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A 2002 study from Northwestern University showed that 59% of all miscarriages of justice in homicide investigations in Illinois--where a year later Governor George Ryan commuted all death sentences--involved false confessions. But despite such evidence, few confessions are ever thrown out. According to Richard J. Ofshe, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert in false confessions, only recently have juries been allowed to hear testimony about the phenomenon, which can occur as a result of coercion, exhaustion or mental impairment. The juries in the Norfolk trials were not among those. Many experts say the solution is to require police to videotape all interrogations and confessions of suspects in capital cases, as is the law in Minnesota, Illinois, Alaska and Maine.
Moore-Bosko's murder resonated in Norfolk, a Navy town, because sailors' wives are often left at home alone while their husbands are at sea. The 18-year-old newlywed was slain in the early-morning hours of July 8, 1997, in her apartment in a low-rent brick building. She had been expecting her husband Billy, a Navy signalman, home that day from his weeklong tour of duty. After Billy discovered her body, stabbed in the chest, on the bedroom floor, the local police were under enormous pressure to solve the crime quickly. By the second day of the investigation, the clues seemed to be falling nicely into place; a witness had identified Moore-Bosko's neighbor Williams as having been stalking her.
Williams went to the police station, thinking he was summoned just to answer a few more questions, he told TIME by phone from prison last week. Since he trusted the police and believed in his innocence, he says, he didn't ask for a lawyer. He maintained he had been in bed the entire night of the rape and murder, with his wife Nicole, who days before had had a hysterectomy. (Williams says the detectives never asked Nicole what she remembered, and she died of ovarian cancer three months later.) But it was at the station, in a windowless room, that the detectives began to browbeat Williams, and he began to, as he now puts it, "question my own memory." By his account, they told him they knew he was obsessed with Moore-Bosko and had raped and killed her. They told him they had an eyewitness who saw him leave the victim's apartment. (No such witness existed.) They told him that unless he confessed and cooperated, he would face the death penalty. Williams asked to take a lie-detector test, which he passed, but he says the detectives told him he had failed.