Sixteen year old Nga Truong was charged with smothering her thirteen month old son, Khyle. A judge threw out the confession as the product of unlawful police questioning.
Check out the video and the other excerpts of it from YouTube. Next week we'll discuss the anatomy of a confession and some techniques detectives can use during an interrogation to obtain a confession.
I'm excited to read your detailed post on confessions.
ReplyDeleteIn the meantime, I would be interested to hear your thoughts about a strange interrogation during a murder case from Columbia, MO. The case is the State of Missouri v Ferguson. 325 S.W.3d 400. It's an interesting case for many reasons (the defendant basically admitted to the crime via a dream). However, it seems disturbing how the police interviewed his accomplice. The accomplice kept getting answers wrong, so the cops would basically correct him and lead him to answers. This was the prosecution's main witness that got the defendant sentenced to 1st degree murder and 2nd degree robbery.
This is the youtube video of the interview. It's obviously biased, but still seems extremely disturbing to me. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCyKnc1BVV8
btw, love your blog! Keep it up!
Thanks for the kind words Quinton. I'll add a post about this next week with the confessions info. My response will be too long for a comment. I can't wait to read more about a dream crime confession!
ReplyDeleteWhere are these videos coming from? I wouldn't think they'd be something for public consumption.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is FOIL (Freedom of Information Law) requests made by news sources. I have not handled a case where one of my video taped confessions was leaked to the media.
ReplyDeleteI took a look at the link in the article that you linked. From my (limited) understanding of the legalese, once the case was dismissed, the court determined that public access to the confession was alright, as it wouldn't potentially hinder her right to a fair trial.
ReplyDeleteYou are correct Jeff. The court denied NPR's motion twice whie her case was pending. Once the DA's office dismissed the case though, the court no longer had to uphold her right to a fair trial and granted NPR's motion to copy and release the video.
ReplyDelete@Quinton: The video is edited and has a slant towards saying it's coerced. I checked some other videos, read up on any news I could find, and read the case you cited. I'm sorry to say, that I don't have an opinion. I don't know enough and I don't have the full confession to analyze. There's apparently no physical evidence connecting Ferguson to the murder, but I don't know if there was any other evidence. Do any of the witnesses mentioned identify Ryan near the crime scene? Did he go to the party and bar with Erickson? Is everyone claiming Erickson made up his involvement or acted alone? I've read an article claiming that neither he nor Ryan did it and another article that says Erickson acted alone.
ReplyDeleteIn NY, a person cannot be convicted on the testimony of a co-conspirator alone. If there was only Erickson's testimony without any corroboration, we could not prosecute this case in NY. I was unable to find whether this was the same in Missouri or not.