Episode 7: This Side of the Line AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Bear Brook

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Episode 7: This Side of the Line) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Go to PodExtra AI's podcast page (Bear Brook) to view the AI-processed content of all episodes of this podcast.

Bear Brook episodes list: view full AI transcripts and summaries of this podcast on the blog

Episode: Episode 7: This Side of the Line

Author: NHPR
Duration: 00:56:14

Episode Shownotes

How could someone possibly confess to murder if they didn’t do it? A modern understanding of confessions sheds new light on Jason Carroll’s case.For more on the case and to see selected data on exonerations, visit bearbrookpodcast.com. To make a donation in support of Bear Brook, click here. To explore

more data, visit The National Registry of Exonerations. SUPPORT THE WORK OF THE TEAM BEHIND BEAR BROOK BY MAKING A DONATION HERE!

Summary

This episode of Bear Brook delves into the intricate issue of false confessions, particularly highlighting Jason Carroll's case, where he asserts his innocence while serving a life sentence for murder. It explores psychological factors and interrogation techniques that can lead innocents to confess. The discussion underscores the significant role confessions play in wrongful convictions, outlining how systemic issues and suggestive questioning can distort the truth, raising critical questions about the reliability of such confessions within the justice system.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Episode 7: This Side of the Line) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:02 Speaker_08
Previously on Bear Brook Season 2, a true crime story.

00:00:07 Speaker_08
I could point out how Jason's statements were so inconsistent with the undisputed forensic evidence in this case that it was more probable that he was guessing in response to interrogation questions than that he had any actual knowledge.

00:00:21 Speaker_08
In fact, looking at these inconsistencies, it is shocking that Jason was ever even a credible suspect, let alone convicted.

00:00:28 Speaker_03
I do remember being yelled and screamed at And anytime I'd answer them the wrong way, he'd be like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. I remember being so wiped out, I tried to go to sleep under the table, they wouldn't let me.

00:00:41 Speaker_11
But ultimately, did you find, were you convinced that Jason was guilty of the crime?

00:00:45 Speaker_15
Oh yeah, he admitted to, if I recall correctly, he admitted to stabbing her at least once. This was a horrible crime. I mean, that's... You know, why would you say that if you didn't do it?

00:01:16 Speaker_11
The first known wrongful conviction in the United States was based on a false confession. Actually, two false confessions, one from each of the two co-defendants. They were farmers in Vermont in 1812, Jesse and Stephen Bourne.

00:01:35 Speaker_11
They didn't like their brother-in-law, thought he was lazy, freeloading off the family. So when the brother-in-law disappeared, the Bourne brothers were easy suspects.

00:01:45 Speaker_11
Witnesses said they'd heard the Bourne brothers threatened to kill the brother-in-law. The brother-in-law's personal items were found in the Bourne's cellar. Bones were found buried in their field. The Bourne brothers were arrested.

00:01:59 Speaker_11
A jailhouse informant said one of the brothers confessed to him. Then, Jesse and Stephen Bourne themselves both confessed.

00:02:09 Speaker_11
In detail, they described murdering their brother-in-law with a club, burying his body, then excavating and moving the remains twice. Stephen Bourne was scheduled to be executed on January 28, 1820. Then the brother-in-law arrived in town. Alive.

00:02:34 Speaker_11
The signs were all there. The bones in the field were dog bones. The jailhouse informant had every incentive to lie about his cellmate. The confessions from the Bourne brothers didn't match with known facts.

00:02:49 Speaker_11
But confessions are uniquely powerful, as evidence goes. And so, for a very long time, it took something like this to exonerate someone who had falsely confessed to murder. A miracle. The victim come back to life.

00:03:14 Speaker_11
Because of this, for a long time, the known examples of false confessions were very few. From 1820, when the Bourne brothers were set free, to 1989, when Jason Carroll was arrested, just 61 people in the U.S.

00:03:30 Speaker_11
had been exonerated after falsely confessing. That's 61 known false confessions in 169 years. Then, another miracle. DNA testing. In 1989, for the first time, a DNA test proved someone's innocence after they were convicted and freed them from prison.

00:03:53 Speaker_11
Three years later, a group of lawyers founded the Innocence Project, a group devoted to doing more of the same. A flood of exonerations followed.

00:04:05 Speaker_11
Over the last three decades, that flood has helped expose all kinds of problems in the criminal justice system, like the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, police using junk forensic science like bite mark or hair analysis, prosecutorial misconduct, and false confessions.

00:04:25 Speaker_11
Since 1989, nearly 400 people have been exonerated after they falsely confessed to crimes they didn't commit. That's almost 400 known false confessions in just 34 years. Some of those people had been sentenced to death.

00:04:44 Speaker_11
More than half of all of them were black. The same year all that began, 1989, Jason Carroll was confessing to murder. Jason's case sits on a bright red line, separating what we used to believe from what we now know about false confessions.

00:05:16 Speaker_11
And from today's side of that line, the story sounds different. This is Bear Brook Season 2, a true crime story. I'm Jason Moon.

00:06:18 Speaker_12
People really have a hard time understanding why would you confess to something that you didn't commit? Why would you confess to something as horrible as a rape or a murder if you didn't actually do that?

