What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

The more I hear about “Making a Murderer,” the more tempted I am to become a Netflix subscriber so I can watch the ten-part documentary myself. The series follows the case of Steven Avery, released from prison after 18 years when DNA evidence showed he was innocent of the rape for which he had been convicted. A few years later, Avery and his teenage nephew Brendan Dassey were charged and convicted of murdering Teresa Halbach. The documentary suggests that Avery and Dassey, who are both serving life sentences, did not kill Halbach and did not receive fair trials.

Lee Rood has a front-page feature in today’s Des Moines Register about how problems highlighted in “Making a Murderer” point to the need for criminal justice reforms in Iowa, such as “uniform best practices for eyewitnesses and the mandatory recording of law enforcement interrogations.” I’ve enclosed excerpts after the jump, but I strongly recommend clicking through to read her whole story.

Avery’s wrongful conviction for rape rested primarily on eyewitness testimony. The latest edition of the New Yorker contains an excellent piece by Paul Kix on how a similar “travesty led to criminal-justice innovation in Texas.” Passages enclosed below cite Iowa State University Psychology Professor Gary Wells, who “has spent decades researching ways in which police lineups can be made more accurate.” Wells testified at a hearing seeking to exonerate a man who had died in prison, serving time for a rape he did not commit. Some of Wells’ recommendations for improving police identification practices were incorporated into a Texas law.

Those measures are different from the reforms an Iowa working group proposed and Governor Terry Branstad endorsed in his speech to state lawmakers this week. But with statehouse Republicans and Democrats deeply divided over education spending, Medicaid privatization, and Planned Parenthood funding, criminal justice reform may provide a rare opportunity for bipartisan cooperation this year. I hope members of the Iowa House and Senate who applauded Branstad’s call to reduce racial disparities will also consider some of the steps Texas has taken to prevent wrongful convictions.

Speaking recently to the Marshall Project, the rape survivor whose mistaken eyewitness testimony sent Avery to prison during the 1980s recounted how seeing a picture of her real attacker doesn’t stir up any emotion for her. In contrast, she says, “I still see Steven Avery as my assailant even though I understand he wasn’t.” I have read other accounts of traumatic memories being altered so that misremembered details evoke panic and terror. The way trauma affects the mind and body and the malleability of traumatic memories are major themes in Dr. Peter Levine’s latest book Trauma and Memory. I hadn’t heard of the book until I received a copy from a friend who found Levine’s approach to healing trauma life-changing.

A videotaped confession by Avery’s “low-functioning” nephew became a key part of the prosecution’s case in the trial that is the focus of “Making a Murderer.” Des Moines defense attorney Gary Dickey told Rood, “Set aside Avery’s innocence or guilt, the most striking thing of the whole series is the clearly coerced confession of Brendan Dassey.” It is surprisingly easy to manipulate a person to admit doing things that never happened, as shown by the New York Police Department’s ability to obtain false confessions from five teenagers accused of assaulting the “Central Park jogger” during the 1980s. Discussing that notorious crime, Saul Kassin, Psychology Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Williams College, pointed out that “in some cases people accused of crimes, particularly kids and others who are limited intellectually, become so confused by the lies that they actually come to believe they have committed this crime they did not commit.”

A chapter in Trauma and Memory focuses on “the pitfall of false memory,” such as when therapists (either unscrupulous or well-meaning) induce patients to believe wrongly that they suffered ritual or sexual abuse as children. At the end of this post, I enclose a passage from Levine’s book addressing “malevolent police interrogation methods” used to implant inaccurate memories and thereby obtain false confessions or wrongful convictions.

Among other things, the final installment of “Making a Murderer” covers a post-script to the Avery case: the downfall of District Attorney Ken Kratz, who prosecuted Avery and Dassey. Ryan Foley, an Associated Press correspondent in Iowa, was working for the AP in Wisconsin when he reported that Kratz “sent repeated text messages trying to spark an affair with a domestic abuse victim while he was prosecuting her ex-boyfriend.” Kratz lost his job over that despicable abuse of power, which he later blamed on mental health conditions and prescription drug dependence. All journalism students should listen to Foley’s interview with Kratz before the story appeared, a fascinating example of a newsmaker trying to intimidate a reporter. In quite a show of interrogation techniques, the DA warned that a “hatchet story” on his inappropriate behavior would reveal the journalist to be a “tool” for someone else’s political agenda. Kratz modulated his voice frequently–lecturing, mocking, shouting, even whispering–hoping to throw Foley off balance and trick him into revealing his sources.

From Lee Rood’s story for the January 16 Des Moines Register, “Making A Murderer: Cause for reforms?”

The Iowa Supreme Court recommended the electronic recording of law enforcement interviews a decade ago in a high-profile decision. Shortly after, the Iowa County Attorneys Association and Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller advised prosecutors and law enforcement that advisory should be taken as a mandate.

