On June 13, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court decid­ed Miranda v. Arizona, grant­i­ng sus­pects crit­i­cal con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tions designed to com­bat abu­sive police inter­ro­ga­tion prac­tices. In com­men­tary for The Marshall Project, Samuel Gross (pic­tured) and Maurice Possley of the National Registry of Exonerations dis­cuss the inter­play between false con­fes­sions, the death penal­ty, and wrong­ful con­vic­tions and describe how Miranda​’s famous rights to remain silent and to be rep­re­sent­ed by a lawyer dur­ing an inter­ro­ga­tion have failed to pre­vent numer­ous false con­fes­sions and false charges against oth­ers. Nearly a quar­ter of the 1,810 exon­er­a­tions record­ed in the National Registry of Exonerations involve false or fab­ri­cat­ed con­fes­sions, includ­ing 227 (13%) cas­es in which sus­pects false­ly con­fessed and 195 (11%) cas­es in which they false­ly impli­cat­ed some­one else. Despite being giv­en their ​“Miranda warn­ing,” many sus­pects agree to speak with inter­roga­tors with­out a lawyer present and con­fess to crimes they did not com­mit, as a result of the men­tal stress of inter­ro­ga­tion, threats of severe pun­ish­ment if they do not coop­er­ate, decep­tive inter­ro­ga­tion prac­tices, or because they do not under­stand what they are doing. 72% of all exonerees with report­ed men­tal ill­ness or intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty had false­ly con­fessed. Among them was Earl Washington, a man with an IQ of about 69, who was con­vict­ed of a rape and mur­der after false­ly con­fess­ing dur­ing two days of inter­ro­ga­tions, despite the fact that his con­fes­sion was full of errors about the facts of the crime. He spent 16 years on death row in Virginia before being exon­er­at­ed by DNA evi­dence. Gross and Possley explain that ​“some inno­cent sus­pects … blame oth­ers to deflect respon­si­bil­i­ty and reduce their pun­ish­ment.” They point to the case of Richard Ochoa, who, to avoid the death penal­ty, false­ly impli­cat­ed his room­mate Richard Danziger as the actu­al killer in a 1988 mur­der in Austin, Texas, pled guilty to a mur­der he did not com­mit, and tes­ti­fied against Danziger at tri­al. In 2002, both were exon­er­at­ed by DNA. The authors praise the Miranda deci­sion as an impor­tant step in reg­u­lat­ing coer­cive inter­ro­ga­tion prac­tices, but say addi­tion­al reforms are need­ed. In par­tic­u­lar, they rec­om­mend that all inter­ro­ga­tions, espe­cial­ly in homi­cide cas­es, be record­ed, as already required in 23 states. They write, ​“Recording great­ly helps us eval­u­ate any claim that a con­fes­sion was false, and it has taught us how to improve the con­duct of interrogations.” 

(S. Gross and M. Possley, ​“For 50 Years, You’ve Had ​‘The Right to Remain Silent’,” The Marshall Project, June 12, 2016.) See Innocence.

For some exam­ples of exon­er­at­ed indi­vid­u­als who were wrong­ly con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death based upon false or fab­ri­cat­ed con­vic­tions, see Debra Milke (Arizona), Joseph Brown and David Keaton (Florida), Joseph Burrows, Madison Hobley, Stanley Howard, Ronald Jones, Ronald Kitchen, Leroy Orange, and Aaron Patterson (Illinois), Johnny Ross and Damon Thibodeaux (Louisiana), Jeremy Sheets (Nebraska), Leon Brown and Henry McCollum (North Carolina), Ronald Williamson (Oklahoma), and Earl Washington (Virginia) on the DPIC Innocence Cases webpage.

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