Convictions are too easy to justify with false confessions

Nobody who looks impartially at the case of Richard Lapointe today is likely to be much persuaded of his guilt in the rape and murder of his wife’s grandmother, Bernice Martin, in Manchester in 1987. Lapointe’s prosecution and conviction were based entirely on three contradictory and even absurd confessions sweated out of him by Manchester police two years later during an interrogation lasting more than nine hours, in which he participated voluntarily and without a lawyer.The claims of Lapointe’s supporters that he is a brain-damaged simpleton who tries to please those in authority are amply supported by the confessions and their circumstances. A murderer cunning enough to have gotten away with such a horrible crime for two years, having left no evidence permitting his arrest, would not consent to even nine minutes of interrogation, much less nine hours in which, as the series of confessions shows, both he and the police made it all up as they went along and the suspect “remembered” only what he was told.Three years after that interrogation, in June 1992, a Superior Court jury convicted Lapointe of murder and eight related charges. Judge David M. Barry sentenced him to life without parole.Contradictory and questionable confessions like Lapointe’s probably would not be believed if they were attributed to more normal people. But Lapointe’s oddness, while absent of any indication of violence or other criminality, made it easy for the jury to believe the confessions’ ultimate point against him, and his public defenders failed to document for the jury the phenomenon of false confession, which is actually common, a plague in the criminal-justice system.Ever since Lapointe’s conviction, a small group of selfless supporters has been striving to get his case reconsidered. But their arguments and claims of new evidence have been largely contrivances meant to win a chance to challenge the confessions. Unimpressed with the claims of new evidence, Superior Court Judge John J. Nazzaro dismissed Lapointe’s appeal the other day. Higher courts may review Nazzaro’s decision but they are not likely challenge his judgment of the new evidence. The Lapointe case remains what it always has been, a matter of the confessions, and the jury considered them valid because Lapointe seemed as odd as the confessions were.Because of the Lapointe case and others before it, particularly the case of Peter Reilly, the teenager wrongly convicted and then exonerated of murdering his mother in North Canaan in 1973, legislation requiring police to make electronic recordings of confessions in serious cases has been urged upon the General Assembly for many years, but still without result. Given the ubiquity of inexpensive video cameras, the only reason to oppose such legislation now is to protect the ability of police and prosecutors to frame unpopular defendants, as Lapointe was framed. So much police and prosecutorial corruption in Connecticut has made it into the news media lately that legislators now are complicit with that corruption through their indifference to checking it as it easily could be checked.But supporters of the recording legislation and believers in justice generally may place too much faith in it. After all, there was an audio tape recording of Reilly’s interrogation and confession, and it showed an exhausted and confused youth being fed an account of a crime that he couldn’t remember by a state police officer who came to seem like the father the young man never had. Though there was no physical evidence against him, a jury convicted Reilly anyway, whereupon his supporters hired private detectives to do the work the state police had failed to do, being smugly satisfied with a contrived confession. Reilly’s private detectives found at the crime scene powerful evidence incriminating others whose identities and animus for the murder victim were known. When the prosecutor in the case died and exculpatory evidence that had been withheld from the court was found in his files, Reilly’s conviction was reversed and he was freed.In the Lapointe case, too, there is evidence pointing to someone else whose identity and criminality are known, if not evidence quite as strong as there was in the Reilly case. But unless someone else confesses to the murder of Bernice Martin, Lapointe, who is now 65, almost certainly will die in prison, and more injustices like the one committed against him may be prevented only by a transformation in the public’s attitudes — a transformation that includes not just skepticism of multiple, contradictory and unrecorded confessions but also a more conscientious conception of reasonable doubt.Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.