Yet today, electronic recording of interrogations is still discretionary and scattershot around the state, even though the vast majority of Iowa’s 400-plus law enforcement agencies have the technology. At least 19 states and the District of Columbia have mandated — either by statute or court action — the practice of recording interviews.

“If there is anything we can take away from the Avery case and make sure it doesn’t happen in Iowa, it is the need for legislation (in certain interrogations) to make sure they are recorded,” said Des Moines defense attorney Brandon Brown. […]

In 2014, the Justice Department began mandating videotaped interviews of suspects in most instances.

But the Iowa Legislature failed to pass a bill out of committee the same year that would have mandated electronic recording on the state level.

The bill aimed to bring Iowa in line with the 2010 Uniform Electronic Recordation of Custodial Interrogations Act. That federal act requires electronic recording of custodial interrogations from start to finish, but leaves it to states to decide where and for what types of crimes it would apply.

The Iowa measure was backed by the Iowa State Bar Association and some law enforcement, but it was opposed by the Iowa County Attorneys Association and others concerned it was too costly and might work to prosecutors’ disadvantage.

From Paul Kix’s feature for the New Yorker, “Recognition: How a travesty led to criminal-justice innovation in Texas.”

Gary Wells, a psychology professor at Iowa State University and an expert on eyewitness testimony, has spent decades researching ways in which police lineups can be made more accurate. In 1998, Wells was the principal author of a paper suggesting a few simple reforms. Lineups should be “blind,” a standard borrowed from scientific experiments: the officer administering the lineup should know nothing about the case, so as to avoid unconsciously influencing the proceedings. In photographic lineups, images should be presented sequentially rather than simultaneously, allowing witnesses to compare each image against their memory instead of choosing from among a group. And witnesses should be instructed that a lineup might not include the perpetrator. In 1999, Wells was part of a federal panel that published a report elaborating on these findings. The report was non-binding, but a few jurisdictions—New Jersey, Tucson, Minneapolis—took up its recommendations. […]

While Tim Cole’s family was trying to clear his name, twenty-nine state legislators, both Republicans and Democrats, had joined forces as the authors of three related bills: House Bill 498, which would establish the Timothy Cole Advisory Panel on the prevention of wrongful convictions; Senate Bill 117, which would require state police to be trained in more advanced lineup practices; and the Tim Cole Act, which would increase the amount of money the state owed to exonerated ex-convicts. Texas’s policy was to pay fifty thousand dollars for each year of wrongful incarceration—already one of the highest rates in the country. The bill would increase the amount to eighty thousand dollars per year spent behind bars, plus funds for college tuition.

It seemed unlikely that any of the bills would pass. […]

With [Governor Rick] Perry’s support, two of the three bills—the one calling for an advisory panel, and the one increasing relief for exonerees—won majorities in the state House, and then in the Senate. […]

The third bill, which would require police departments to reform their identification practices, had yet to pass. Most law-enforcement agencies in the state had no written policies regarding lineups; officers simply relied on old habits. […]

On June 17, 2011, more than two decades after Tim had urged Cory to go to the capitol and “make changes,” the Tim Cole Act passed. […] New York, California, and other left-leaning states have failed to pass similar legislation. […]

The reforms that have been instituted in Texas “are all good changes, and it’s not something that’s difficult,” Jason Lewis, a sergeant in Lubbock, told me. “This actually helps the investigation, because you want your witnesses to be credible and you want them to be correct.” Research carried out in Austin between 2008 and 2011 shows that the use of sequential lineups substantially “reduces mistaken identifications with little or no reduction in accurate identifications.” Jeff Blackburn said, “In terms of conducting eyewitness identification, Texas is doing better than any state in the Union.”

From chapter 7 of Peter Levine’s book Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past (pages 129-30, emphasis in original):

Returning briefly to the power of false memories to be believed as true, even when they can be factually proven to be false, let us look at a particularly sinister example of deliberately implanting false memories: Using (abusing) aggressive, high-intensity pressure and instilling extreme fear in the suspects they are interviewing, police may deliberately inject into a suspect’s story some element that they know to be false (or, at least, inconsistent). Then, when the suspect is interrogated at a later time, he will sometimes tell the interrogator’s version, believing it to be true, to be his own.

In many cases, clearly false memories have become so deeply entrenched in suspects that their inconsistencies are then used against them by prosecutors to obtain what have been in many instances false convictions. Amazingly, a significant proportion of these innocent individuals have come to believe that they were guilty. Their newly implanted false memories may last for a lifetime, though some innocent convicts do realize that they have been duped–unfortunately, far too late, and then only when DNA evidence or witness recantations have definitively proven their innocence.