Legal Updates Winter 2017
Written By:
Reid
Mar 01, 2017
The Legal Updates Winter 2017 column contains cases which address the following issues:
- Defendant claims his confession was involuntary because �his restrictive childhood conditioned him to acquiesce to male authority figures�
- The use of deception with a 16-year-old defendant does not render the confession inadmissible
- Value of video recording to refute defendant�s claims that he was interrogated for 7 hours and that the police refused to give him his medication
- 15-year-old did not make a knowing and intelligent waiver of her rights
- Video recording of custodial police interrogation was admitted into evidence even though the defendant did not make any incriminating statements
- Confession from a 9-hour interrogation found to be voluntary
- Anatomy of a false confession
- Defendant was entitled to Miranda warnings before immigration officers interrogated him on the side of the highway
- Court allows admissibility of video taped interrogation in which the investigator indicates her belief that defendant was lying and that the victims were telling the truth
- Value of recording interrogation to disprove defendant's claims
- Court allows detective to testify as an expert witness to body language and other indicators of untruthfulness during police interviews
- "police are free to capitalize on a defendant's sense of shame or reluctance to involve his family in a pending investigation... absent circumstances which create a substantial risk that [he or she] might falsely incriminate himself [or herself]
- Court finds testimony of false confession expert Richard Ofshe to be "heavily biased and based on unsupported hypothetical scenarios"
- Court reject's defendant's claim that his diminished social and mental capacity invalidated his waiver of rights