False confessions, coercive interrogations, hardly a new problem

Not a Texas topic, but until this NY Times obituary, I'd never heard the story of how the late, great Connie Hawkins - an ABA, Globetrotter, and NBA star in the '60s and '70s - was banned from pro ball in his prime based on false and unproven allegations of game fixing. Hall-of-fame coach Larry Brown has said of Hawkins, “He was Julius before Julius, he was Elgin before Elgin, he was Michael before Michael.” But to the criminal justice system, he was none of those things. He was a suspect in a game fixing scandal, so he got the same treatment as every other young black suspected criminal might have received in the 1960s. (Shudder)

As has been the case with so many modern exoneration stories, his problems arose from the use of coercive interrogation tactics, and his name was cleared thanks to an exceptional act of journalism:

Hawkins’s path to the N.B.A. was buoyed in part by a 1969 article in Life magazine by David Wolf. “Evidence recently uncovered,” Mr. Wolf wrote, “indicates that Connie Hawkins never knowingly associated with gamblers, that he never introduced a player to a fixer, and that the only damaging statements about his involvement were made by Hawkins himself — as a terrified, semiliterate teenager who thought he’d go to jail unless he said what the D.A.’s detectives pressed him to say.”

This sort of coercive questioning of vulnerable suspects matches the story of dozens of documented false convictions from the DNA era. It's a brand of interrogation nearly unique to American law enforcement known as the Reid technique (see here, here, here, here, and here), which earlier this year was finally abandoned by the company that had originated and popularized it.

Because interrogations happen in secret - meaning abusive tactics taught by the Reid method were almost never documented (particularly in the 1960s before recording equipment was cheap and common), much less made public and rectified - they also represent thousands of additional false convictions we'll never know about. Thanks his basketball skills, however, Hawkins' case received greater attention:

On Hawkins’s behalf, Roslyn Litman, a civil liberties activist, along with her husband and law partner, S. David Litman, and another lawyer, Howard Specter, sued the N.B.A. on antitrust grounds, arguing that the league had in effect illegally banned Hawkins and deprived him of the “opportunity to earn a livelihood.” 

They won. The league paid Hawkins a settlement of nearly $1.3 million and dropped the ban. Hawkins joined the N.B.A. in 1969 and became an instant star with the Suns.

To recap: 50+ years ago a black kid was questioned intensely by authorities without an attorney, and like so many others before and after him, he told them what they wanted to hear. He didn't do so because he was guilty, just to get out of the room and make the pressure relent. But it was a false confession which matched no other evidence the investigators had uncovered, so in this case he was never prosecuted. Still, the professional damage lingered for a decade. And others similarly situated likely suffered their fates in silent ignominy, with no obituary featured in the Grey Lady to set the record straight on history's behalf.

These are not new problems, for the most part; the broader public has only become newly aware of them.

Youth especially vulnerable during police interrogation

Adolescents are a "psychologically vulnerable" population when it comes to police interrogation tactics, says a study highlighted in this New York Times piece (Oct. 13), because they're easier to manipulate and don't assert their rights. The article opened:

Even when police interrogators left the room, cameras kept recording the teenage suspects. Some paced. Several curled up and slept. One sobbed loudly, hitting his head against the wall, berating himself. Two boys, left alone together, discussed their offense, joking.

What none did, however, was exercise his constitutional rights. It was not clear whether the youths even understood them.

Therefore none had a lawyer at his side. None left, though all were free to do so, and none remained silent. Some 37 percent made full confessions, and 31 percent made incriminating statements.

These were among the observations in a recent study of 57 videotaped interrogations of teenagers, ages 13 to 17, from 17 police departments around the country. The research, published in Law and Human Behavior, adds to accumulating evidence that teenagers are psychologically vulnerable at the gateway to the criminal justice system. Youths, some researchers say, merit special protections.

According to federal statistics, nearly 1.5 million teenagers were arrested in 2011, the last year for which data was collected.

