Brief of Amici Curiae the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Support of Petitioner

The impact of fatigue on defendants and their statements can be consequential. The most well-known examples come from false confession cases, where suspects (subsequently exonerated) were convicted based on fabricated statements provided under extreme fatigue and duress. Zlatan Križan and Richard A. Leo discuss sleep deprivation and its effects, and they analyze how sleep deprivation and fatigue can undermine the voluntariness and reliability of statements and confessions.

Although voluntariness is a mainstay of the U.S. legal system, voluntariness and its flip side, coercion, are ill-defined. Likely because of this ambiguity, admissibility decisions for contested confessions have been inconsistent. Some modern-day, often-used interrogation techniques (e.g., investigators feigning friendship) are coercive, even if they appear innocuous and non-adversarial.

We are writing as strong supporters of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s effort to investigate and establish the facts surrounding the CIA’s detention and interrogation program in the aftermath of the September 11^th attacks. We urge the Committee to declassify and publicly release its 6,300 page report with as few redactions as possible. Any minority views and the response of the Central Intelligence Agency should also be made public.

Letters to the Maryland State Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee and House of Delegates Judiciary Committee regarding proposed legislation to protect the due process rights of youth and end the practice of automatically charging youth in adult criminal court.

Cases alleging child sex abuse often hinge on the forensic interview of the alleged victim, and thus the forensic interview should be the first place defense counsel looks. In this article, a forensic psychologist and a criminal defense lawyer discuss the forensic interview and how failure to follow best practices may encourage false allegations and elicit misinformation.

In the latest editions of its interrogation manual, Reid and Associates adopted several positions that align with the views of its critics. In a nutshell, Reid and Associates directly or indirectly endorsed many measures that could help prevent false confessions. Defense attorneys seeking to suppress confessions can strengthen their arguments by noting when law enforcement officers ignore any of the recommendations in the Reid manual.

Court holds the district erred in admitting evidence of a prior conviction.

Amicus curiae brief of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Amicus curiae brief of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Louisiana, and the Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law in support of petitioner.

Amicus curiae brief of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in support of petitioner.

Brief of the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner (on petition for writ of certiorari).

Age Does Matter in Juvenile Interrogations - Washington, DC (June 16, 2011) – More than two decades of exonerations have shown that pressure from police too often results in people confessing to crimes they have never committed. There is no reason to believe that children and adolescents would be immune to such pressures; common sense tells us the opposite is true.