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Melissa Calusinski - Interesting false confession case on CBS 48 Hours

Charlie Wilkes

Illuminator
Charlie Wilkes
Joined
Dec 8, 2009
Messages
4,177
In Lake County Illinois, if you can imagine such a thing...

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/melissa...care-worker-coerced-into-a-murder-confession/

http://dailynorthshore.com/2015/03/03/is-deerfield-killer-innocent/

A toddler lapsed into a coma in a day care and died in the hospital. The cops grilled the day care workers and browbeat a confession out of one of them. A reviewing pathologist says the original pathologist made an egregious mistake, and he has admitted it. The case is a sham.

Now this woman has Kathleen Zellner as her appellate lawyer and a pit bull Chicago reporter on her side. I think they will pry her out. Lake County prosecutors will fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening. It's how they roll.
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
In Lake County Illinois, if you can imagine such a thing...

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/melissa...care-worker-coerced-into-a-murder-confession/

http://dailynorthshore.com/2015/03/03/is-deerfield-killer-innocent/

A toddler lapsed into a coma in a day care and died in the hospital. The cops grilled the day care workers and browbeat a confession out of one of them. A reviewing pathologist says the original pathologist made an egregious mistake, and he has admitted it. The case is a sham.

Now this woman has Kathleen Zellner as her appellate lawyer and a pit bull Chicago reporter on her side. I think they will pry her out. Lake County prosecutors will fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening. It's how they roll.
Click to expand...

For the longest time, confessions were the gold standard as far as guilt. We are finally realizing that this is garbage but slow going.

It seems like police and judges want to still believe that they never get false confessions.
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
In Lake County Illinois, if you can imagine such a thing...

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/melissa...care-worker-coerced-into-a-murder-confession/

http://dailynorthshore.com/2015/03/03/is-deerfield-killer-innocent/

A toddler lapsed into a coma in a day care and died in the hospital. The cops grilled the day care workers and browbeat a confession out of one of them. A reviewing pathologist says the original pathologist made an egregious mistake, and he has admitted it. The case is a sham.

Now this woman has Kathleen Zellner as her appellate lawyer and a pit bull Chicago reporter on her side. I think they will pry her out. Lake County prosecutors will fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening. It's how they roll.
Click to expand...
I don't wish to derail the thread but New Zealand is reeling at the "confession" browbeaten from Teina Pora. It was obvious from the get go what happened. Foetal alcohol syndrome is a red herring, any idiot would have succumbed after dreaming of a 4 figure reward. The whole New Zealand police prosecutor judge politician nexus should be hanging their heads in shame.. back to your case though Charlie.
 
Samson said:
I don't wish to derail the thread but New Zealand is reeling at the "confession" browbeaten from Teina Pora. It was obvious from the get go what happened. Foetal alcohol syndrome is a red herring, any idiot would have succumbed after dreaming of a 4 figure reward. The whole New Zealand police prosecutor judge politician nexus should be hanging their heads in shame.. back to your case though Charlie.
Click to expand...

I would not worry about a derail. That's up to the mods. I see this an an interesting reference case. The more cases we examine, the more informed our discussion. This is an exceptionally good episode of 48 Hours, which IMO is the best crime show on the air.

Also worth reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/magazine/dna-evidence-lake-county.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Lake County has a rep...
 
How should confessions be treated? My thoughts is that maybe confessions should only be allowed in court when in the presence of a friendly lawyer and have other evidence supporting them? Seems to me that confessions just taint a jury too much.
 
Desert Fox said:
How should confessions be treated? My thoughts is that maybe confessions should only be allowed in court when in the presence of a friendly lawyer and have other evidence supporting them? Seems to me that confessions just taint a jury too much.
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Confessions aren't the problem, the problems lie in how the confessions were obtained. Add to that an assumption that one could never confess to a crime they didn't commit and you have prosecutorial crack.
 
Dr. Keith said:
Confessions aren't the problem, the problems lie in how the confessions were obtained. Add to that an assumption that one could never confess to a crime they didn't commit and you have prosecutorial crack.
Click to expand...

I consider confessions to be inherently as unreliable as eye witness testimony.
 
Desert Fox said:
How should confessions be treated? My thoughts is that maybe confessions should only be allowed in court when in the presence of a friendly lawyer and have other evidence supporting them? Seems to me that confessions just taint a jury too much.
Click to expand...

Corroboration is the key. An uncorroborated confession is not enough. The Austin TX police have gotten more than 50 confessions for the yogurt shop murders, but they have never solved the case, because the perp left DNA, and it doesn't match anyone they have investigated.

The kind of confession obtained from Melissa Calusinski should never get as far as a courtroom. There is no way she could have done what she confessed to doing without leaving visible bruises on the toddler, and they weren't there. The confession does not corroborate with medical facts. That was obvious even before the autopsy mistake was discovered.

These idiots in Lake County are going to lose. Again. They don't seem capable of learning from experience. But they will only lose after inflicting a lot of pain on many innocent people.
 
Charlie Wilkes said:
Corroboration is the key. An uncorroborated confession is not enough. The Austin TX police have gotten more than 50 confessions for the yogurt shop murders, but they have never solved the case, because the perp left DNA, and it doesn't match anyone they have investigated.
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Maybe they should check the DNA before beating a confession out of the "suspect"?
 
The politicisation of role of prosecutor does seem an issue. Where it can be a stepping stone to another elected office and personal ambition comes before justice. Given that the medical examiner has changes the cause o death from homicide, that should be enough to trigger a re-trial or appeal. My guess is the prosecutor will hold out for a deal, accept a guilty plea on homicide, accept time served, so no compensation pay out and still goes down on his record as a successful homicide conviction. On the other side the certainty of get out now accepting the wrongful all be it reduced conviction, versus the uncertainty of further appeals and retrials whilst remaining incarcerated. A neat administrative solution, face and cost saving, but not really justice.
 
Changing from "homicide" to "undetermined" wouldn't necessarily vacate the guilty verdict. In effect, the jury is making the determination. However, it might constitute grounds for a new trial, depending on how much the jury relied on the original analysis.

This is Illinois. I wonder how much it costs to get a coroner to change the cause of death?
 
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I think that part of the problem is that most people can't imagine confessing to a crime that they did not commit. If they can envision it at all, it would be only in response to intense physical torture.

So they have trouble (as did I) in understanding that there are certain psychological quirks in many or most people that can lead them to make false confessions in response to techniques far less than physical torture. And the police understand how to manipulate these quirks, although I believe that most police who do so intend to generate real confessions and don't understand the high risk of fake ones.

Apparently these fake confessions can be generated by exhaustion, guilt unrelated to commission of the crime ("I should never have let my son go to the playground that day..."), confusion while in a state of shock, etc. Interesting how confessions have gone from the "gold standard" to being recognized as often beaten out of suspects to now being recognized as potentially delusional even in the absence of physical threats.
 
catsmate said:
Maybe they should check the DNA before beating a confession out of the "suspect"?
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What is wrong about beating "suspects"? In a country that has been waterboarding and indefinitely imprisoning hundreds of "suspects" for 15 years, at a Cuban harbour.
 
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