The article concluded mentioning a couple of other recent developments on false confessions of which I wasn't aware:

Citing recent research, the American Psychological Association has called for widespread protections for suspects, including teenagers, during interrogations. The recommendations include limiting the length of interviews; videotaping them in their entirety; assuring that teenagers are always accompanied by a lawyer; and that interviewers be trained to reduce the risk of eliciting false confessions from impressionable suspects such as youths.

This spring, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a law enforcement coalition, along with the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, developed online training for those who interview adolescents. Drawing from developmental research, the program instructs officers to explain Miranda warnings in language teenagers will understand and not to make false promises of leniency, because of youths’ proclivity toward gullibility.

“We want to avoid involuntary or false confessions from juveniles,” said John Firman, director of research for the association. “The ultimate goal is to get accurate information from them. And if you don’t understand juvenile brain development, the likelihood is that you’ll get bad information.”

Hall to Governor: Pardon Max Soffar

At Texas Monthly, Michael Hall has published an extended open letter to the governor pleading for executive clemency in the case of Max Soffar, who has "been on death row for a third of a century for a crime I'm certain he did not commit." Soffar has liver cancer and will likely perish before the courts decide his pending habeas corpus writ. Hall urged the governor to allow Soffar to die at home with his family instead of in prison.

RELATED: See an essay on Grits from Texas Southern journalism chair Michael Berryhill about Soffar's case.

Disputed confession corroborated by jailhouse snitches seeking secret deals may have resulted in two false convictions

Grits apparently forgot to post anything about this story when it came out last month, so let's correct the oversight.

Two Dallas men, Dennis Allen and Stanley Mozee, who were convicted based on Mozee's disputed, un-recorded confession and the testimony of now-discredited jailhouse informants, appear poised to have their convictions overturned, the Dallas Morning News reported last month (Sept. 11). My employers at the Innocence Project of Texas along with the national Innocence Project are representing Allen and Mozee. The paper's editorial board opined the next day that, "As the underpinnings of the convictions come out, criminal justice advocates in Austin will inherit more ammunition for one overdue reform: mandatory recording of suspect interrogation." The editorial board elaborated:

Key to the prosecutions is what transpired between Mozee and a detective in the interrogation room. The detective said the suspect was well-rested and lucid for the last session. Mozee said he was strung out on drugs and alcohol and was off his psychiatric medication. Moreover, he said the detective threatened him with these words: “Somebody’s going to get the needle, and it’s going to be you if you don’t come up with something.” That last interrogation ended with Mozee signing a statement depicted by prosecutors as a confession but later disputed by the suspect himself. Further, it was at odds with other evidence in the case, the Innocence Project brief says.

The phenomenon of false or coerced confessions has been established in recent years as contributing to an alarming percentage of convictions later overturned by DNA tests. It would be foolish for state lawmakers to ignore the chance to build in a common-sense safeguard and require police to start a recording when they formally question a suspect. Jurors would be thankful for eliminating the guesswork.

The Allen-Mozee cases also illustrate the wisdom of reforms enacted by lawmakers just last year. The Michael Morton Act, which took effect Jan. 1, requires prosecutors to share key case information with the defense. Innocence Project lawyers cited numerous documents favorable to Mozee and Allen that weren’t divulged before trial — such as correspondence with jailhouse informants who expected favors in return for testimony against the murder defendants.

If prosecutors stitch together a case with witnesses such as this, the reality ought to be clear to the court. The Constitution demands it, now with backup from Texas law.

According to the Morning News report, the habeas writs hinge not just on DNA testing techniques that didn't exist at the time of trial but also newly discovered evidence that prosecutors allegedly concealed informant deals from both the defense and jurors.

Though [Dallas attorney and Innocence Project of Texas board chair Gary] Udashen said the DNA evidence is compelling, he said attorneys were startled by additional evidence they found in the prosecutor’s original case file. Under an “open file” policy adopted by District Attorney Craig Watkins in 2008, attorneys filing a writ can view the file while preparing their case.

