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Shining A Light on Injustice (Inside NACDL)
By Norman L. Reimer
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Inside NACDL columns.
The Champion’s False Confession Issue
For far too long, American law enforcement has exploited the common
belief that people will not falsely implicate themselves in a criminal
act, absent physical coercion. But with alarming frequency, the facts
prove otherwise. Analysis of the steady stream of exonerations shows
that a recurrent ingredient in erroneous conviction cases is a false
confession. These false confessions, whether an outright admission to
the act charged, or merely a false admission to a fact that implicates
the accused in the crime, are a blight on America’s system of justice.
It is time to confront this phenomenon by exposing its causes and
adopting palliative reforms. This issue of The Champion is dedicated to
that mission.
The array of feature articles and columns included in these pages
vividly exposes the source of the problem, illustrates its extent,
offers suggestions for how to uncover a false confession, and describes
the status of nati
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