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>From the Chicago Tribune
Coercive and illegal tactics torpedo scores of Cook County murder cases
By Ken Armstrong, Steve Mills and Maurice Possley, Tribune staff reporters
December 16, 2001
Substituting interrogation for thorough investigation, police in Chicago and
Cook County have repeatedly closed murder cases with dubious confessions
that imprison the innocent while killers go free.
In the first investigation of its kind, the Tribune examined thousands of
murder cases filed in Cook County since 1991 and found at least 247 where
police obtained incriminating statements that were thrown out by the courts
as tainted or failed to secure a conviction.
Some crimes offer little in the way of physical evidence or eyewitnesses and
would go unsolved were it not for a confession. But the newspaper's
investigation revealed case after case in which confessions were
untrustworthy or unconvincing in the eyes of jurors and judges. And these
cases only hint at the depth of the problems involving one of law
enforcement's most potent tools.
Police have obtained confessions from men who, according to records, were in
jail when the crime occurred. They have obtained confessions refuted by DNA
evidence. They have obtained confessions that contradicted the facts of the
crime.
Two teenagers confessed to shooting a man from across the street. The bullet
was fired point-blank. Another teenager confessed to shooting a man
point-blank. The bullet was fired from a distance. Yet another teenager
confessed to stabbing a woman. The autopsy found no stab wounds. In all,
eight defendants confessed in those three cases. All eight were acquitted.
Police have obtained scores of confessions from suspects especially
vulnerable to making false admissions of guilt. Children ages 7, 8 and 9
have confessed, only to have the charges dropped. Mentally retarded men with
IQs in the 40s, 50s and 60s have confessed, only to be acquitted.
All but 11 of the 247 cases were handled by the Chicago Police Department,
which relies heavily on confessions but has seen an embarrassing number of
these prosecutions fall apart.
Earlier this month, after DNA tests exonerated them, four men convicted of
the 1986 rape and murder of Rush University medical student Lori Roscetti
had their cases thrown out. Two of them, Marcellius Bradford and Calvin
Ollins, had confessed to Chicago police.
At the time, Ollins was a 14-year-old boy with mild mental retardation and
no prior criminal record. His explanation of why he confessed echoes the
accounts of scores of defendants interrogated by Chicago police.
"They threatened to do things and got me thinking they could do them,"
Ollins said. "One said he would smack me in the mouth if I didn't cooperate.
Another said they would put me in jail. . . . Then they told me I would go
home if I gave them what they wanted.
"I thought I knew the streets a little bit, but it turned out I was just a
little kid who didn't know nothing. . . . They got me good."
In a postscript written many times, Chicago police are searching anew for
Roscetti's killer, 15 years after her body was found.
As evidence of guilt, confessions hold extraordinary power. But the
country's mounting number of provably false confessions -- many unraveled by
DNA evidence -- has undercut the belief of some law enforcement officials
that nothing short of torture could persuade someone to admit a crime he did
not commit.
In the 247 cases identified by the Tribune, the charges were dropped, the
confession was thrown out by the courts, or the defendant was acquitted.
Although an acquittal almost always means a confession was insufficient to
prove guilt, judges and juries are not required to explain their verdicts.
The cases expose a system in which police have violated well-established
safeguards, such as questioning suspects after they've asked for an attorney
or invoked their right to remain silent, interrogating children without
trying to notify their parents, or arresting people with little or no
evidence and grilling them for hours or days.
Chicago Police Supt. Terry Hillard and other police officials declined to be
interviewed for this series.
Cook County State's Atty. Dick Devine said he has taken steps to enhance the
reliability of confessions, including videotaping many confessions and
requiring police in some cases to do additional investigation before
prosecutors approve charges. But he said in an interview that he does not
believe false confessions are a systemic problem.
"Many people in our system, in this jurisdiction, confess to crimes they
didn't commit? No, I don't believe that," Devine said.
Among the cases identified by the Tribune, 71 were confessions by suspects
who were 16 years old or younger when interrogated. Police have repeatedly
violated an Illinois law meant to provide minors with the protection of a
concerned adult during questioning, appellate rulings and other court
records show.
Since 1991, appellate courts have thrown out the murder confessions of at
least 70 defendants in Cook County -- more than half because police arrested
people with insufficient evidence before interrogating them. Taking people
into custody without probable cause is both illegal and a precursor to many
false confessions. But in Cook County, an appellate judge wrote last year,
that prohibition is "routinely ignored."
