For decades, a confession to a crime was one of the surest ways to send someone to prison. But false murder confessions happen, and according to defense attorneys, they happen often.
“False confessions plague the system at a fairly high rate,” writes defense attorney Sean O’Brien from Kansas City.
A conviction based on a false confession can have devastating effects — consider Sandra Hemme, who spent 43 years in a Missouri prison for a murder she did not commit.
That is more time in prison than any wrongly convicted woman in American history.
The Innocence Project, which helped free Hemme, says of all the people exonerated by DNA evidence between 1989 and 2020, almost a third confessed to a murder they did not commit.
But Hemme’s case — decided by the Missouri Court of Appeals in October — should help others wrongly convicted of murder win their freedom. That's because the three-judge panel directly addressed the issue of false confessions in its 75-page opinion.
“It does, I think, put new teeth in some of those 1940s and 50s and 60s U.S. Supreme Court decisions that distrust confessions where there are vulnerable subjects and persistent police questioning,” O’Brien told KCUR.
That is exactly what happened to Hemme when she was arrested for killing a St. Joseph librarian in 1984.
Hemme was sedated when she confessed
Hemme was highly medicated when she was questioned repeatedly by St. Joseph Police detectives. O’Brien said it reminded him of when police used to sweat confessions out of people.
“That's effectively what they did to Sandy. She was interrogated a dozen times over a ten-day period, and finally, she gives them a confession they think they can use,” he said.
“There are times when the interrogators describe her as breaking down into tears when she gets confronted with parts of her statement that could not possibly be true.”
The court’s opinion has some legal analysis, but it also sets out additional guidance about false confessions.
“They acknowledge that there were things out in the real world that were totally inconsistent with Sandy's confession," O'Brien said.
O’Brien said several factors “contaminated” Hemme’s confession — namely, the amount of media coverage surrounding the murder.
In her confession, Hemme described the flowered bedspread on the victim’s bed, despite having never been to her home. O’Brien says it’s likely that Hemme knew about the bedspread from a picture on the front page of the newspaper.
The police misconduct was so egregious that even the appeals court called it out. The St. Joseph police, the judges said in their unanimous ruling, “ignored and buried evidence coming into its possession.”
Hemme’s case reminds O’Brien of another notorious wrongful conviction out of St. Joseph: that of Melvin Lee Reynolds. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1979 for killing and sexually assaulting a four-year-old boy.
Reynolds was interrogated nine times and was even given “truth serum,” a drug used in attempts to extract truthful statements from people. Before finally confessing, Reynolds was questioned for 13 hours and was promised he could go home if he confessed.
He served four years before the real killer came forward.
Some of those same officers worked on the Hemme investigation, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.
A false confession in Clay County
False confessions are still common today, but some juries are beginning to consider the conditions of a confession.
In April, a false confession came into play during a murder trial in Clay County. Lori Ackerman of Smithville, Missouri, was charged with killing her fiancé.
She was interrogated for seven hours by police before confessing.
“I was like, 'I’m done fighting with this,'” she told KMBC.
Her lawyer said other evidence from the crime scene didn’t match what police said during Ackerman’s interrogation.
It took the jury just two hours to acquit.
Hemme has been out of prison for six months now and living with family in mid-Missouri.
“She's happy to be home and she loves her sister and her brother-in-law where she's living,” said O’Brien. “And they love her very much. And that is really a wonderful relationship.”
O’Brien has worked on many high-profile exoneration cases including Ricky Kidd and Joe Amrine. He says Hemme is doing better than most people who are released from prison after so many years.
“Because she has family. She's doing better because she has a stable roof over her head.”
