Confession Had His Signature; DNA Did Not
Mr. Lloyd's exoneration — the 110th nationally based on DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law in New York — occurs as federal investigators continue their inquiry into whether the Detroit Police Department systematically violated civil rights laws. The inquiry is focusing on excessive force, prisoner deaths and the widespread detention of witnesses but includes at least one other case of a confession.

…The question of coercion is a central focus of efforts to change the criminal justice system, like the Innocence Protection Act pending in Congress, which calls for all interrogations of suspects to be videotaped. Videotaping is now required in just two states, Alaska and Minnesota.

"When the police believe somebody's guilty, they conduct a particularly aggressive investigation — they make the person look guilty," said Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at Williams College who has studied false confessions for 15 years. "The question you need to ask in these cases is: Did the suspect produce anything in that statement that the cops didn't already know? If not, you have to wonder."

Barry C. Scheck, the co-director of the Innocence Project and Mr. Lloyd's lawyer, said that the detective in the case, Thomas De Galan, should be criminally prosecuted. Mr. Scheck also called for misconduct investigations into William Rice, the sergeant who oversaw the case, and the prosecutor, Timothy Kenny, because biological evidence available at the time that could have cleared Mr. Lloyd was never pursued.

"This cop had to know, he had to know, that he was feeding a paranoid schizophrenic guy, a guy with a mental disorder, in a mental institution, facts in order to clear a major homicide so everybody could look good," Mr. Scheck said. "If you permit this kind of questioning, you're going to end up not just with innocent people in jail but the real perpetrators still out there."


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/26/national/26DNA.html