Some police officers have figured prominently in a string of cases with
questionable confessions. One Chicago detective has helped get confessions
from more than a dozen people who were acquitted or had their charges
dropped. They included one man who records show was in jail when the crime
occurred and another whose confession was undermined by DNA evidence.
The precision of science has repeatedly exposed the fallibility of
confessions. In Cook County, DNA has helped unravel the murder confessions
of at least eight defendants, including a Death Row inmate. Forensic work
also cleared two boys, ages 7 and 8, who police say confessed to murdering
11-year-old Ryan Harris. Laboratory tests showed semen on the victim, and
police eventually charged a 30-year-old man with the crime.
In the past 10 years, Chicago police have obtained confessions from three
people who produced records showing they were in jail when the murder
occurred. In addition, 14 other people confessed to the murders -- and said
one of the men with a jail alibi committed it with them.
Two of the men with jail alibis were set free. But Daniel Taylor was
convicted and sentenced to life without parole. A Tribune investigation of
that murder has turned up new evidence, including crucial social service
records and police reports, that bolsters Taylor's alibi and undercuts the
prosecution's case.
While the paper found numerous examples of defendants who appeared to have
been wrongly charged through a false confession, it is likely that some
defendants were guilty. But by making illegal arrests, resorting to improper
interrogation tactics or failing to investigate other evidence aggressively,
police contributed to them going free.
Thirty-five years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court required police to inform
suspects of their rights to remain silent or have an attorney present, some
law enforcement officials predicted the confession's demise. But in Chicago,
police still obtain an admission of guilt in 7 of every 10 murder cases they
solve.
Many judges and legal commentators have long feared that police can become
too enamored of the confession and its virtually unmatched power to close
cases quickly.
In the landmark 1964 case of Escobedo vs. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court
wrote:
"We have learned the lesson of history, ancient and modern, that a system of
criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the `confession' will, in
the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system
which depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skillful
investigation."
Sang Kim's story
Before he was freed in the fall of 2000, Sang Kim spent 3 1/2 years in the
Cook County Jail awaiting trial for murder and a possible death sentence.
Police said that he had confessed to kicking and pushing his pregnant
girlfriend so hard that she was forced to prematurely deliver a child who
died hours after birth.
Friends refused his calls, and some called him a baby killer. In Kim's
nightmares, jailers led him down a long tunnel into an execution chamber.
Throughout the ordeal, Kim insisted that he was innocent and that he had
confessed only after Chicago police had reduced him to a state of fatigue,
fear and confusion through lies, threats and manipulation.
Police have denied mistreating Kim during the interrogation and his attempt
to have his confession suppressed by a judge was refused.
But, in the end, the girlfriend recanted and said no assault occurred.
Unable to prove there was a murder, much less that Kim committed it, Cook
County prosecutors dropped the case. Now Kim is suing police and others
involved in the investigation.
Detectives arrested Kim, then 21, in the spring of 1997, after his
girlfriend, Elizabeth Xiong, 17, told police that Kim's assault led to the
baby being born four months premature. His account of what happened next is
based on an interview with him and court records.
At Area 5 violent crimes headquarters in the Grand Central District, police
handcuffed him to an interrogation-room wall, Kim said. The room had one
small window in the door and was sparsely furnished with a narrow metal
bench, a chair or two and a table.
Kim was left alone for about an hour before Detective Neal Jack entered and
removed Kim's handcuffs. Jack said that he was investigating Xiong's claim
that he had battered her. He did not mention murder. The interrogation,
which would last more than 30 hours, had begun.
Sitting in the interrogation room, Kim didn't even know Xiong had given
birth, let alone that the baby had died. He denied hitting Xiong. He said
they had only argued. She wanted him to pay for an abortion, he told police,
but he disagreed.
Jack and Detective Robert Rutherford interrogated Kim for stretches of an
hour or two, then left. When Kim tried to open the door, it was locked. He
banged on the door, but no one answered.
Throughout the interrogation, Kim said, he asked for a lawyer but was
ignored.
At one point, police moved Kim into a chilly holding cell with a metal bed
that had no pillows or blankets. He laid down and tried to sleep but could
not.
The next morning, the interrogation resumed. Rutherford, Kim said, yelled at
him and jabbed his finger into his chest. Jack told Kim not to worry, that
he was making too much of the questioning -- they were only investigating a
misdemeanor battery case.
Kim said the detectives told him that if he signed a statement, he could go
home, and that if he did not, he could go to prison for 45 or 50 years. All
they needed, the detectives repeatedly told Kim, was a statement from him
that matched the one they had from Xiong.
Frightened and confused, Kim finally gave in.
"I was kind of numb, and I was scared," Kim told the Tribune. "I didn't know
what to think."