00:06:33 Speaker_11
Dr. Fabiana Alceste has devoted her career to researching and understanding the answers to that question. She's a professor of psychology at Butler University.

00:06:44 Speaker_12
Being wrongfully accused and convicted of a crime that you did not commit on the basis of your own false confession is just about the worst thing that can happen to someone.

00:06:55 Speaker_11
I called Fabiana to see what she would make of Jason Carroll's case. I wanted to know what she hears when she listens to the confession tapes. I'll spare you the suspense. There are no simple answers here. But there is so much that we've learned.

00:07:11 Speaker_11
What was once just a rhetorical question, why would you confess to a murder you didn't commit? Today, it's actually been answered, thanks to decades of scientific research and the lived experiences of hundreds of exonerees who falsely confessed.

00:07:35 Speaker_11
For the last six episodes, I've told you about the ways Jason's case was argued over as it happened, with the knowledge and ideas people had at the time. Call it another true crime storytelling choice.

00:07:50 Speaker_11
I wanted you to hear the arguments the way Tony and Jason's juries heard them. Now, let's run the clock forward 30 years. Let's take a journey into a modern understanding of confession evidence. Fabiana's first lesson for this journey.

00:08:16 Speaker_11
This is not the land of intuition. Hunches and gut feelings about the way people act or how they sound during a confession, it will not help us here.

00:08:26 Speaker_12
It's very, very difficult for anyone to distinguish between true and false confessions.

00:08:32 Speaker_11
There's one study that illustrates this so powerfully, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. It's from 2005. Psychologists videotaped a group of incarcerated men confessing to the crimes they actually committed.

00:08:47 Speaker_11
Then they videotaped them confessing to crimes they did not commit. And they wondered, could anyone tell the difference? They played the tapes for a group of about 60 police officers and another group of about 60 college students.

00:09:04 Speaker_11
Both groups felt confident they could tell the difference. Both groups were wrong. Overall, their accuracy rate was no better than if they had guessed at random. The police officers in the study had an average of 11 years of experience.

00:09:24 Speaker_11
Many of them had been trained in so-called deception detection. But it didn't matter. Lay people, trained detectives, you and me. As much as we might think we'd know a false confession if we heard one, we're probably wrong.

00:09:45 Speaker_12
it's very hard to reliably tell when people are telling the truth versus when people are lying using the kinds of behavioral cues that are kind of in the general zeitgeist. So if I asked you, how do you know when someone is lying?

00:10:00 Speaker_12
What kinds of things would you tell me to look for?

00:10:04 Speaker_11
shifting in your seat, looking away, mumbling, making too much eye contact, touching your face. These might be signs of anxiety, but none of these behaviors are reliable ways to tell if someone is lying.

00:10:18 Speaker_12
But unfortunately, these are the kinds of signs that police officers have been trained to look for for a very long time.

00:10:26 Speaker_12
And they're often told in these trainings that these are scientifically proven ways to identify liars when they are just unequivocally not. And in fact, a lot of scientific evidence shows that this is not the way to identify liars and truth tellers.

00:10:43 Speaker_11
By the way, Fabiana says there is a better way to catch liars. Have them tell the story backwards. People have trouble with the mental effort required to build a false story in reverse. So false confessions are really hard to spot.

00:11:04 Speaker_11
We can't rely on our senses or intuition to hear them. But why do they happen in the first place? Fabiana says the answer is not in the confession. It's in the interrogation.

00:11:19 Speaker_12
Interrogations are not. conversations, right? The interrogation is basically a monologue by the interrogator until the very end where you finally have the suspect verbalize and write their confession.

00:11:37 Speaker_11
Here, Fabiana is describing a particular method of interrogation that's common in the United States, something called the Reed technique. The roots of the Reed technique go back to the 1950s.

00:11:49 Speaker_11
It's named after the police officer who originally developed it, John Reed. He has since died, but today the Reed Company continues to hone the technique and to teach it to all kinds of law enforcement agencies around the world.

00:12:03 Speaker_11
The Reid technique uses a two-pronged approach. Make it hard for the suspect to deny guilt and make it easy for them to confess it. False confession researchers like Dr. Fabiana Alceste call this maximization and minimization.

00:12:18 Speaker_11
You might think of it like the carrot and the stick. In Reed, the interrogator tells the suspect up front that the evidence already points to them. The interrogator might do this, even if it's not true.

00:12:37 Speaker_12
What's called the false evidence ploy. This is an interrogation tactic in which an interrogator will tell the suspect that there is

00:12:46 Speaker_12
irrefutable ironclad evidence of their guilt, like DNA, fingerprints, an eyewitness, CCTV footage, you name it, even though this is actually false.

00:13:00 Speaker_11
That's totally legal in the U.S., by the way. And that's the first stick. We already know you're guilty. Then the interrogator cuts off any denials. Another stick.

00:13:12 Speaker_12
You kind of put your hand up and you say, well, hold on a second. Let me finish because this is really important. And you don't actually let them verbalize their denial.

00:13:22 Speaker_11
The sticks, or maximization, are meant to make the suspect feel hopeless, like denying their involvement is a total dead end. They already know it's me. They won't even let me say I didn't do it. And they say they've got proof.

00:13:39 Speaker_11
Now come the carrots, minimization.

00:13:42 Speaker_12
So these could be things like blaming the victim, saying that anyone in the suspect's shoes would have done the exact same thing, saying that the crime was committed on the spur of the moment rather than being planned.

00:13:55 Speaker_12
The interrogator might be using a kinder tone. Maybe sometimes they're even whispering all of these excuses to the suspect, telling them, hey, I understand. I would have done the same thing. You were just trying to protect your family.

00:14:11 Speaker_11
Carrots can also be implied, like, hey, if you tell the truth, it'll be better for everyone, which to a suspect might sound like they'll get a lighter sentence, even if that's not true.

00:14:25 Speaker_11
If you imagine the suspect is truly guilty, it's not hard to see how this might work. The suspect feels the jig is up. And anyways, even the cops are saying it's not that bad what I did. I'll confess and make things easier on myself.

00:14:47 Speaker_11
The carrots and the sticks of the Reed technique do work. The Reed company once reportedly claimed their technique yields a confession 80% of the time. The problem, according to the research, is that it can work on guilty people and innocent ones.

00:15:05 Speaker_11
In research settings, when these tactics are used during an interrogation, the rate of true confessions goes up, but so does the rate of false confessions.

00:15:16 Speaker_11
The Reed Company responds to these critiques by saying that when false confessions happen, it's usually because an interrogator has strayed, quote, outside the parameters of the Reed technique.

00:15:28 Speaker_11
But Fabiana and other experts on false confession say the Reed technique puts innocent people at risk. especially when you combine it with other risk factors, like younger suspects.

00:15:40 Speaker_11
Children and adolescents are hugely overrepresented in the pool of proven false confessions. Same goes for people with intellectual disabilities. The length of interrogations is another risk factor.

00:15:53 Speaker_11
According to one study, most interrogations last between 30 minutes and two hours. The Reid technique cautions against going for more than four hours.

00:16:02 Speaker_11
One study of 125 proven false confessions found the average length of those interrogations was over 16 hours. So, the read technique, young or mentally disabled suspects, long interrogations.

00:16:19 Speaker_11
The research shows these things all make false confessions more likely. But it can still be hard to wrap your mind around. Surveys show most of us still think we would never falsely confess. Maybe the research isn't enough to convince us.

00:16:37 Speaker_11
Maybe we need to hear from someone who lived it, like Hugh Burton. Have you ever gone back and watched the taped confession you gave?

00:16:47 Speaker_14
Absolutely. You know, it's still hard to watch it without breaking down. I can hear the officer's voice in the back, and it takes me right back. to that room, 1989. And it takes me right back to how terrified I was.

00:17:09 Speaker_14
And I can see the fear in my eyes as I'm looking at my 16-year-old self. 1989, the same year Jason Carroll confessed.

00:17:25 Speaker_11
One evening, a 16-year-old Hugh came home to his family's apartment in the Bronx and noticed his mom's car wasn't in their driveway. Then he went inside.

00:17:35 Speaker_14
And I came in. Now I'm taking my things off. I'm walking towards the back of the apartment, towards the bedrooms. I noticed that my parents' bedroom was open. The door was open. I went into the room.

00:17:52 Speaker_14
I looked, and that's when I made the discovery I had found my mom.

00:17:55 Speaker_11
His mom, Keziah Burton, was lying dead in her bed. She'd been stabbed in the neck.

00:18:02 Speaker_14
I immediately called the police. I'm screaming, crying. I couldn't stay in the house any longer, so I ran outside.

00:18:09 Speaker_11
The police arrived. Hugh answered some questions about what he saw and where he was that day. Hugh's father was away in Jamaica visiting Hugh's grandmother, so Hugh went to stay with his godmother. A few days later, police called Hughes' godmother.

00:18:25 Speaker_11
They wanted Hughes to come take a polygraph test.

00:18:29 Speaker_14
I was only able to sleep 10, 15 minutes at a time. And I'm just waking up, staring at the ceiling. If I try to eat something, as I eat it, it's coming back up. I'm drained. I didn't even want to get out of the bed.

00:18:44 Speaker_14
My godmother said, well, they just want to do this, you know, the same questions they asked you that day. They just want to ask you the same thing again. They just want a polygraph test. And I didn't, you know, I'd never heard of it before.

00:18:57 Speaker_14
I don't know what a polygraph test is. All right, so let's go. If it'll help you find out who did this to my mom, then all right. So by the time I get to the precinct, I'm already a mess. I'm already drained.

00:19:11 Speaker_11
Hugh went into a room alone with the police. No lawyer, no parents.

00:19:17 Speaker_14
What started as a simple interview, maybe about an hour and a half, two hours into that, it turned accusatory. And they told me that they had evidence that led them to believe that I was the one who had committed this crime.

00:19:33 Speaker_11
Hugh was 16. He'd just found his own mother murdered in their home. And now the police were telling him they knew he did it. Stick.

00:19:49 Speaker_14
I started crying immediately because I still couldn't process that I just left my mom sitting on a couch and went to school only to come back and find her murdered in my parents' bedroom. I don't know up from down.

00:20:09 Speaker_14
And in the middle of that, you tell me that we know that you're the one responsible for it. You did this. The more I told them I didn't, the more they told me, you did. And, you know, this is the only way that this is going to work for you.

00:20:27 Speaker_14
We know that, you know, you didn't mean to do this. We know that this was an accident. But you need to tell us the truth. I'm still telling them, no, I didn't commit this crime. I didn't commit this crime. I didn't do anything to my mom.

00:20:44 Speaker_11
Hugh was telling the truth. He did not murder his own mother. But at the time, the detectives were following a hunch, a theory of the case that later turned out to be based on a mistake.

00:20:58 Speaker_11
When police first spoke to Hugh the day of the murder, he told them he went to school as normal. But when the police checked with his teacher, she incorrectly said her attendance records showed Hugh was absent that day.

00:21:11 Speaker_11
So it looked like Hugh was lying.

00:21:14 Speaker_14
The theory was that I owed a local drug dealer money, and I tried to pay with my mom's car, and I left the keys for this drug dealer, and he's the one who took the car.

00:21:27 Speaker_11
The interrogators believed Hugh's mother confronted him about the car. They figured Hugh was high on cocaine, the argument escalated, and in a rage, Hugh accidentally killed his mother.

00:21:42 Speaker_11
After hours of telling 16-year-old Hugh Burton they know he's guilty and cutting him off when he denies it, the interrogators have succeeded in pushing him to the point of despair. The sticks, the maximization, it's worked.

00:21:58 Speaker_14
They continued with this over and over and over again. And in my 16-year-old mind, it seemed like an eternity. I felt that I could not leave. Although no one told me, you can't leave.

00:22:10 Speaker_14
I was made to feel as if I could not get up and walk out of the interrogation room.

00:22:15 Speaker_11
Now, the carrot. Minimization.

00:22:18 Speaker_14
They then began to tell me that, look, just tell us that you committed this crime because again, we know this was an accident.

00:22:29 Speaker_14
And if you do, we'll take you to family court where your dad can come and pick you up and you can put all of this behind you. So when they started to suggest that this is the only way that this is going to

00:22:43 Speaker_14
work because you're going to go to jail for this one way or not." When they started talking that language, now your mind says, okay, well, you have to trust them.

00:22:55 Speaker_14
It's interesting when the people that you look at as authority figures, you know, you're taught to respect them and you get to a point where you're almost trying to do the best that you can to make sure that you appease them and that it's done right.

00:23:10 Speaker_14
Even with my confession, after we're going over and over and over it, In my mind, I'm saying, I have to do it right if I want to just go to family court and see my dad.

00:23:20 Speaker_14
That's the only way that I'm going to be released is by doing this thing that they're asking me to do properly. You believe that you're helping your accusers help you.

00:23:40 Speaker_11
Hugh started to play along with the detectives' questions. And remember, the police already had a theory of what happened here. And so they asked Hugh questions based on that theory.

00:23:53 Speaker_11
And this is really important because it helps explain one of the most puzzling parts of false confessions. Here's Fabiana again.

00:24:02 Speaker_12
False confessions aren't just someone breaking down and saying, I did it, right? They're actually pretty often rich, detailed narratives.

00:24:12 Speaker_12
They have statements of motive, they have apologies, they have timelines, they make references to the thoughts and feelings of the confessor, of the victim, of the things going on around them when they were committing the crime.

00:24:26 Speaker_12
They sound like stories that come from a person's memory. And so if we know for an absolute fact that someone is innocent, how is it possible that they could give such a detailed confession with real facts about the crime?

00:24:46 Speaker_12
And the answer to that question is contamination.

00:24:52 Speaker_11
Contamination. Basically when ideas or facts are leaked from the interrogator to the suspect. It's usually unintentional, and even though interrogators are trained to avoid it, that can be hard to do, especially over a long interrogation.

00:25:09 Speaker_12
The more frustrated you get or the more convinced that you might become of the suspect's guilt, kind of the less careful you might be because you're like, well, I know that this person did this.

00:25:18 Speaker_12
Why would I care about leaking information to them because they already have all the information because they did it?

00:25:24 Speaker_11
Embedded in the questions from interrogators are often details about the crime and an implied narrative about how the police think it happened.

00:25:33 Speaker_14
And they said, OK, so you were on drugs. So then what did you do? Because your mom was stabbed, so did you go into the kitchen and then did you go get a knife after that? Yes, I went into the kitchen.

00:25:48 Speaker_14
So my answer is yes or no to things is them putting the story together and having me remember this. They fed me a story, and I agreed, and I agreed, and I agreed, and they kept going over it. So let's back from the top. So what happened?

00:26:07 Speaker_14
So you woke up that morning, and you were still high? Yeah, I was still high. And after you do it a few times, now they're not saying anything. It's just you. Now the training wheel's off, and you can just roll and do the story yourself.

00:26:29 Speaker_11
Contamination in interrogations can be hard to detect, especially when the interrogation itself is not recorded. That happens a lot in proven false confessions like Hugh's. The tape recorder isn't turned on until the end.

00:26:45 Speaker_11
The interrogation, the contamination, is not captured, but the confession is. And so that's all the jury hears. What was that like hearing the verdict from these jurors? I mean, you must have been in disbelief.

00:27:02 Speaker_14
No, I collapsed. My legs gave. I was 18. And we stood up and they read the verdict. As guilty, second degree murder, I dropped. I'm crying and screaming. I didn't kill my mom. I didn't kill my mom. First time I seen my father crying, you know,

00:27:31 Speaker_14
And I can remember the judge dismissing the jury, and I'm crying, I'm looking at them, they have all of the bailiffs and stuff in the court around me, and I'm asking the jury, just to show you, I'm still a kid, but I'm 18, I'm asking them, where are they going?

00:27:54 Speaker_14
Where y'all going? Like, what about me? What about, you can't leave, what about me? This is not, you know. I never forgot that. I couldn't believe that someone would actually think that I could harm my mom.

00:28:20 Speaker_14
The shock of that, like, you actually believe that. It was a lot. That day was a lot.

00:28:36 Speaker_11
The jury saw Hugh Burton's videotaped confession, and they believed it. Because why wouldn't they?

00:28:44 Speaker_14
Who in their mind, and go back in the time capsule of 1989, who says that they killed their mother if they didn't?

00:28:53 Speaker_11
Hugh Burton spent 20 years and eight months in prison for a crime he did not commit. He was released on parole and then finally exonerated in 2019, when he was 46 years old.

00:29:08 Speaker_11
Hugh and a team of innocence lawyers uncovered serious misconduct by the police and prosecutors in his case. The teacher who said Hugh was not at school the day of the murder, she later called police and told them she was wrong.

00:29:22 Speaker_11
She just looked at the wrong date in her records. Hugh was at school that day. Prosecutors had that information, but never turned it over to Hugh's defense attorneys, a serious violation of their constitutional duty.

00:29:38 Speaker_11
Hugh and his lawyers also uncovered the detectives who interrogated him had extracted false confessions in another investigation just three months before Hugh's arrest. But even with what the jury heard at trial, there were plenty of signs.

00:29:55 Speaker_11
Hugh recanted his confession and told everyone it was coerced. Hugh said in his confession he stabbed his mother once. She'd been stabbed twice.

00:30:05 Speaker_11
There was no medical or physical evidence that Hugh was high on cocaine or that he'd been involved in a struggle. And there were even signs, obvious in retrospect, that Hugh's confession was contaminated.

00:30:19 Speaker_11
Hughes' story about the murder was littered with police jargon, things most 16-year-olds would never say. Hughes said he was stimulated on cocaine, that he was associating with a friend, and that he proceeded up a road.

00:30:36 Speaker_11
But these warning signs were nothing compared to the power of Hughes' confession.

00:30:42 Speaker_12
Confessions seem uniquely positioned as the thing that overpowers all the other factors that you could think of, that you could look at and say, these things don't seem right. The confession overpowers all of those things.

00:31:02 Speaker_12
There's some research that shows that confession evidence can be more powerful than DNA that exonerates the confessor.

00:31:10 Speaker_11
Confessions are so convincing, they can even spill over into influencing other forms of evidence, including forensic evidence.

00:31:19 Speaker_12
You would think that the science is the science, and it would be really difficult to bias a scientist who is examining some kind of forensic evidence like, let's say, a fingerprint.

00:31:31 Speaker_12
But actually, what we see in the studies that researchers in this field have conducted is that if a fingerprint examiner knows that there was a confession in the case, they're more likely to say that that person's fingerprint is a match to the fingerprint that they found at the scene.

00:31:47 Speaker_11
Fabiana says this goes for other forensic experts, too, like medical examiners. If they know a confession exists, it can influence their interpretation of the evidence. Confessions can also derail good police work.

00:32:02 Speaker_11
Once there's a confession, there's a tendency for the investigation to come to a halt. We found the guy. He confessed. What's left to do? Six days after Hugh's confession, police pulled over a man driving Hugh's mother's car.

00:32:18 Speaker_11
This man lived downstairs from Hugh's family. He had a violent criminal history. He was driving the victim's car. But police already had their guy, someone who had confessed. The man who was driving Hugh's mother's car died before Hugh's trial.

00:32:38 Speaker_11
No one, besides Hugh, was ever convicted for Keziah Burton's murder.

00:32:48 Speaker_14
For many years, I would ask myself sitting inside there, like, very angry with myself, like, how did you allow them to trick you like that? I was very upset, especially in my early 20s.

00:33:05 Speaker_14
It's one of those things that, you know, you can't, you can't put that kind of pain into words. You're screaming at the top of your lungs that, you know, you didn't do something. And it's almost as if the world can't hear you.

00:33:26 Speaker_11
Once Hugh was exonerated, the world did hear him. He spoke out in interviews like this one. He says it was partly a way to begin healing and partly because he feels a duty to tell all of us this can happen. This does happen.

00:33:45 Speaker_11
Today, Hugh continues to speak out and to move on with his life. In prison, he picked up long-distance running as a way to cope with the pain. In 2019, he ran the New York City Marathon as a free man.

00:34:03 Speaker_11
The experience of exonerees like Hugh Burton and the research of psychologists like Dr. Fabiana Alceste have opened a new world of understanding about how and why false confessions happen.

00:34:17 Speaker_11
In fact, according to the legal clinic that helped exonerate Hugh, his case marked the first time a court ruled that new understandings about false confessions can constitute newly discovered evidence of actual innocence.

00:34:33 Speaker_11
After the break, we bring those new understandings to Jason Carroll's case. If you're enjoying this episode of Barebrook, I'd invite you to check out another podcast made by my colleagues here at NHPR.

00:35:20 Speaker_11
It's called Civics 101, and it's a guide to American democracy and how to live in it, including episodes about criminal justice, your rights, and the institutions that guide our lives as citizens. Take a listen.

00:35:34 Speaker_02
The United States comes with a big, shiny promise. Here, you are free. Here, you have rights. Protections.

00:35:49 Speaker_13
But look a little closer at the fine print of history, and you find that a lot of the time, those rights have to be fought for.

00:35:57 Speaker_01
They wanted to make sure that when they won, that this would settle it for all America. The harm is done.

00:36:07 Speaker_02
But how can you fight for your rights if you don't know what they are or how they work?

00:36:15 Speaker_09
You have this document creating a nation on liberty and equality, but because the unstated white male landowners You have subjective liberty and inequality.

00:36:26 Speaker_13
I'm Hannah McCarthy.

00:36:27 Speaker_02
I'm Nekepa Dice.

00:36:28 Speaker_13
And we host the podcast Civics 101. It is your toolkit for getting the most out of America, from your rights and protections to the battles that have been waged to secure them to the people in charge of it all.

00:36:41 Speaker_00
I think Roe is in. object lesson in the limits of the power of the Supreme Court.

00:36:45 Speaker_10
The tension that's inherent in the Fifth Amendment, the fact that we recognize that police interrogations are really just interrogations by the government generally, are fraught with power imbalances.

00:36:58 Speaker_00
Within the lifetime of young people today, that kind of prosecution seems virtually impossible, which is not to say it can't happen again.

00:37:11 Speaker_02
Each episode of our show is like a page in the manual for the United States. Because unless you understand how and why it works, you can't know when it isn't quite working.

00:37:21 Speaker_13
Listen to Civics 101 and get the real story of these United States. You can find it where you found Bear Brook.

00:37:27 Speaker_02
It's just like true crime, only replaced crime with workings of American democracy.

00:37:44 Speaker_11
I asked Dr. Fabiana El Ceste to review the confessions in Jason's case—the only real evidence against him. Here's what she saw. Five red flags in Jason's interrogations. Five things that the research shows makes a false confession more likely.

00:38:02 Speaker_11
The first red flag—the length of Jason's interrogations. Over four days, police interrogated Jason for a long time. Just how long depends on how you count it. Police actively questioned Jason for at least 13 and a half hours over four days.

00:38:21 Speaker_11
Five hours the first day, about six hours the second day, and then more sporadically in the following two days.

00:38:28 Speaker_11
But if you count up all the time that Jason was with police as part of the overall psychological burden he was under, the number is 24 hours over four days.

00:38:38 Speaker_12
The longer the interrogation goes on, you see more and more false confessions.

00:38:44 Speaker_11
The second red flag, Jason's age.

00:38:47 Speaker_12
Jason was 19 at this time, but so legally he wasn't a minor, but we still would classify him as an adolescent. He's still a person at this point in time where his brain has not fully developed.

00:39:01 Speaker_11
Of all people in the U.S. who've been exonerated after falsely confessing to murder, their median age at the time they were interrogated was 20 years old. Red flag number three, Jason's mom, Karen Carroll.

00:39:17 Speaker_11
Fabiana says Karen's aggressive involvement in Lammy's interrogation of Jason supercharged the carrots and sticks. Karen made it even more stressful for Jason to deny and repeatedly communicated that confessing was the only good outcome.

00:39:39 Speaker_11
Karen says, the longer you hold off telling the truth, the harder it's going to be, and the worse it's going to be on yourself. You still have a chance to save your ass. My dear, I don't want to see you go to prison.

00:39:53 Speaker_11
Jason says, I don't want to go to prison either, Mom. Karen says, then tell us every goddamn thing you know.

00:40:01 Speaker_05
Tell us everything you know.

00:40:10 Speaker_11
Remember, when Jason appealed his conviction to the New Hampshire Supreme Court in 1994, the judges ruled that if Jason's mom had been acting as a police officer, the confession would have been thrown out.

00:40:22 Speaker_11
But because they said Karen wasn't a police officer in that room, her conduct wasn't relevant to them, since the state constitution doesn't have anything to say about the way relatives question each other.

00:40:34 Speaker_11
But to a psychologist, looking at whether Karen's involvement made a false confession more likely, it definitely is relevant. Red flag number four, maximization tactics, the sticks. Jason's second interrogation especially is full of them.

00:40:57 Speaker_12
So they say things like, the jury will tear you apart if you're not telling the truth here. They repeatedly tell him that he's not telling them the whole truth and that he's holding out on them and that they know that for sure.

00:41:11 Speaker_11
And the fifth red flag, contamination.

00:41:15 Speaker_12
So we do see the interrogators revealing key details to Jason. And then sometimes almost immediately after that, we see Jason incorporate those details into his story.

00:41:30 Speaker_11
We're going to spend some time on this red flag because Jason's knowledge of certain details about Sharon's murder was a big point of contention at his trials.

00:41:39 Speaker_11
Remember, the state argued Jason could only have known so much if he was actually involved. But Fabiana sees clear evidence that, for at least some of those details, Jason likely learned them from the interrogators. Here's one example.

