Chicago: The false confession capital

In the case of Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr and James Harden, DNA found inside the 14-year-old victim Catteresa Matthews was also retested, and a match was made to Willie Randolph, a 34-year-old convicted rapist, with 39 arrests.

Peter Neufeld says prosecutors rejected the DNA evidence and instead came up with an unusual theory to explain it all away.

Peter Neufeld: They suggest perhaps after the kids killed her this man wandered by and committed an act of necrophilia.

Byron Pitts: Necrophilia. A lot of our viewers won't know what that means.

Peter Neufeld: Having sex with a dead person.

Anita Alvarez: It's possible. We have seen cases like that.

Byron Pitts: Possible?

Anita Alvarez: It is. We've seen it in other cases.

Byron Pitts: It's possible that this convicted rapist, wandered past an open field, and had sex with a 14-year-old girl who was dead?

Anita Alvarez: Well, there's all kinds of possibilities out there, and what I'm saying is that I don't know what happened.

Bob Milan: People don't like to admit they made a mistake. But we need to do that. Our job as a prosecutor--isn't to win, our job is to get it right.

Former prosecutor Bob Milan says that prosecutors need to put the same sense of urgency into exonerations as they once did into prosecutions.

Bob Milan: When you have physical evidence, it doesn't lie. So when you have the DNA on a girl from some guy with a history of sexual attacks that pretty much tells you where you're going.

Byron Pitts: Not the people who gave the confessions?

Bob Milan: No.

By now 10 defense attorneys were focusing on the new DNA. Working with them was a third-year Northwestern Law School student named Katie Marie Zouhary. She was assigned to re-examine the original confessions and her research helped change the case.

Katie Marie Zouhary: I think when you look at a confession on a piece of paper, a court reported confession, a handwritten confession, it seems like all the pieces are in place.

Katie Marie Zouhary: But what you don't see is the 17-year-old in the room by himself with the police officers, what you don't see is that confession next to the other confessions. So you're able to see that these things don't match up. And it's not just a "one of these things is not like the others," it's "all of these things are not like the others."

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[tonyrigatoni]

The police and prosecutors involved in this (and others) should be stripped of their possessions, prosecuted and sentenced to serve out the remainder of these sentences..

Where I come from, they'd be eating dirt.

[redhotastra]

Gosh, I hope you-all aren't thinking that this is something that ONLY happens in the Windy City. This kind of crap still goes on in most cities around the U.S.

[judymar14]

Whether this has anything to do with the article it is still something the public needs to know before passing judgement on the police...

Chicago has to be one of the largest cities that police brutality is yelled when they do do their job. Black neighborhoods are the first to pickett the police aren't doing enough. When they try to, even shooting a criminal caught red handed, fleeing the scene, the neighborhood citizens cry police brutality. "He didn't have to shoot him, he wasn't hurting anyone". "He was a good boy, went to church every Sunday". One of the best was when a man was in a stand off with the police and pointing a gun, "They didn't have to shoot him, the gun wasn't even loaded".

There has to be more innocent victims in Chicago than any other city shot in drive-bys, usually children playing in their front yard. Again, if the shooter is caught, which is pretty often, the cry goes out he couldn't have done it, insisting the cop be charged with murder, even though they know the one shot is in a gang fighting with another gang for territory to sell drugs. There were more killings in Chicago's south/westside this last summer than ever before. 80% or more were gang related.

Before the early 90s police were known to beat a confession out of someone. That was put a stop to and several cops who were already retired were brought to trial and found guilty on cases of coerced confessions. Many who were guilty were releasted from prison because of this.

Few cops are going risk his/her job/retirement in the 21st century by beating or using coerced tactics to get a confession by an innocent person even though the pressure is on him/her to close the case. "Damned if you do, damned if you don't". This is Chicago's police force when trying to do their job in many parts of the city.

[josephp5]

The trouble with your comment is that none of what you say applies in this specific case. These men were shown to be innocent of this terrible murder, yet the police coerced them into falsely confessing. Your claims (even if they are true which I doubt) that police are just doing their job and are frequently falsely accused of brutality doesn't have anything to do with this particular travesty of justice.

