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The False Confessions of Juveniles
When a beleaguered 13-year-old confessed to murder after hours of interrogation in a Mississippi sheriff's station in 2003, he had been isolated from his mother and had never met with a lawyer. Tyler Edmonds later recanted, becoming a national poster boy for those who question the reliability of child confessions a concern that has long roiled courts nationwide. Last month, the Mississippi court of appeals heard arguments in the Edmonds case that raised, among other issues, whether expert testimony on factors that could contribute to the making of false confessions should have been allowed. The case is Edmonds v. State. … Solomon Fulero, an attorney and a forensic psychology professor at Dayton, Ohio's Sinclair Community College, follows the research on false confessions and tracks developing case law on expert testimony. In 1986 in Crane v. Kentucky the U.S. Supreme Court reversed and remanded a murder conviction in which the government's case rested mainly on a juvenile's confession. It held that evidence of the circumstances surrounding the confession should not have been excluded, even though the trial court had determined that the confession was voluntary. It said that "the physical and psychological environment that yielded the confession can also be of substantial relevance. Confessions, even those found to be voluntary may be shown 'unworthy of belief.' " That, Fulero said, left open the question of what kinds of evidence a defendant could present.
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