00:41:56 Speaker_11
During Jason's second interrogation, detectives ask him, why did Ken Johnson want his wife murdered? Jason says, quote, I wasn't briefed on that. His mother pushes him for an answer. Then Jason says, quote, because she knew something that Ken had done.

00:42:15 Speaker_11
And then a detective with the Bedford Police Department, Leo Morenci, jumps in and introduces a new idea.

00:42:23 Speaker_12
So he asks, what had he done? What had Ken done? Rape his daughter? And after that, Jason goes on to use this detail repeatedly, but he had never mentioned anything about Ken raping Lisa before Morenci brought that up.

00:42:38 Speaker_11
You might remember, this was an early theory police had, that Ken had sexually abused his own stepdaughter, Lisa, and that Sharon caught him doing it. But police later abandoned this theory, because there's no evidence for it. Lisa herself denied it.

00:42:55 Speaker_11
Tony said he was, in fact, the father of the child. And Tony never mentions it as a motive in his interrogations. By the time of Tony and Jason's trials, prosecutors say the motive was Ken's gambling debts, not a rape.

00:43:11 Speaker_11
But once the idea is introduced to Jason, it sticks. It's now a part of his story from that point on. Here he is repeating this idea in his third interrogation.

00:43:22 Speaker_06
Did he give you any explanation as to why she was to be killed? He had told me that Johnson, she had caught Johnson raping his daughter. Fabiana says it's important to trace the genealogy of each detail in a confession.

00:43:45 Speaker_12
Is it something that the police had already thought in their theory before they even questioned anyone? Is it a new theory that arose out of the questioning of one of the suspects or witnesses? Where does each thought and fact and detail come from?

00:44:03 Speaker_12
Who states it first? Is it actually true?

00:44:07 Speaker_11
The idea that a rape was the motive for the murder was not reported on in the news. So if that idea isn't true, and it wasn't in the news, where else did Jason get it from, if not the detectives?

00:44:23 Speaker_11
And if that happened with this detail, couldn't it have happened with others? If you trace the origin of other important details in Jason's confession, you see a similar trajectory.

00:44:39 Speaker_11
Detectives introducing ideas, Jason incorporating those ideas into his story. Like the murder weapon. Even after Jason has admitted to stabbing Sharon, he gives a handful of different answers about where the murder weapon is. He says he doesn't know.

00:44:56 Speaker_11
The detectives say that's wrong. He says he burned it in a fire. They say that's wrong. He says he threw it in a river. Wrong again. And finally, Detective Lammy introduces the idea that the knife is at Jason's house.

00:45:12 Speaker_11
Quote, it's at your house or you got it, he says. Then Karen introduces the idea of the specific knife. Quote, is it a small brown pocket knife? Jason simply agrees with them. Or how about the amount Jason was paid?

00:45:29 Speaker_11
According to police, before anything was tape recorded, Jason said he was paid $500. Then Lammy says, quote, I suspect that is not the accurate amount you got. Jason changes his answer to $2,000, then later to $5,000.

00:45:46 Speaker_11
There's Sharon's bra, which, remember, was cut open in the front with a knife — one of those supposedly hidden details that only the killer would know.

00:45:56 Speaker_11
But Jason makes no mention of the bra until his third interrogation, when the idea is first introduced by police.

00:46:06 Speaker_11
And then, when Jason gets the answer wrong — he says the bra was unsnapped — listen to the detectives give him multiple-choice answers to try and help him match his story to the evidence.

00:46:17 Speaker_06
How was the bra taken off? The bra? It was unsnapped. Unsnapped or torn? You recall? Cut, torn, unsnapped, pulled over her head. To me, to me, the way it was going, it seemed like it was unsnapped. Snapped in the front or the back?

00:46:36 Speaker_06
In the back, from where it seemed like he was reaching around her, to the back.

00:46:41 Speaker_11
So not only does Jason not mention the bra until police specifically ask him about it, when he does incorporate the idea into his story, he does so in a way that gets the evidence wrong.

00:46:59 Speaker_11
There's even evidence that detectives were willing to show Jason pictures of the crime scene. It happens during the interrogation with his mother.

00:47:08 Speaker_11
Near the end of the tape, after Jason already said he stabbed Sharon, Lammy asks Jason about Sharon's rings. You might remember Sharon's rings were found lying on the ground at the construction site. Lammy says, who took the rings off her hand?

00:47:25 Speaker_11
You haven't told us anything about that. Why didn't you tell us about that? Jason replies, because I didn't know of any rings being on her hands. Lammy says, well, they were on her hands. Who took them off? You were there. Think clearly. Think clearly now.

00:47:42 Speaker_11
They were found on the ground. Who took them off, and why were they off? And then Lammy asks, presumably of one of the other detectives, if they have a picture they can show Jason. And from that moment on, the rings are part of Jason's story.

00:48:08 Speaker_11
So, all right, but so a jury could hear this and think, well, whatever, he gets some of the details wrong and the details change and they get more incriminating, not because it's what cops want to hear, but it's because it's the things that he doesn't want to say.

00:48:23 Speaker_11
So why isn't this evolution of details just a kind of slow, like, surrendering to the reality of what he's done? Why can't we say that's what's happening here?

00:48:38 Speaker_12
I think the hard part is that we can't say that that's what's not happening. We can't prove just by analyzing what is going on in the interrogation.

