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
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