Telling Police What They Want to Hear, Even if It's False
In his second day of questioning by Los Angeles police detectives, David Allen Jones sealed his fate.
Although never admitting to murder, he repeatedly incriminated himself in the deaths of three prostitutes. By the time he got to describing what happened with the third woman, Mary Edwards, the story came easily.
He paid her for oral sex, he said, then she asked for more money and they got into a fight.
"Another knock down, drag out," Jones said, according to a transcript of the interrogation. "[I] kind of grabbed her, you know. Well, I just choke her. I kind of choke her out."
On the strength of the incriminating statements, a jury convicted Jones of the three killings. But there was a problem: Jones did not kill them.
Eleven years later, DNA and other evidence exonerated Jones and a judge voided his conviction in the killings. He was freed in March.
Police now believe at least two of the slayings were committed by accused serial killer Chester Dewayne Turner.
The fact that Jones has an IQ of between 60 and 73 -- giving him the mental capacity of an 8-year-old -- made him particularly vulnerable to making false, incriminating admissions, according to legal scholars, sociologists and criminologists.
Studies and surveys have found that both minors and the mentally impaired are more likely to make false confessions, in part because they are more vulnerable to suggestion.
Together they made up more than half of suspects who falsely confessed in a study published this year by Northwestern University law professor Steven Drizin and UC Irvine criminologist Richard Leo.
The scholars reviewed 125 cases in which individuals were exonerated after giving false confessions, and found that 40 of them, or about 32%, were minors and 28, about 22%, were mentally retarded.
"They are more likely to go along, agree and comply with authority figures -- to say what the police want them to say -- than the general population," said Emory University law professor Morgan Cloud.
Cloud co-wrote a study that found the mentally impaired, even those deemed to be only mildly retarded, are largely incapable of understanding police admonitions of their right to remain silent and to have a lawyer.
The LAPD, like most police departments, does not have a special protocol for dealing with mentally retarded suspects during interviews, according to a spokeswoman. But both age and mental capacity can be used by jurists to determine whether suspects intelligently waived their rights and whether their statements are admissible in court.