00:48:51 Speaker_12
We can't prove that this is a false confession just by anything that he has said or that the interrogators have said. All we have are the red flags. All we have are the red flags and what they amount to and how they interact with each other.

00:49:06 Speaker_12
They provide a reason to be skeptical of these interrogation practices and the confessions that resulted from them.

00:49:19 Speaker_11
After all this, we're back to the original problem of false confessions. They are so hard to detect. Even for the interrogator. Fabiana says they often do not realize they're planting the details of a false story.

00:49:36 Speaker_12
The majority of police officers and interrogators and detectives out there, when they're interrogating someone and they are getting a confession and they are contaminating and they are making this person rehearse the confession over and over again, it's because they really think that the person did it.

00:49:56 Speaker_12
And so that is not always the case. I can point to some very specific people and instances where there have been set ups by the police and the police knew that they were taking a false confession. And I think that that is rare.

00:50:08 Speaker_12
I think that is the exception.

00:50:11 Speaker_11
Fabiana says the problem here is not about the intentions of individual interrogators. It's bigger than that.

00:50:19 Speaker_11
In 2012, the Attorney General for the state of Nebraska apologized and offered $500,000 in taxpayer money to a man who'd been wrongfully convicted. Beryl Parker had been coerced into a false confession in 1955 by a detective named John Reed.

00:50:40 Speaker_11
The most commonly used interrogation technique in the U.S. is named after a detective who extracted a false confession.

00:50:48 Speaker_12
The system, the culture that our detectives live in and are made to operate in, sets them up for this specific kind of failure of not being able to realize that there's an innocent person in front of them because it is so guilt presumptive.

00:51:11 Speaker_12
It is such an accusatory and confirmatory process. And so I think that they're just doing what they have been trained to do. They are doing what their police departments have done for decades and decades and decades.

00:51:30 Speaker_11
This is why recording interrogations from start to finish is the number one recommendation from experts like Fabiana to avoid convictions based on false confessions. In total, about an hour and a half of Jason's interrogations were tape recorded.

00:51:47 Speaker_11
That's about 11 percent of the time Jason was questioned by police. None of this is to say we should never trust any confession. Confessions can have green flags as well as red ones.

00:52:01 Speaker_12
One thing that you should be looking for are details that can be independently corroborated that the police did not know about beforehand. So if a confession leads the police to new evidence, that's a good sign that this might be a true confession.

00:52:22 Speaker_11
For instance, if Jason had led police to the location of Sharon's shirt or her pocketbook, which were never found, it would have been strong evidence he was telling the truth. But Jason didn't.

00:52:35 Speaker_11
In fact, there's not a single verifiable fact that comes from Jason's confessions that police didn't already know about in advance. In criminal trials, the standard for convicting someone is beyond a reasonable doubt.

00:52:52 Speaker_11
It's the highest burden of proof in our court system. It's also notoriously vague. What makes a doubt reasonable? And what if doubts that seemed unreasonable in the early 90s become reasonable 30 years later with new science? What do we do then?

00:53:21 Speaker_11
In the courts, new doubts are often not enough to undo a conviction. So what does it take? A new telling of the story?

00:53:33 Speaker_07
My main goal is to raise the concerns around this conviction to the extent that it would encourage the state to revisit the evidence.

00:53:42 Speaker_07
And we have been lucky with other past cases that almost in every case we've been able to find something, a witness who's never talked before, just something. And that could happen here too.

00:53:53 Speaker_11
Or does it still take a miracle?

00:53:58 Speaker_08
What are you? I need to stop for a second.

00:54:06 Speaker_11
That's next time on Bear Brook Season 2, A True Crime Story. And special thanks this episode to all of the scientists and lawyers whose work we relied on.

00:54:33 Speaker_11
They include Saul Kassin, Stephen Drizzen, Thomas Grisso, Gisli Gjonsson, Richard Leo, Alison Redlich, Brandon Garrett, Emily West, Vanessa Materico, Jennifer Perillo, Christian Meisner, Rebecca Norwick, Catherine Keitchel, William Crozier, Darren Strange, Sarah Appleby, Lisa Hazel,

00:54:53 Speaker_11
Kristen Jones, Timothy Luke, Johanna Helgrin, Arya Amram, the National Registry of Exonerations, and, of course, Fabiana Alceste. In 2022, 30 people in the U.S. were exonerated after convictions based on false confessions.

00:55:11 Speaker_11
The median amount of time they spent incarcerated was 24 years. A True Crime Story is reported and produced by me, Jason Moon. It's edited by Katie Culinary. Additional reporting and research by Paul Kuno Booth.

00:55:27 Speaker_11
Photos and production help on this episode by Sarah Nathan. We had editing help from Lauren Chooljian, Daniella Ali, Sarah Plord, Taylor Quimby, Mara Hoplamazian, and Todd Bookman. Our news director is Dan Barrick.

00:55:40 Speaker_11
Our director of podcasts is Rebecca Lavoie. Fact-checking by Danya Suleiman. Sarah Plord created our original artwork as well as our website, barebrookpodcast.com. Additional photography and videos by Gabby Lozada.

00:55:55 Speaker_11
Original music for the series was created by me, Jason Moon. Barebrook is a production of the Document Team at New Hampshire Public Radio.