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SF CHRONICLE Richard A. Leo is a University of San Francisco law professor. But he is simultaneously respected and despised in cities across the United States. The strong reactions to Leo derive from his academic specialty - interrogations of murder and rape suspects by police. Leo has cast doubt on the fairness and legality of police interrogations in case after case. That means defendants and defense lawyers tend to lionize him, while prosecutors and police tend to criticize him. Leo explains a phenomenon that seems inexplicable to lots of fellow human beings: why a person who has committed no crime - who is completely innocent - would tell police he is a murderer or a rapist. Because I write about the criminal justice system regularly, I have studied the phenomenon of false confessions for a long time. I have read Leo's law review articles. I have seen him testify in court. (We have never met, though.) He is brilliant. Because of his published research and his lucid court testimony, I now can grasp, however precariously, why some individuals confess despite their innocence. It is a vital issue for society, because false confessions almost always result in wrongful convictions. Wrongful convictions in turn mean the actual murderers and rapists are probably still at large, perhaps murdering and raping again. Although some law enforcement officers demonize Leo as "helping criminals," in fact Leo should be considered favorably by everybody who cares about crime. That is because police officers, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges are sworn to seek justice first, not to focus solely on winning a case. Leo's research has without question served justice time after time. "Police Interrogation and American Justice," although certainly a learned tome from an academic publisher, is easy to read. Leo writes as clearly as he talks on a witness stand as an expert. At the start of his introduction, he raises prickly questions that he addresses without equivocation throughout the text. Here is Leo's opening salvo: "The process of modern interrogation - as well as the confessions it often produces, the crimes it sometimes solves, and the competing interests and ideologies it implicates - raises a multitude of important issues. How do police elicit confessions from reluctant suspects? How should they be permitted to interrogate in a democratic society that needs both crime control and due process to maintain public confidence in its institutions of crime justice?" Leo does not seek to denigrate police officers. He understands that many of them risk their lives to catch criminals. As a result, police officers are naturally inclined to question suspects avidly when evidence points to them as the perpetrators - and when police develop a gut feeling about a suspect's guilt even when physical evidence is absent. Unlike most academics, Leo understands police interrogation well. He has been allowed to observe usually closed interrogation sessions. When he has not been present, he has studied audio tapes, video tapes and verbatim transcripts. That means Leo is aware how frequently, and in what ways, police interrogators lie to suspects on the path to gaining confessions. The lies are usually legal, in the strictest sense, because judges have ruled on their legality. But legal does not always equate to moral. And, whatever the morality, Leo's scholarship has demonstrated beyond a doubt that false confessions have played a role in countless wrongful convictions. The book moves beyond the theoretical by relying on specific cases of wrongful conviction, cases that demonstrate vividly why suspects act against their own interests during interrogation. Fortunately, in part because of Leo's research, police and prosecutors interested in justice rather than merely winning know that false confessions can be avoided by questioning that is without deception and conducted humanely. Furthermore, defense lawyers and judges now know that false confessions can usually be detected after their occurrence by the simple requirement that all be videotaped from beginning to end. Readers who care about the "justice" in "criminal justice" can learn in a few days of reading Leo's book what it has taken decades of research to demonstrate: that innocent men and women end up in prison because police know how to manipulate them.
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