In that file, attorneys found letters from the inmates who had testified that they’d heard the two men admitting to the murder.

During their court testimony, the informants said neither had been “promised, sought or expected any personal benefit for their testimony.”

But letters from those inmates found in the file demanded benefits, such as reduced sentences for pending charges, that they “believed they had been promised from the State in direct exchange for testifying.”

“The prosecution not only failed to turn over this material,” the brief said, but concealed it while insisting to jurors “that no such discussions with these informants had ever occurred.”

The two inmates have now told the defense attorneys their testimony was false, the filing says.

[Retired prosecutor Rick] Jackson said he “never, ever made any type of deals up front. I told every single lawyer I ever dealt with that was the case and that was no different in that case.

“There were no deals in place, period, end of story.”

Udashen said he has a “high degree of confidence that the convictions are going to be set aside.”

“Whether or not it ultimately results in an actual innocence finding,” he said, “I think a lot of that is going to depend upon what the DA’s office determines in their own independent investigation.”

The Morning News is exactly right about the significance of this case vis a vis legislation to require police to record interrogations. Who doesn't think justice would have been better served - then and now, whether these two men are innocent or not - if Mozee's original interrogation and confession had been recorded and everyone could see for themselves what happened there?

As recording tech and  storage gets cheaper and easier to manage, there are increasingly scarce few viable arguments against recording interrogations except that police are afraid the public may disapprove of their techniques.

Max Soffar’s Last Appeal

Michael Berryhill chairs the journalism department at Texas Southern University. He asked Grits to publish this extended guest post by him on the Max Soffar capital murder case, which also inspired this recent Dallas Morning News editorial. Soffar, who for decades has maintained his innocence and may have falsely confessed, is terminally ill and likely will not survive until his execution. While on paper he has many years' worth of appeals left before the state can kill him, as a practical matter he probably has just a few months remaining to prove his innocence before death overtakes him.

Mr. Berryhill is also the author of The Trials of Eroy Brown, the Murder Case that Shook the Texas Prison System, published by the University of Texas Press. Here's his article in full, with only minor copyediting by yours truly.

* * *

On the last Wednesday of July, a death row convict named Max Soffar gave what may well be his last news interview. Soffar, who is 59, has spent most of the last 34 years insisting he falsely confessed to helping another man kill three teenagers at a Houston bowling alley in 1980.  

Harris County prosecutors, the leading experts in the nation at winning death penalty verdicts, insisted that no matter what his written confession said, Soffar acted alone. Although there is not a shred of physical evidence that links Max Soffar to the murders, not a trace of blood, not a hair, not a fingerprint, not a gun, not a getaway car, they have twice convicted him of shooting a young woman, one of the three victims of an execution-style murder and robbery.

 Soffar was convicted once in 1981, and after he won a second trial because of his ineffective lawyers, a second time in 2006. During the final arguments, one of Soffar’s prosecutors gloated to the jury that his lawyers “didn’t bring you any evidence that someone other than the defendant committed this crime.”

That is particularly galling to Soffar because the Harris County prosecutors and his judge, Mary Lou Keel of the 232^nd District Court, did everything necessary to keep the jury from hearing a plausible story about who really committed the bowling alley murders. Now Soffar’s appeal lawyer has turned up a reliable witness who has identified a convicted mass killer of seven people as being present at the Houston bowling alley a week before the murders.

“I hope my federal judge in Houston will let me put this witness on,” Soffar said. “He was the one who saw this murderer in the bowling alley.”

Soffar’s lawyers need to hurry up to get that hearing, not because Soffar faces impending execution, but because he is terminally ill with liver cancer and has from five to eight months to live, maybe less. So many questions surround Soffar’s conviction, which a judge for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has called “fishy,” that he has never been scheduled for execution.  Soffar has many years of appeals left: to the federal district court, to the Fifth Circuit panel of three judges, to the nine judges of the Fifth Circuit en banc, and to the Supreme Court. Such appeals could go on for several years. But Soffar is out of time.

