In the “Making a Murderer” Case, the Supreme Court Could Help Address the Problem of False Confessions
June 6, 2018
by Douglas Starr
Dassey’s attorneys hope to reverse the conviction and reinforce the “voluntariness” protection. They want to reinvigorate the idea that courts should take special care in examining whether confessions are given freely or as a result of coercion. “Even though this case is specifically about children, the broader implication is that courts need to be enforcing rules that guard against involuntary confessions—rules that apply to everyone,” Laura Nirider, one of Dassey’s attorneys, told me. “We want to remind police officers that, in order to get accurate and voluntary statements, they need to be focussed on whether the person they’re questioning is confessing voluntarily, and not just on whether they’ve been read their Miranda rights.”
Others hope to intervene earlier in the process, by training police officers to conduct interviews in less coercive ways. In March, 2017, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, a nationally known interrogation-training company, announced that it would stop teaching Reid-style interrogation in favor of the nonconfrontational interviewing style used by British police. Since then, the company has trained about a thousand personnel from numerous police forces around the country, according to Dave Thompson, the company’s vice-president of operations. That’s a start. “We now spend about a third of our time in class talking about false confessions,” Thompson told me. “We use the Dassey case as an example of what can go wrong.”
