False Confessions From 53 Persons With Intellectual Disabilities: The List Keeps Growing

Abstract

Today, persons with intellectual and related disabilities are being seen as citizens in full standing in their own neighborhoods. We see them on the street, on buses, in restaurants—even attending classes in their own neighborhood schools and working at jobs they are able to do. It wasn’t always that way. In earlier years they were seen as objects of rejection. Most were removed from their communities and sent to live in large, out-of-the-way, state-funded institutions. Now that they are back in the midst of our neighborhoods, we are learning to understand and support them as never before. Most—but not all—seek to be friendly with local police officers. They do it because they need to depend on authority figures around them to live in the community successfully. Police officers need to know that some tend to be overly vulnerable and pliable when placed under pressure in interrogation rooms. In such a situation they may say whatever these authority figures want to hear. They will even confess to crimes they did not commit. Today, 53 persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities have confessed to serious felonies—murder, rape, arson, and robbery—that they did not commit. These cases have been extracted from three sources: They come from my own 30year collection of files and from sifting through a list of all false confessors produced earlier by two of the top experts on all false confessions (Drizin & Leo, 2004). More recently they have been sifted from a constant stream of false confession reports flowing out of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s School of Law. All of the 53 individuals have been legally exonerated. The number of persons on this list will increase in the years to come. For example, I can name 15 other false confessors with intellectual disabilities I believe to be innocent, but they will not be placed on this list until they have been exonerated by a formal legal action. Six factors gleaned from this list may be worth pondering: