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82 N.C. L. Rev. 891 (2003-2004)
The Problem of False Confessions in the Post-DNA World

handle is hein.journals/nclr82 and id is 905 raw text is: THE PROBLEM OF FALSE CONFESSIONS IN THE POST-DNA WORLD* STEVEN A. DRIZIN' & RICHARD A. LEo In recent years, numerous individuals who confessed to and were convicted of serious felony crimes have been released from prison-some after many years of incarceration-and declared factually innocent, often as a result of DNA tests that were not possible at the time of arrest, prosecution, and conviction. DNA testing has also exonerated numerous individuals who confessed to serious crimes before their cases went to trial. Numerous others have been released from prison and declared factually innocent in cases that did not involve DNA tests, but instead may have occurred because authorities discovered that the crime never occurred or that it was physically impossible for the (wrongly) convicted defendant to have committed the crime, or because the true perpetrator of the crime was identified, apprehended, and convicted. In this Article, we analyze 125 recent cases of proven interrogation-induced false confessions (i.e., cases in which indisputably innocent individuals confessed to crimes they did not commit) and how these cases were treated by officials in the criminal justice system. This Article has three goals. First, we provide and analyze basic demographic, legal, and case-specific descriptive data from these 125 cases. This is significant because this is the largest cohort of interrogation-induced false confession cases ever identified and studied in the research literature. *The authors' names are listed in alphabetical order. Professors Drizin and Leo would like to thank the many law students for their invaluable research assistance in this project, including Beth Colgan, Kate Shank, Masato Ishibashi, Colleen Ryan, Jason Christopher, Alice Decker, Megan Chmura, and Eric Jehl. A special thanks is due to Kylie Pak for her assistance in both researching and cite checking the Article. We would also like to thank Welsh White for helpful comments on an earlier draft. **Clinical Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law. B.A., 1983, Haverford College; J.D., 1986, Northwestern University School of Law. ***Associate Professor of Criminology, Law and Society, and Associate Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine. B.A., 1985, University of California, Berkeley; M.A., 1989, University of Chicago; J.D., 1994, University of California, Berkeley; Ph.D., 1994, University of California, Berkeley.

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