Rivera had to serve another six years even after DNA evidence proved him innocent, stark evidence of how firmly authorities can hang on to innocent prisoners when they’re determined to do so. The Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office that wouldn’t let go of Rivera is, not surprisingly, the source of an alarming number of wrongful convictions under challenge. “They can never admit a mistake,” said Kathleen Zellner, a lawyer suing Lake County on behalf of Jerry Hobbs, who spent five years in jail for killing his daughter Laura and her friend Krystal.49 In May 2005 he found the girls’ bodies near their homes in Zion. Both had been stabbed numerous times. Prosecutors alleged Hobbs killed them because he was angry that his daughter was outside when she was supposed to be home. Both defense attorneys and prosecutors acknowledged that no physical evidence linked Hobbs to the murders.
Two years after Hobbs’s arrest, a private laboratory hired by his lawyers discovered that there had been sperm in his daughter’s vagina, anus, and mouth. The sperm DNA didn’t match Hobbs’s. Mermel suggested that Laura could have gotten the sperm on her while playing in the woods, where couples might have sex. Hobbs remained in jail. Ultimately, the DNA was found to match that of a friend of Krystal’s older brother named Jorge Torrez, a former Zion resident who was already serving a sentence in a Virginia jail for attacking three women. A judge released Hobbs in 2010, three years after he was proved innocent.
Hobbs, who moved to Texas and was trimming trees for a living, told Martin of the Times that he’d confessed to the crime because he hadn’t slept in days and figured the truth would come out. “I found my daughter,” he said. “She didn’t even have eyes in her head. I was already broken. They didn’t have to break me.”50
Mermel said he still suspected that Hobbs was the killer and that the sperm was not related to the crime. Perhaps, he said, Torrez masturbated while visiting Krystal’s brother, and then Laura got it on her hands and unknowingly transferred it elsewhere. “They have popcorn-movie night, and the little girl is in the same bed where this guy did it,” Mermel said by way of explanation. “How do we get colds? We touch our mouths, we touch our nose. What does a woman do after she urinates?” In the lobby of the prosecutor’s office, Mermel demonstrated the theory for Martin by standing and pulling his hand between his legs, as if wiping himself. “Front to back, O.K.?” Waller and Mermel never charged Torrez, but their successors did. He was also charged in federal court for another Virginia murder.51
In another case, Mermel opposed a new trial for a man convicted of killing an unidentified woman. When her identity became known years after the initial trial, it turned out that her former husband had once admitted that he had killed her. Mermel dismissed the confession as rants from a “one-armed Cuban feces-covered masturbator.” He told the Chicago Tribune, “The taxpayers don’t pay us for intellectual curiosity. They pay us to get convictions”—a total misreading of a prosecutor’s duties.52
Solving crimes can generally be broken down into three steps: (1) learn the identity of the perpetrator; (2) make an arrest; and (3) make it stick. When the crime is particularly notorious, authorities feel pressured to pay more attention to a fourth imperative: act fast. No case illustrates this more vividly than that of the West Memphis Three, three innocent teens who were tried and convicted in the hideous 1993 murders of three eight-year-old Cub Scouts.53 The scouts’ bodies were found hog-tied near their homes in West Memphis, Arkansas, a rough-edged town across the river from Memphis, Tennessee. The bodies showed signs of torture, and investigators quickly seized on the theory that the boys were killed as part of a satanic ritual. They targeted people they thought might fit a satanic profile, which quickly led them to nonconformist teen Damien Echols. He cut his jet-black hair in an odd, asymmetrical fashion, listened to heavy metal rock, and wore lots of black. Plus, he’d proclaimed himself a follower of Wicca, a religion based in witchcraft. Police picked up his friend Jessie Misskelley Jr., who had an IQ of 72, and questioned him for hours without his parents or an attorney present. He confessed. Prosecutors, basing much of their case on this confession (which Misskelley quickly recanted), won conviction against Echols, Misskelley, and their friend Jason Baldwin.
That much of Misskelley’s confession contradicted evidence did not bother the investigators. He told them the bodies were tied with rope, for example, when in fact the boys’ own shoestrings had been used. All three defendants were in classes during the time he said they’d committed the crimes. He also said the other two teens raped the boys, but there was no evidence of rape. Echols drew a death sentence, and the court sentenced Misskelley and Baldwin to life in prison. Fortunately for Echols, his legal team was able to delay execution.
The three would probably still be imprisoned—providing Echols stayed a step ahead of execution—were it not for two documentary filmmakers who journeyed to West Memphis expecting to shoot a film about three teens who were ritual murderers.54 Instead the filmmakers kept uncovering material that pointed to innocence. DNA testing unearthed no evidence that any of the three defendants had been at the scene or touched the victims. In fact, there was no physical evidence connecting them at all. It turned out that an “expert” witness for the prosecution owned a mail-order doctorate. Another witness was a jailhouse snitch who regularly claimed cellmates confessed to him privately. Bite marks on one of the victims, overlooked by investigators and not mentioned in the trial, didn’t match the teeth of any of the defendants. Circumstantial evidence pointed to a man who had his teeth removed years later, after the bite marks were made public. The man told conflicting stories about the circumstances of his dental work.
The case against Echols, Misskelley, and Baldwin was worse than flimsy. Appealing to blind panic and prejudice, it was devoid of substance. Word spread. Books, a fact-filled Internet site, and other films followed. The rock group Metallica took up the cause of freeing the three teens, and lawyers hammered away with a variety of appeals. The original case eventually collapsed, but it took many years.
Ultimately, three men in their thirties, convicted half their lives ago, walked out of prison in 2011. They’d submitted Alford pleas, rarely used pleas through which a defendant can proclaim innocence while acknowledging there is enough evidence for a jury to find him or her guilty. The judge sentenced them to time served—more than eighteen years.
False confessions such as the one used to help convict the Memphis Three are far more prevalent than common sense would dictate. In fact, they’ve been discovered so often that researchers have published studies explaining the phenomenon. One such study in the March 2004 North Carolina Law Review focused on 125 false-confession cases. “There are three groups of people most likely to confess,” concluded Steven A. Drizin, a law professor at Northwestern who conducted the study with Richard A. Leo, a criminology professor at the University of California–Irvine. “They are the mentally retarded, the mentally ill and juveniles.”55
TV and film can’t come close to depicting the reality behind the closed doors of the interrogation room for the simple reason that it’s not feasible to follow the proceedings minute by minute for four, eight, sixteen, or thirty-two hours. Drizin found false confessions most common in murder cases. “Those are the cases where there is the greatest pressure to obtain confessions,” he said, “and confessions are often the only way to solve those crimes.”56 He advocates for videotaping police interrogations to, in effect, allow the public to see the sausage being made.