Soffar’s current pro bono appeals lawyer, Andrew Horne, has been feverishly working on new writs: an appeal for clemency from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Governor Rick Perry, and an appeal for an expedited hearing from the Southern District Federal Court. The odds of winning clemency for a twice-convicted capital murderer in Texas from Perry, who is preparing to campaign for president, are about zero.  The petition for an expedited federal hearing for a terminally ill inmate breaks new legal ground, Horne told me. He said he hasn’t found any precedent for it.  But he wants his client to have one more chance to clear his name before he dies.

Horne, a young Scot with a Harvard law degree from the international firm of Kirkland and Ellis, has spent the last six years and millions of dollars of his employer’s money to investigate Soffar’s complicated case. The files alone fill sixty boxes in a small room at his firm’s offices in midtown Manhattan.  He had been warned that in a case that has been litigated for thirty years by dozens of lawyers, the chances were slim he would find something new.  

Vowing to touch every piece of paper connected with the case, he found a witness that anyone with a sense of fairness (but perhaps not a judge or a Harris County prosecutor) would want to hear. He was a bowling alley employee named Patrick Pye, and two of his friends died that weekend. The case was widely publicized: it was a cold-blooded execution of some helpless teenagers that horrified the city.

On July 15, the Monday after the weekend killings, Pye told police that he and one of the bowling alley employees who was killed had a “run-in” with a white man at the bowling alley a week before the murders. The man bowled alone and drank alone, Pye told Horne, and he and Steve Sims had thrown him out for not paying.

“Pye stated that he got a phone call from this man,” the police report days, “who stated, ‘You better be watching over your shoulder.’  Pye stated that he thought he would be able to id this man if he saw him again.”

Even 28 years later, Pye could identify him as Paul Dennis Reid, the man with the droopy eyes, from a wedding photo taken a couple of weeks after the murders. 

If the Houston police had followed up on Pye’s story, they might have found Reid. For one thing, he had a criminal record. But more importantly, he resembled a police sketch of the murderer, drawn with the help of a surviving witness, Greg Garner. Garner lost an eye when he was shot in the back of the head, but he had a strong recall of how the robbery happened. Detectives interviewed Garner seven times, recording and transcribing the interviews, and even hypnotizing him to see if he could retrieve further details. It had happened quickly. There was one man, not two. The man said his truck had overheated and he needed water. He had a gun. He made them lie down. He said “good-bye,” and shot them one after another.

Garner remembered a single, mild-mannered robber who was white, beardless, muscular and more than six feet tall. His hair was parted down the middle, covered his ears and was down to his collar. It fit Reid. Within a few of days of the murders, Houston newspapers and television stations were circulating this drawing:

It was this drawing that led to Max Soffar’s downfall. A reward of $15,000 was offered for the arrest of the killer, and Soffar had a crazy notion that his running buddy and partner in burglaries and drugs resembled the drawing closely enough that he could turn him in for the bowling alley murders and collect the reward. It didn’t matter that his buddy was bigger and rounder than the drawing indicated, and wore mutton-chop sideburns. Max thought he looked just like the image.

“My sister, I told her I was going to do it,” Soffar recalled, “ and she said, ‘Max, don’t do that, because if you do, then you’re gonna get in trouble.’ And I’m thinking how am I gonna get in trouble? I’m telling them he did the murders…. I said ‘They’re going to listen to me and they’re going to give me that money.’ She said, ‘You’re crazy.’”

Thinking back 34 years, Soffar sighed, and said, “I guess I should have listened to my sister.”

