court records. The distraught father later testified that detectives also screamed at him, showed him a picture of his daughter, bound and gagged with duct tape, and told him that his wife was planning to divorce him, the records show. Fox finally agreed to a detective's hypothetical account of how his daughter, Riley, died in an accident, thinking investigators would realize that the phony details didn't match up with the evidence, his lawyer said...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on July 12, 2010 (boomark / email).