[nygurl1]

You sound like a mouthpiece for the cops!
No matter what you think, the cops were wrong and they should be punished.
The city will now have a fun time when the lawsuits start!

[forgivethemfather]

I am friends with a man who used to be on the Chicago Police Force. After a few years he quit because he couldn't stomach the corruption, stupid bigotry, and vicious cruelty he witnessed his coworker cops engaging in. He never had a good thing to say about them or the system, and he was born and raised in Chicago. After that experience, he wanted nothing to do with being a cop anywhere so he followed a different career path.

[FoolKiller]

"One reason may be the way police go about questioning suspects."
Ya think???

[the_edge_of_chaos]

its mind numbing that someone like anita alverez could be in a position of power like this and be so incredibly stupid and racist. they had DNA evidence from BOTH cases showing someone else VERY likely committed these crimes. Id like to see what her attitude would be if it was HER son being charged. she needs to be IMMEDIATELY removed from this job.

[Iconoblaster]

She isn't even unusual. States have fought in court (as Virginia did) to prevent DNA testing of evidence in a case where they had already executed the accused... the technology came up that could have proven what the family of the accused said all along, and the state brought a lawsuit to prevent it ever being used on the evidence. That evidence was eventually destroyed by the state, rather than risk it ever being tested. Texas fought a case where the convicted man could prove he was factually innocent, and hid behind the argument that actual innocence of the crime is NOT a legal basis for appeal. And they prevailed with that argument. I'm not making any of this up.

[ewcollins]

I found Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez to be terrifying.

[judymar14]

Chicago needs a terrifying states attorney.

[nygurl1]

They need an intelligent States Attorney!
She is so biased she is totally useless!
She does explain, by her comments, how innocent people were sent to jail!
It does not explain the mentality of the people that hired her or any of the lying cops!

[MichaelfromLondon]

Welcome to the American Justice System....

This really makes you think, how many innocent people are behind bars - 7 teenage boys sent to prison, just to think how much money was used to first convict these boys, then to keep them locked up for all those years, and they are all innocent....politicians and bureaucrats like Anita Alvarez - the American people are allowing their country to be destroyed from within when they allow people like Anita Alvarez to represent them....think about her statement on Necrophilia:
Having sex with a dead person.

Anita Alvarez: It's possible. We have seen cases like that.

Byron Pitts: Possible?

Anita Alvarez: It is. We've seen it in other cases.

Sure, Anita Alvarez has a nice office and a large pay cheque to go with it, but it is people like her, working in the US government - the very decision makers who are responsible for what is happening to America today - these people are locking up innocent people and allowing the real crooks to PILLAGE America...greed, corruption and power is the fuel for these CORRUPT elected officials....it is so sad those boys spent all those years in jail - then to see what Anita Alvarez had to say!


Michael

[tmittelstaed]

Years ago the Mafia in Chicago would take care of people like Anita Alvarez. For her to get on national TV and say this kind of thing is beyond the pale. She needs to be fired immediately.

[nygurl1]

I think 6 months in prison would do her a lot of good!

[MiaGIotta]

The only way to fix this is to make the cops, prosecutors and judges pay restitution to the victims, 1/2 of their salaries for every single year that person was falsely imprisoned.

Think that wouldn't solve the problem?

You ruin somebody's life, yours should be ruined. Pure and simple.

[InterestingWorld_Info]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%ADsli_Gu%C3%B0j%C3%B3nsson

http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Interrogations-Confessions-Handbook-Policing/dp/0470844612/ref=la_B001H6N9YA_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355122729&sr=1-1

[InterestingWorld_Info]

60 minutes should interview the Icelander Gisli Hannes Gudjonsson, CBE (born 26 October 1947) is a Professor of Forensic Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry of King's College London. He is an internationally renowned authority on suggestibility and false confessions whose expert testimony was the basis for the convictions of the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four being overturned. He created the Gudjonsson suggestibility scale to measure how susceptible someone is to coercion during an interrogation.