From birth Soffar had problems. He was the adopted son of a drug-using mother, and both his liver and brain were damaged from fetal alcohol syndrome. He was an impulsive and difficult child who beat his head against the wall His parents had little idea of how to raise him. Soffar’s adoptive father was a remote, alcoholic owner of a second-hand furniture shop in Alvin, who beat Max when he was little. His mother was a hoarder, who kept the house filled with so much junk and stacks of newspapers that a person could barely walk through the house.

From an early age he sniffed glue and gasoline. When he was 9, his parents had him committed to the Austin State Hospital, where he was often kept naked and terrified in a padded cell. He was given electroshock treatments and dosed with powerful anti-psychotic drugs.  (At his second trial, in order to assert Soffar’s future dangerousness, prosecutors falsely claimed he had been criminally confined, which created another point of appeal. During his long confinement in death row, Soffar has never been a threat to the inmates or correctional officers.)

When he came back home to Friendswood, his parents couldn’t control him. He smoked marijuana, sniffed glue, and took methamphetamine and other drugs. He dropped out of school at the seventh grade. He worked as a truck driver for a while. In 1980, he was living at his parents’ home, unemployed, committing burglaries, stealing cars and motorcycles, and taking whatever drugs he could find.

Galveston County sheriff’s officers got to know him well, and for the most part, Max liked the attention.  With no authority figures at home, he looked up to the police. He even helped them by ratting out drug dealers. Once in a while he made fifty bucks as a drug informant for the Galveston sheriff’s office. He had a friend there, a detective named Bruce Clawson. Clawson thought of Max as having the mind of a 12-year-old, and testified that he never swore out a warrant on the basis of one of Max’s stories, which could be lurid and exaggerated. Max learned that the wilder the story, the more attention he could get.

That’s how he came up with the idea of turning in a friend for the reward money. It was going to be his big score. When he was arrested riding a stolen motorcycle three weeks after the murders, he was high on drugs. The cop who arrested him told Max he was going to see he got thrown in prison for life for being a habitual criminal. Soffar decided he wasn’t going to spend life in prison for a stolen motorcycle.  He had already bragged to a couple of drug dealers and that he and his buddy had done the bowling alley murders. Now he had something big to offer the cops. He figured he would soon be home with $15,000 in reward money.

The Houston police and an assistant district attorney came to League City to listen. When Soffar balked at talking to them, they brought in his handler, Bruce Clawson, to get him to open up. Many years after Soffar’s first conviction, Clawson expressed regret about how he had misled Soffar. Soffar had routinely waived his Miranda rights after they were read to him, but when a suspect refuses to talk, that’s a sign under some legal interpretations that the interview should end, and the suspect wants a lawyer. Soffar asked Clawson what was involved in getting a lawyer and how soon it would take him to get one. Maybe a day, maybe thirty days, Clawson said. Clawson advised him that if he was guilty of the crime, he should talk to the police; if he was innocent, he should get a lawyer. I guess I’m on my own, Soffar told Clawson. Later, when Clawson observed a Houston detective questioning Soffar about the murders, he concluded that Soffar didn’t know a thing about the crime, that the police were feeding him details that would lead to his conviction.

It took police three days for the Houston police to get the confession they wanted. In his first signed statement, Soffar said he was waiting outside in the get-away car while his partner robbed the bowling alley and shot the teenagers. The next day, at the urging of the detectives, he said he went inside and watched his partner do the killing.

But forget about the partner. Harris County did. The son of a Houston police detective, he was hauled to the police station and appears to have invoked his Miranda rights successfully. His car and apartment were searched and nothing was found to link him to the crime. Greg Garner, the surviving witness, couldn’t pick him out of a lineup as the killer. He couldn’t identify Soffar, either. No record of the partner’s police interrogation survived, except a scrap of yellow legal paper that says, “Suspect is crying.” He was never indicted, because unlike Max Soffar, he never confessed.

