New York’s High Court Attacks False Confessions

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

A young man of limited education and low I.Q. confesses to murder. His statement is a fine-grained picture of the crime: The victim had been dressed in a red-striped nightshirt, cooking chicken and mashed potatoes, when the attack began. He was stabbed 15 or more times with a 12-inch serrated knife. Later, the killer used a paper towel to clean a cut on his own hand and dabbed his wound with intensive-care lotion.

All these details were known only to the police and the killer.

Yet somehow, the man who signed the confession, Douglas Warney, was innocent, a fact established beyond all dispute 10 years after he was arrested.

(...)

On Thursday, the State Court of Appeals ruled that it looked very much as though detectives in Rochester had fed facts about the murder to Mr. Warney, and it said he could seek compensation for his conviction. The state attorney general’s office, first under Andrew M. Cuomo, and now under Eric T. Schneiderman, had argued that Mr. Warney, while innocent, had brought about his own conviction. Therefore, they argued, he was not eligible to get money under a state law intended to help people who were wrongly imprisoned.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/nyregion/02about.html

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Meanwhile, the national Supreme Court ruled in Connick v. Thompson that a wrongfully convicted man who was on death row (!) could not sue prosecutors for negligence.

[old mark]

1. K&R.

[No Elephants]

2. Damned liberals.

ETA: :sarcasm: