(2 of 2)
Davis' clemency petition offers a different version of events. At around 2 a.m. on Sept. 10, it states, "Mr. Davis says the police pulled over to the shoulder of a deserted highway, produced the as-yet- unsigned confessions, removed him from the police car, removed his handcuffs, removed his leg shackles, unholstered their guns and told him he had two options: sign the confessions or try to escape."
His defense team further argues that Davis couldn't have penned the jailhouse confession because in 1979 he was illiterate, a claim buttressed by a 1975 doctor's report that labels him a functional illiterate. The lawyers contend that Davis learned to read only on death row, where inmates prepared flash cards to help him. (Eventually, Davis earned his high school-equivalency degree and became an ordained minister.)
At least seven of Davis' confessions failed to hold up. In some cases, surviving victims didn't identify Davis; in others, different people were either previously or subsequently convicted. Still, juries found Davis guilty of four murders, each carried out in conjunction with an armed robbery. While Davis does not dispute his involvement in two of those robberies, he claims he had no hand in any killings. As for the Biebel case, the only one to carry the death penalty, he claims he had no involvement at all.
Clyde Kuehn, who was the St. Clair County prosecutor at the time of the murders and is now a circuit-court judge, counters that despite the lack of physical evidence in the Biebel case, there was a "unique pattern of conduct" that involved daytime robberies carried out in isolated areas. As for Davis' intelligence, Kuehn says Davis "did not strike me as an individual who is mentally deficient."
The fact remains, however, that standard police-interrogation techniques assume subjects are focused and stable. The 1985 how-to book used by most police departments, Criminal Interrogation and Confessions, encourages the investigator to isolate the suspect, ignore claims of innocence and try to involve the suspect in possible scenarios of how the crime was committed. "An innocent person,'' it states, "will remain steadfast in denying guilt." But a retarded suspect often has "an excessive desire to please,'' says Florida lawyer Delores Norley, who has trained police in 30 states to deal with the mentally impaired. "This is especially true with authority figures." She and her colleagues are currently aware of some 100 cases of possibly false confessions by impaired defendants.
Only a few become causes celebres. Playwright Arthur Miller, who previously came to the aid of a Connecticut teenager convicted of killing his mother, is now involved in the appeal of Richard Lapointe, a brain-damaged dishwasher who was convicted of raping and killing his wife's 88-year-old grandmother after a nine-hour interrogation in which he made three contradictory confessions. "This is a great problem,'' says Miller. "It ought to interest people that when they get a confession from an innocent man, a murderer gets a passport to freedom.''
--Reported by Michele Donley/Chicago and James Willwerth/Los Angeles