When a prosecutor arrived, Kim tried to recite the account the detectives
had provided. When he made mistakes, Jack took him into another room and
yelled at him, Kim said. Finally, he signed a 7 1/2-page confession,
handwritten by the prosecutor.
The body of Kim's confession says nothing about the baby dying. But on the
first page, in spaces filled out by hand, the statement says it was taken
regarding the "battery and death" of "Elizabeth Xiong and child." Kim
alleges that when he signed the statement, those blanks contained only the
words "battery" and "Elizabeth Xiong."
After Kim signed the statement, Jack walked him downstairs. Kim thought he
was going home, but instead he was taken to be booked. The officer at the
desk asked him, "So who did you kill?"
"That's when it hit me: This guy tricked me," Kim said.
The confession was crucial because the rest of the evidence against Kim was
thin. Cook County Deputy Medical Examiner Nancy Jones had ruled that the
baby died from a premature birth caused by blunt trauma. But there was no
evidence of trauma on the baby, and Jones told the Tribune she never
examined the mother. She said she based her ruling on Xiong's allegations.
"If mom said this happened as the result of a physical assault, that's where
you go," Jones said.
After a judge ruled that prosecutors Joe Magats and Walter Hehner could use
Kim's confession, they told the court that if Kim was convicted they would
seek a death sentence.
"My heart just stopped," Kim recalled. "I felt like my life was over . . . .
I kept thinking, how will they do it?"
Then, on Oct. 23, 2000, Magats and Hehner dropped the charges against Kim.
Xiong, they said in court, admitted she had lied, saying she had not been
attacked by Kim or anyone else. Xiong declined to comment to the Tribune.
Two months ago, Kim filed a lawsuit against the detectives, Jones, Xiong and
the city. The suit alleges false arrest, saying Kim confessed because of
"coercion and deceit."
Rutherford told the Tribune that he never pressured Kim, and said the 30
hours in custody was "not that long."
"We never tell a guy he can go home if he confesses," Rutherford said. "We
just want to get to the truth, nothing else. Something caused her water bag
to break . . . I believe he was guilty of the crime."
Magats said he had "no doubts" about the confession.
"[Suspects] make allegations with every single statement," he said. "He had
a full hearing and the judge didn't suppress his statement."
Hehner said that Xiong's recantation did not "reflect" on the credibility of
the confession.
Jack, now a sergeant in the narcotics unit, declined to comment.
"This shouldn't have happened," said John Kelly, one of Kim's attorneys in
his pending lawsuit. "But since it did, somebody should be trying to find
out why."
Ambiguous interrogation rules
Over the years, appeals courts have tried to provide guidelines governing
police interrogations, but few clearly delineate between improper techniques
and permissible ones.
When police arrest a suspect, they must give him his Miranda warning, which
includes the right to remain silent and the right to have an attorney
present. If a suspect invokes either right, questioning must cease. In
addition, police must not use force or the threat of force to obtain a
confession.
But beyond those principles lies a world of gray. Promises of leniency are
generally forbidden -- but not always. Lying to a suspect is generally
allowed -- but not always.
The overarching rule is that a confession must be voluntary. To determine
that, courts look at "the totality of the circumstances" to decide whether a
suspect's will was overcome. That means evaluating each case individually,
matching the interrogation techniques used against a particular suspect's
background and vulnerabilities. Techniques deemed proper in one case might
be condemned in another.
In some Cook County cases where confessions have been suppressed, judges
found that police continued interrogating a suspect after he invoked his
right to remain silent or asked for an attorney.
But more often, cases with confessions hinge on whether the statement was
voluntary.
In Cook County, police have detained suspects for as long as three days
before getting a confession and interrogated people who were in severe
physical distress. In a pending case in which the defendant has been found
unfit to stand trial, Cook County sheriff's investigators interrogated a
paralyzed gunshot victim just out of surgery. They said he confessed by
blinking his eyes.
Many defendants have accused police of extracting confessions with physical
force. This year, a judge threw out the murder confession of a man who
alleged Chicago police beat him and used a stun gun on his genitals.
Murder suspects in Cook County have claimed that they signed false
confessions because they had been deprived of food, sleep or use of a
bathroom, or held for so long they simply gave in. Some said they were
coerced with promises of being released or with threats such as having their
children taken away.
In 1998, a jury rejected Rashon Harris' nine-page confession and acquitted
him of the murder of prep basketball star Reggie Nunnery, who was gunned
down in 1995 on a West Side playground.