It would have helped Soffar’s case if police had tape-recorded their interrogations of him. His case has been used as an example for legislation requiring that they do. Police had the technology at the time, but seem to have used it only when it suited their purposes.  (They recorded their interviews with Garner, for example.) Instead they talked to Soffar for hours, drove him to the bowling alley where he inaccurately described the crime, and wrote up statements for him to sign. By the third day of interrogation, Soffar was ready to say whatever he thought would get the process to end. And the police needed to charge him or let him go. Soffar told me he kept making up stories about buried guns and bodies that were so wild he thought the police would figure out that all he told was lies and that he knew nothing about the crime.

On the third day, the detectives told him he couldn’t say he had just witnessed the murders. He had to say he helped out. They had already cut his supposed partner loose. Soffar signed a statement in which he said his partner ordered him to participate in the killing. After shooting two of the men, the partner threw the loaded handgun across the room to Soffar and told him he had to shoot the last two. Soffar signed a statement  saying that first he shot one of the men. Next came the chilling sentences that led to his convictions:

“I walked around the other side of them and hesitated, and [he] said, ‘Shoot her.’ She had her face down and she just looked up at me and I aimed and turned my head and shot her. I think I hit her in the cheek.”

Prosecutors have claimed that this is a detail that only the killer could know, even though it published in the first Houston Post story the day after the crime. Soffar says he didn’t get the detail from the newspaper but from the police detectives.

Soffar said one of the detectives asked him,  “’Why did you shoot the girl in the face and everybody else in the back of the head or the side of the head? ‘ And that’s how I knew that Arden Alane Felsher had been shot in the face. That key element put into one of the statements and that’s how they hammered me into death row right there.”

More than one judge had observed that Soffar’s confession is all there is to this case, and none of it matches the surviving witness’s account.

In 2002 a rock-ribbed conservative judge for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Howard DeMoss, read Clawson’s affidavit and concluded that Soffar had indeed asked for a lawyer, not about a lawyer.  He and a second judge concluded that Soffar’s confessions had been illegally obtained and violated the Miranda act.

Had the court thrown out the confession as a violation of the Fifth Amendment , the state would have had no case because it had no physical evidence. The state appealed, and in a kind of tradeoff, the Fifth Circuit ruled that Soffar deserved a new trial because his court-appointed lawyer, the infamously casual Joe Cannon, known for sleeping during trial, had ineffectively defended him.

Then came the second trial in 2006, 24 years after the first conviction. It must have seemed strange to the jury to hear a case that old, with no mention ever made of the previous conviction.

Soffar’s defense team had a witness named Stewart Cook who had partnered with Paul Reid in a series of armed robberies. With Reid in Tennessee death row for killing seven restaurant workers in two different robberies, Cook thought he would write a book about Reid, a boyhood friend.  Cook signed an affidavit stating that Reid had told him he had committed the bowling alley murders. But Cook never went before the jury because the Harris County district attorney threatened to prosecute him for murder if he testified. 

Judge Mary Lou Keel would not let the Tennessee police detective who helped convict Reid testify about how closely the Tennessee murders resembled the bowling alley murders. She concluded they weren’t that similar. Nor would she let the defense show jurors how many of the details of the murder had been widely publicized on television and in newspapers.

When Garner testified, which he had not at the first trial, he couldn’t remember much.  The clean-shaven murderer with hair to his collar that he described to police did not resemble Soffar, who had a full beard and mustache and hair down to his shoulders.

The prosecutors said he had grown it after the murders. Besides, how accurate could Garner have been? He had been shot in the head, lost an eye and suffered brain damage.

Soffar’s defense was gutted.

His prosecutor argued that the confession was all the jury needed: “Why in the world would anybody ever do that, unless they did that or more and the answer is you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t say that. You wouldn’t make an admission. You wouldn’t say I shot Alane Felsher in the cheek…”

This was a masterful use of the word you. Most people are baffled by false confessions. They can’t imagine doing such a thing. The jury can’t imagine such a thing. And yet it happens all the time. More than one person confessed to the bowling-alley murders besides Soffar. He was a mental patient who was living with his mother. A study of exonerations holds that false confessions play a role in 25 percent of the cases.

