Out in the lonely forensic linguistics wing of Language Log Plaza I've been busy recently trying to help with a case that began all the way back in 1993. A house on Chicago's south side was torched with gasoline and Adam Gray, who had just turned 14, was brought in for questionning, mostly because his former girlfriend lived in that house. At the time of the fire, the two were at serious odds with each other and so the police considered Adam a logical suspect and hauled him in for questionning. For whatever reasons, the police did not tape-record the interrogation, leaving few traces of what actually was said and done that day. Police departments that fail to make a verifiable record of what they do and say was the subject of a previous Language Log post (see here).
Adam was quickly charged with the crime, interrogated for four hours,
tried and convicted of arson leading to death, and has spent the
past 13 years serving a life sentence in prison. Recently the
Youth Network Coucil in Chicago has been trying to get the courts to
reassess the evidence, especially the damaging confession that Adam
made in a nine minute recap of those four hours in the police
department. Confessions are made in language; thus their request for
linguistic help. Unfortunately, since no tape-recording was made of any
part of the interrogation, there isn't a lot for a linguist to work
with. Adam reports that he denied committing the arson many times but
the police continued to accuse him of it anyway. You wouldn't learn
this from the police reports and testimony, however. They denied using
any inappropriate tactics, of course, and the stenographic record of
those last nine minutes doesn't reveal much to support the claim that
Adam was coerced. But even with the fragmented record left by the
police, the following questions remain:
1. As a juvenile suspect, why
wasn't Adam allowed to see his mother during the interrogation?
Adam had slept over at his adult
brother's house on the night of the fire. At 5 a.m. the police first
went to Adam's house and his mother told them where they could find
him. They then went to his brother's house and told Adam to come to the
station with them for questionning. They told his brother not to hurry
because it would be two hours before the questionning actually started.
The brother testified that he then got dressed, ate breakfast, called
Adam's mother and told her what happened, and arrived at the station
before 7 a.m. He asked to see Adam and they took him to the room where
he was sitting alone. The brother could see him through the one-way
window but he wasn't allowed to talk with him. Adam's mother and sister
arrived shortly after. Between seven and noon they asked to see Adam
over and over again but were told that they could not do this. Adam
reports that he asked to see his mother and brother but was told that
they weren't present at the station at any time. Adam claims that the
police told him that his mother didn't care what happened to him and
that she refused to come to the station for him. The police testified
that they didn't tell him this. All that is questionable here could
have been avoided by tape-recording the entire process.
2. Was Adam questioned without
concern for his well-being and health?
The interrogation actually started
at about 8 a.m and lasted until noon. Adam reports that they gave him
two cups of coffee that morning but didn't offer him anything to
eat until after they got his confession. Different police gave
conflicting stories about this but one of them testified that Adam was
given a McDonalds sandwich BEFORE the stenographer was brought in to
record his statement, at about 11 a.m. Adam says that he wasn't
given anything to eat until AFTER he agreed to give his confession
statement.
3. Was Adam coerced or harassed
while he was being questioned?
Adam's account of the
interrogation was remarkably different from the way the police
described it. He said that every time he denied setting the fire the
police kept accusing him of it anyway. He reported that he cried
frequently as he tried desparately to convince them of his innocence.
He claimed that they told him he would get the electric chair unless he
confessed. As for tactics, the police are allowed to lie to suspects
and one detective admitted that they concocted several lies to get him
to admit setting the fatal fire. One story was that Adam's best
friend had turned on him, telling the police that Adam had planned to
kill his ex-girlfriend (his friend subsequently denied that he ever
said this). Another story was that his mother and family didn't care
enough about him to come to the station for him. His mother testified
that she and other family members were in the waiting area all the time
but were never permitted to see Adam. Finally, the interrogator got
Adam to place his hand on a copy machine to take its image, claiming
that it would show any traces of gasoline. After Adam agreed to do
this, they informed him there was gasoline all over his handprint.
Adam reports that he eventually cracked under the pressure, believing
that his only way out of this was to dream up a story that the police
might believe. So he told them how he took an empty gallon milk jug to
a local gas station and purchased three-fourths of a gallon of gas. He
then went to the house and poured the gas from the outside stairway of
the house, starting at the top floor and ending at the bottom. Then he
used his lighter to set it afire. That was enough for the police. They
called in the court stenographer and got Adam to recap the story in
her presence.
4. What did the confession say?
From letters that Adam wrote within
a week of the fire, it is clear that he could write English sentences
in a way that is pretty normal for a 14 year-old boy. Most were
simple sentences but a few contained embeddings and multiple clauses.
This contrasted with his syntax in the stenographically recorded nine
minutes of the interrogation, where his sentence length was 3.9 words
per response. By far the majority of his answers consisted of either
one word or two word phrases. One can never know for sure what
was on his mind at that time but clamming up like this at least
suggests that he had given up and agreed to everything the Assistant
State's Attorney asked him.
This stenographic record became the "confession" that sent Adam Gray to
prison for life. It consisted of 78 questions, mostly answered by
"yes." Adam didn't narrate or explain. He just responded to questions
briefly in a way that looked very much like a well-rehearsed scenario.
Adam signed it at the bottom but, oddly enough, added a
sentence in his own handwriting, possibly because the police remembered
a loose end for which Adam hadn't accounted. They had quickly scoured
the area for an empty milk jug and finally found one that seemed
suitable as evidence (no mention was made about whether it had gas
traces). But they still had the problem of the missing lighter. So they
got Adam to add that he had broken it up and flushed it down a toilet.
Case closed as far as the police were concerned.
5. How could these questionable
issues have been avoided?
All of the reasonable doubt in this
case could have been resolved if the police had tape-recorded the
entire interrogation. All we have is a stenographic record of nine of
the 240 minutes that Adam was in custody. And there is no way to verify the
accuracy of this record, since they didn't tape-record it either. As
a result, we can never know for sure what was said leading up to the
recapped confession statement or, for that matter, during it. An
unimpeachable record (audio or video) of the entire interrogation (not
just the recap) could have justified every step in the process.
More and more police departments around the country are reaping the
benefits of such procedure. It eliminates challenges of police
coercion, provides good training protocols for new detectives, and has
been found to be cost-effective. The true offenders are caught and the
tactics are observable to all who may be concerned about such
things. Perhaps most of all, subsequent trials could avoid the "he
said, she said" battle between the prosecution and the defense. It
eliminates the reasonable doubt and relieves jurors of the need to make
inferences based on second-hand information and the self-reports of the
police.
In Adam Gray's case we can't know for sure whether or not the police coerced
him to invent a false confession so that he could go free. It might
seem unbelievable that anyone would naively create a false confession
but it's quite likely that a child could submit to the influence of
strong authority figures such as law enforcement officers and state's
attorneys. We can't know what was going through the mind of a 14
year-old child who becomes subjected to the frightening experience of a
police interrogation. For that matter, we can't even know how frequently
adults actually act rationally under the power and pressure of
being interrogated at the police station. But a verifiable record would
certainly help relieve the onus of some of these questions.