Harris, who was 17 and did not have a criminal record when arrested, said he
was high on marijuana when detectives interrogated him. He said they
handcuffed him to a ring on a wall, did not give him anything to eat and
refused to let him use a restroom. Harris said he finally signed a
confession because the detectives told him it was a release form.
"They were saying, like, `You sign these papers and we can let you go,' "
Harris said in an interview. "So I signed them papers. If I thought I was in
any sort of jeopardy, I never would have signed anything."
Police denied mistreating or duping Harris. But at trial, Harris' lawyer,
James A. Stamos, presented jurors with a booking photo that showed Harris
smiling broadly. It was evidence, Stamos said, that Harris believed the
detectives were going to release him.
"We didn't believe that was his confession," said Sophia Dahl, of Tinley
Park, who was a juror. "It was like they talked that into him. The police
orchestrated the whole thing. That's the way it looked to us."
Because Cook County law enforcement agencies will sometimes videotape
statements but not the interrogations that preceded them, what occurs inside
the interrogation room is often disputed and largely unprovable. Typically,
defendants allege mistreatment and police deny it, leaving judges to decide
who is more believable. Most times, the police version prevails.
Many suspects' claims appear baseless. Defendants claim injuries that don't
show up in medical reports or abuse by officers who weren't working that
day. But unless they are alleging broken bones or other severe injuries,
most defendants have little evidence they can offer other than their word.
Mental capacity is key
At a hearing last year, a Cook County prosecutor and Chicago police
detective said that before 18-year-old Luster Nelson confessed to killing
two teenagers, he read and understood the following words, commonly known as
the Miranda warning:
"I understand I have the right to remain silent and that anything I say can
be used against me in a court of law. I understand that I have the right to
talk to a lawyer and have him present with me during questioning, and if I
cannot afford to hire a lawyer one will be appointed by the court to
represent me before any questioning. Understanding these rights, I wish to
give a statement."
Nelson confessed on Jan. 27, 1999, about 16 hours after the murders of Mark
Hemphill and Steven Bausal in a second-floor apartment in the 4800 block of
West Monroe Street.
At last year's hearing, a detective told a judge that Nelson read the
statement explaining his rights in about 10 seconds. A prosecutor testified
that Nelson took about 90 seconds and had trouble recognizing one word --
appointed.
At the same hearing, the judge heard testimony from a clinical psychologist
hired by Nelson's attorney to test his level of comprehension. She testified
that she visited Nelson in jail and asked him to read the Miranda warning
aloud while she transcribed his words and reactions on a laptop computer.
"Uh, uh, uh, uh, I don't know that word," Nelson began. "I have the
re-re-reg to remember."
He stopped and looked up, puzzled. "And --" He stopped again and sat in
silence. Finally, he began once more.
"I can be --" He rubbed his forehead. "-- Me in a --" He halted again,
heaved a sigh, resumed. "Kuh-kuh-court of law, law," he said, trying to
sound out the words.
"I un-un-un that I have the ra-ra-ray-rate to take a law, law, law and him
point pre-wha-want me."
After reading "questioning" as "Christian" and "represent me" as "repair
me," Nelson finally reached the third and final sentence. He made it halfway
through, then gave up, saying, "I can't."
Elapsed time: 11 minutes, 26 seconds.
In March, Cook County Circuit Judge Marcus Salone threw out the alleged
confession, ruling that Nelson did not have the mental capacity to
understand what he was doing when he waived his Miranda rights. Nelson, the
evidence showed, had an IQ of 53, well below the dividing line for mental
retardation, which is commonly placed at 70.
Since the state's remaining evidence was a 13-year-old boy who implicated
Nelson and then recanted, prosecutors didn't have a case without Nelson's
confession. They dropped their charges in July. Nelson maintains he was
innocent.
Mentally retarded individuals are vulnerable to exploitation, susceptible to
suggestion and more likely to confess falsely than other suspects, medical
and legal experts say. But police and prosecutors in Cook County have
repeatedly assumed the risk of building cases on little more than a
confession from such defendants.
At least two dozen of the 247 defendants in the cases examined by the
Tribune were mentally retarded, or had significant learning disabilities.
Eight years ago, as it threw out a mentally retarded teenager's confession
in a Downstate case, the Illinois Appellate Court wrote that "society is not
being served by the police obtaining a false confession from a subnormally
intelligent suspect, while the real criminal remains free."
The case of the Ford Heights Four, one of Cook County's most infamous
miscarriages of justice, can be traced in large part to a false confession
from Paula Gray, a 17-year-old with mild mental retardation.
Under pressure from sheriff's deputies, Gray falsely implicated herself and
four men in a 1978 double murder. Two of those men were sentenced to death.
The four men were exonerated in 1996 and wound up receiving $36 million in a
wrongful-prosecution lawsuit.
Confessions from mentally retarded suspects often prompt legal challenges
concerning a defendant's ability to understand his constitutional
protections.
Last year, the Illinois Appellate Court upheld a trial judge's ruling that
threw out the murder confession of a 13-year-old who had scored 52 and 54 on
IQ tests. A psychologist asked the boy what "silent" meant, prompting him
with the song, "Silent Night."
The boy replied: "Like silent, like you said, Christmas song. Mean like what
they said, some stuff. I forget."
Videotaping in question
Responding to a series of high-profile cases where confessions have
unraveled, the Cook County state's attorney's office began to videotape
murder confessions when suspects consent.
Since August 1999, prosecutors have videotaped more than 400 such
confessions, State's Atty. Devine said.
But in all those cases the camera did not start to record until after police
had finished interrogating the suspect. Critics say such limited use of
videotaping does little to prevent the kinds of abuses that can occur during
interrogation and lead to disputed confessions.
Although the Chicago Police Department has vigorously opposed taping
interrogations, Devine said in an interview that he would support a pilot
program in which interrogations would be videotaped.
The case of Corethian Bell provides a dramatic example of how a videotaped
confession can fail to resolve questions of guilt.
Bell, in a videotaped confession, explained how he was angry because his
mother had resumed smoking cocaine, so he grabbed "a little kitchen knife."
Then, he said, he stabbed her to death in her South King Drive apartment.
"She hurted me to the point where I just walked up to her and shanked her
probably like six, seven times," said Bell, then 24, who was charged with
murder for the July 2000 stabbing of his mother, Netta.
But DNA tests conducted earlier this year raise questions about Bell's
guilt.
Bell was picked up by police after he came home and found his mother dead.
He called police to report the murder, telling them he thought she had been
shot.
At the time, he made money panhandling, selling the newspaper Streetwise and
washing windshields in Hyde Park. He suffered from mental illness, including
schizophrenia, and he was borderline mentally retarded, court records show.
He had an IQ of 74 and had only completed school to the 8th grade.
Bell was questioned repeatedly by Chicago police detectives at Area 2
headquarters in the Calumet District, and when he was not being questioned
he was left alone in the interrogation room for hours at a time.
At first, Bell repeatedly denied he killed his mother. According to court
documents filed by Bell's lawyers, detectives yelled at him, told him he
failed a lie-detector test and insisted he confess. He said they hit him so
hard he fell off his chair.
After 50 hours, Bell agreed to make a videotaped confession. He did so, he
told his attorneys, only because he thought he could later tell a judge the
truth and be released.
The new forensic tests show that DNA in semen found in Bell's mother and in
blood spatters on the walls of her home matches DNA from another man.
According to police records, the man has told police he had sex with Netta
Bell shortly before her death, but he denied killing her.
That man currently is in Cook County Jail on charges that he stabbed and
sexually assaulted another woman in December 2000, six months after Netta
Bell was killed and roughly five blocks from where Bell was attacked.
Corethian Bell is still in jail, awaiting trial.
Tribune analysis of murder confessions
For this series, the Tribune researched thousands of murder cases and
appellate opinions dating to 1991.
A confession was defined as a statement, made to police or prosecutors, in
which the defendant admitted killing the victim or participating in the
crime in a way that could make him eligible for murder charges.
This includes cases where a person is held accountable under the law even
though he didn't fire a shot or otherwise kill someone. For example, if two
men rob a store and one shoots the clerk, both men can be tried for murder.
Instances in which the defendant made what authorities call a
false-exculpatory statement--in which the defendant professes innocence but
provides details that can be proven false--were not counted in the Tribune
analysis. Statements that were incriminating only in context--for example,
if a defendant said he was wearing particular clothes that matched
eyewitness descriptions of the killer's clothing--also were not considered
confessions.
When there were no copies of the defendant's statement available, reporters
considered the statement a confession only if other records in the file
adequately described the defendant's statement, or if attorneys involved in
the case clearly recalled the defendant's admissions to police.
Also, some of the statements were given orally, so there was no signed
admission to examine.
Dozens of cases had all the markings of a defendant who confessed, such as
descriptions of lengthy interrogations and alleged police coercion, but they
were not counted when attorneys could not remember or when the file was
otherwise silent on what the defendant admitted doing.
There also are at least 700 cases from this time period in which murder
charges are still pending.
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Copyright � 2001, Chicago Tribune
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