One of the people who knows about false confessions is a judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Cathy Cochran, who wrote a concurrent opinion about Soffar’s case. She cited some of the better known cases such as the Central Park Five, the subjects of a documentary movie by Ken Burns, and the Norfolk Four, subjects of a book, The Wrong Guys. Four of the Central Park Five were minors, held without legal or parental help and coerced into confessing to a brutal rape and beating that left a jogger unconscious. When the real rapist confessed, insisting he had acted alone, and his DNA matched with the rape kit, New York police refused to concede their mistake. In the Norfolk, Virginia, case, four sailors confessed to raping and murdering a young married woman in a small apartment. The physical evidence of the scene contradicted the theory of a gang rape. None of the sailors’ DNA matched the rape kit. The real rapist, whose DNA confirmed he was the criminal, confessed and said he acted alone, but again police insisted that anyone who confessed must be guilty.

In the Kafkaesque world of criminal appeals, Cochran concurred with the rest of the court that Soffar had no legal grounds for a new trial, writing: “...although I personally do not have great confidence in the reliability or accuracy of applicant’s written statements and hence in his culpability for the triple murders, I was not the chosen fact finder. Applicant’s experienced and extremely capable counsel presented the jury with all of the information it needed to decide that applicant made a false confession and that he was not involved in the bowling-alley murders. The jury rejected that factual conclusion, as it was entitled to do.”

But the jury had never heard an alternate theory to the case. It was excluded. All they had was the painful choice of convicting Soffar or letting him go. They couldn’t tell the judge that they had a reasonable doubt because they had never heard of Paul Reid.

When prosecutor Lynn McClellan retired, he told the Houston Chronicle that sending Max Soffar to death row a second time was the highlight of his career. He had read about the case when he was in law school, and hoped he would do something similar some day. It appears he missed what could have been a major triumph, admitting a mistake and prosecuting Paul Reid instead.

After Andrew Horne took on Soffar’s appeals six years ago, he asked the Harris County office for conviction review to consider Soffar’s case, but he never heard back. A couple of years later when he was in Houston and asked about the oversight, he recalls a prosecutor telling him, “Max is not a poster boy for innocence.”

He lacks what could be called the Harrison Ford factor. Ford played an innocent doctor in the movie The Fugitive. The character is a handsome, intelligent, educated man without a trace of bad behavior. He’s more like Michael Morton, the kind of innocent man who gets the most attention, the kind we can identify with. Max was not a good young man. He admitted to being a thief, a drug addict and a rapist. He tried to turn in a friend for a reward. Prison has changed him for the better, he said.

“I was a Class A knucklehead when I got there,” he said. “I got beat pretty severely because I would not conform to the rules and regulations. But those were lessons where I learned to respect the authority of those around me.

“I’ve learned an awful lot behind these bars for 35 years. I’ve met a lot of interesting people. I’ve met a lot of truly dangerous, crazy people. I’ve met a lot of good people. I wouldn’t change it for the world. I wouldn’t change it for the world because if I had changed it, I would be dead. Because I had a habit of sticking a needle in my arm and stealing from my own mom and daddy, and lying to people and doing things I shouldn’t have been doing. I surely wouldn’t have survived. No way.”

His liver cancer grew out of his battle with Hepatitis C, he said, which came from his needle use. Last December surgeons at John Sealy Hospital in Galveston removed tumors from his liver. Recently the pain came back, for which he is being given morphine.

“They told me I had this portal vein tumor,” he said. “It’s inoperable. Even a liver transplant wouldn’t save me. No hospital in the world can do anything for me.”

On August 11, Horne appealed to the Texas Board of Pardon and Paroles to commute Soffar’s sentence to life and free him from death row for what little is left of his life.  That would distinguish him from Paul Dennis Reid, who refused to talk to Soffar’s lawyers about the bowling alley murders.  Reid died of a heart attack last spring in Tennessee’s death row.  

Soffar could choose to move to the prison hospital at the Estelle Unit in Huntsville, but that would mean leaving behind his radio, his legal papers, and all of his belongings, including letters from the Swiss woman he married three years ago, and who visits him every six weeks.  Bad as conditions are for death row inmates, if he can’t be freed, he would rather stay put.

“I’d rather lie right there in my cell,” he said, pointing in the direction of his block at the Polunsky Unit, “and die right where I grew up.”

MORE: A columnist for the Houston Chronicle, Lisa Gray, reacted to this post with an article titled, "Will an innocent man die on Texas' death row?"

Related Links

• Cochran concurring opinion
• Study of exonerations
• DeMoss dissent
• McClellan

How Dallas cops are trained to interrogate suspects

At the Dallas News, Kevin Krause has a story ("Dallas detective defends investigation of woman later cleared in murder," Jan. 14) on a false arrest lawsuit against Dallas Detective Dwayne Thompson, brought by a woman named Hephzibah Olivia Lord who was arrested and later released on a murder charge after her boyfriend committed suicide. This bit jumped out at me:

Thompson also defended his aggressive interrogation of Lord several hours after the death. Jurors watched a video of the session during which he shouted profanity-laced accusations at Lord while working himself into a rage. Thompson said he employed techniques that he had learned during training, one of which is to directly accuse someone of a crime to see how they react.

“As unpleasant as it is, you have to make every attempt to arrive at what happened,” he testified.

But that interview, while revealing some inconsistencies, yielded no strong evidence of murder, Thompson said.

Lord did not crater under such "questioning." But some folks do, including innocent ones. (Ask Christopher Ochoa.) Thompson is almost certainly correct that he was trained to behave that way - it's a significant cause of false confessions and a method central to the so-called "Reid technique," which is the basis for nearly all police interrogation training in America. (See here, here, here, here, and here.) But does it really help to shout "profanity-laced accusations" while working oneself "into a rage" when there's a good chance the person is innocent (and legally are presumed to be)? Should that really be a routine part of police investigation?

There are alternatives to the Reid technique, but it's hard to blame officers for following their training. It's much harder, though, to understand why officers are still trained to behave that way.

MORE: An alert reader pointed out that Tod Robberson beat me to the punch on this topic yesterday at the Dallas Morning News Opinion Blog. Concluded Robberson:

These tactics reflect an outdated way of eliciting false confessions and justify why all such interrogations must be recorded. I don’t know what it is about some detectives, sheriffs and headstrong prosecutors who think that the goal is to win a confession and/or prosecution no matter what, and regardless of whether the person charged is guilty or not. That’s how Michael Morton wound up spending 25 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. That’s how Christopher Scott spent 12 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Both faced these aggressive, brutal interrogation tactics by overly eager law enforcers who refused to look at the evidence first before charging ahead with their assumption of guilt.

I hope Lord wins her current lawsuit against Thompson, because it’ll send a message to law enforcers everywhere that these tactics have to stop.

AND MORE: From Robberson. AND MORE: Kevin Krause reports on a former Dallas homicide cop named Kim Sanders, a 30-year veteran, who testified for the plaintiff at the trial. Here's a notable excerpt:

Sanders testified that he reviewed evidence in the case and that the Burnside death looked like a self-inflicted accidental shooting or a suicide.

Sanders also said he was shocked by how Thompson treated Lord during her interrogation.

Thompson shouted accusations at Lord in a booming voice, using profanity and whipping himself into a rage. He defended his actions during the trial, saying he was using acceptable methods that he learned during training.

“This went beyond anything I’ve ever seen,” Sanders said during testimony.
He said you can’t intimidate someone into saying something, and he called it a “formula for a false confession.”

But Thompson said it was one of three interview techniques he learned from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.