No, I was now in their little box of horrors. Their little box as they call it. August 2018. He just wanted to report his dad missing, but then cops broke him down for like 17 hours. And by the end, Thomas Perez Jr. had falsely confessed to murder, was locked in a psych ward, and still didn’t know his father was alive.
These are cops who went too far in interrogations. I haven’t made that yet. I get back to my mom. Well, it’s not a matter if you’ve been there. February 16th, 2022. It’s a cold Wednesday afternoon in Walkegan, Illinois, when a boy sat across from a detective in a small, sterile room. He’s only wearing a t-shirt, visibly shivering, and just wanted to go home.
He didn’t know it yet, but the next 43 minutes are going to change his life. Police are investigating a shooting here at a local Dollar General that had left a clerk seriously injured. And the boy had nothing to do with it. He was actually playing basketball in another town at the time, but he ended up confessing to this crime.
Yeah, he confessed to something he didn’t do. So, how did that happen? The city of Waggan refused to release that interrogation video at first. It only became public after a lawsuit. And when it finally did, it was clear just how wrong things had gone. The footage shows a detective, Shawn Ames, leading the boy into a false confession.
He wasn’t yelling, and there was no violence or physical threats. He just used carefully chosen words, nudges in the right or wrong direction, and a growing pressure that would be hard for any teenager to stand up to, especially one cold, hungry, and scared out of his mind. It all started with Miranda writes, “That standard legal warning we’ve all heard on TV, the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney.
” But Detective Ains immediately downplays them. I think your words are going to be extremely valuable in this situation. I I don’t think you have anything to necessarily fear in terms of talking to us. Subtle, yeah, but extremely dangerous. Because instead of making it clear that staying silent was his legal right, the detective made it sound like talking was the smart thing to do, that it would somehow help him.
And then came the false comfort. A leaned in, saying, “I promise you, if you’re straight with me, that weight’s going to go away.” As if confessing even to something he didn’t do would somehow lift the burden off his chest. Steven Drizzen, a law professor from Northwestern University, had spent his career studying false confessions, and he called it misleading, manipulative, and a violation of everything Miranda is supposed to protect.
But that wasn’t everything. One of the hardest parts to watch here was the moment the detective planted the idea that this could all just blow over. He tells the boy that sometimes people who shoot in self-defense or by accident never spend a day in jail. And I’ve watched people I’ve driven people home. I’ve shot people before.
They never spent a day day in jail. Now, imagine being a scared boy who literally tells the detective he’s worried he’s not going to see his family again. And then you’re given the promise of leniency. That maybe if you just said the words, you could sleep in your own bed tonight. And imagine this one. Illinois had even passed a law banning deception during juvenile interrogations.
That law was in effect for 6 weeks when this happened. And yet Ains kept telling the boy that they had loads of evidence, that they knew he was at the scene, that video footage showed him, that witnesses saw him, and that it was just a matter of explaining why he did it. No, I can tell you you wouldn’t be here talking to me right now if I didn’t have an abundance of information that you know you were there and you were you were involved in this. Okay.
So, but none of that was true. In fact, the victim himself didn’t identify the boy in a photo lineup. A witness didn’t pick his photo until after staring at these images for over 7 minutes. And most importantly, the store video didn’t show the boy at all. After all, he was on the basketball court about 18 miles away.
So, the detective builds the whole case on sand. And without a false confession, there was nothing solid to charge him with. And what’s messed up here is that throughout the interrogation, a said he didn’t want to put words in the boy’s mouth, but that’s exactly what he did. Dollar store since that.
So, maybe maybe your memory isn’t great. Cool. Um, I’m trying to give you little facts about the situation and maybe you can remember exactly what happened. Okay. He named the store, described the victim’s height and ethnicity, even gave details about the struggle and the shot being fired through the door.
And just like that, every breadcrumb the boy needed to build a believable but false story was fed to him one line at a time. What the detective never asked was what kind of weapon was used and what the shooter wore. Key details that might have proven the boy didn’t really know what happened. Well, because if he’d answered wrong, the whole illusion might have fallen apart.
In the end, the boy’s charged with serious crimes, including attempted murder. He’s kept in custody, and his life was hanging by a thread. And then his basketball team steps in. They proved he was playing a game out of town at the exact time of the shooting. Only then were the charges dropped. To this day, the Walkegan PD has not apologized.
An outside review admitted the detective made mistakes, but said he hadn’t technically broken any rules. Manipulative interviews and cops going too far is as old as time. And this next case on the list was one of the very first to actually change the law. March 30th, 1934. It started with a murder. A white plantation owner named Raymond Stewart was found dead in Keer County, Mississippi.
Within days, three African-American tenant farmers, Arthur Ellington, Ed Brown, and Henry Shields were arrested. There were no eyewitnesses, no fingerprints, just their confessions. Except those confessions weren’t real. They were whipped out of them, literally. At their trial, the prosecution made no effort to hide how those statements were obtained.
In fact, the officers themselves admitted it. The men were stripped and beaten with leather straps until their backs were torn open. They’re basically laid on chairs and told the beatings would continue until they confessed. And not just confess, but say exactly what the deputies wanted to hear. If they slipped up even a little, more beatings would come.
Man, at one point, one of these guys was even hanged by his neck from a tree and revived, only to be beaten again. Now, this is no interrogation, but pure torture. The kind that would sound out of place, maybe not in a medieval dungeon. And yet, their confessions were read aloud in court. The jury heard nothing else, just those words carved out of them in pain.
And by the end of the day, yeah, just one day, they were all convicted and all sentenced to hang. The case goes up to the Mississippi Supreme Court and unbelievably it upheld the convictions. Only one judge dissented and his words described what happened perfectly. He wrote that the entire transcript reads more like pages torn from some medieval account than a record made within the confines of a modern civilization.
2 years later, the case reaches the United States Supreme Court. And this time, everything changed. In a unanimous decision, the justices ruled that confessions obtained through torture could never under any circumstances be used as evidence. It was the first time the court made it crystal clear. Brutality has no place in American justice.
If someone’s words were beaten out of them, they don’t count. Period. The ruling didn’t erase the pain those three men endured, but it did save their lives. Once the case was sent back to Mississippi, they agreed to plead no contest to lesser charges. Manslaughter, not murder. Their new sentences ranged from 6 months to a few years.
A far cry from the death penalty they had originally faced. However, none of their torturers were held accountable. And in the strange twist, the prosecutor from that trial, John Stennis, went on to become a US senator. He stayed in office for over four decades and never lost an election.
But this case, known as Brown versus Mississippi, will remain the first real crack in the legal foundation that had long allowed police brutality to hide behind a badge. It marked the moment the court started to say enough. And it was the first time people and the justice system were forced to face a truth we’re still reckoning with today.
Sometimes the people meant to uphold the law go too far. Way too far. Welcome to May 1984. A jury in Virginia sentences a 22-year-old man named Earl Washington Jr. to death. They believed he raped and murdered a mother named Rebecca Lynn Williams. The only real evidence against him was a confession. But here’s what the jury didn’t fully grasp.
Earl didn’t understand the confession himself. But let’s go back now, shall we? Who was Earl Washington Jr.? Earl was a quiet, soft-spoken African-Amean man from rural Virginia. He had an IQ of 69, roughly the mental capacity of a 10-year-old. He was deeply trusting of authority, polite to a fault, and easily led. 1983, he’s arrested for an unrelated assault.
And while in custody, police begin questioning him about a series of local crimes. One after another, Earl confessed, five in total, but four of them quickly fell apart. Wrong dates, wrong places, victims saying he wasn’t the guy. Only one confession stuck. The murder of Rebecca Lynn Williams. Now, Rebecca was a mother of three.
In 1982, she was attacked in her apartment, stabbed more than 30 times. Before she died, she tells police her attacker was an African-Amean man, and that he acted alone. When Earl confessed to her murder, the details were wrong. He said she was short, but she’s actually 5’8. He said he stabbed her a couple of times, but she had 38 stab wounds.
He didn’t know the location of the apartment. He didn’t even know if she had children, though they were home during the attack. So, how did that confession stick? Well, detectives helped him fix it again and again, they corrected him. They even coached him. They walked him through the scene until he finally got it right, or at least close enough to write it down and have him sign it.
At trial, Earl had no chance. His defense team never explained his intellectual disability, and they didn’t challenge the confession. The prosecution had no physical evidence tying him to the crime, but they didn’t need it. Earl had confessed, and that was enough. January 1984, the jury sentences him to death. By the summer of 1985, he’s just 9 days away from execution. But then a twist comes in.
Another death row inmate named Joseph Yaratano heard about Earl’s case. Man, something didn’t sit right. He flagged it to Mary Deans, a woman who’d spent years helping people on death row. And thanks to her and a team of volunteer attorneys, Earl’s execution was put on hold just in time. 1993, DNA testing finally comes into play.
It shows that Earl couldn’t have been the source of the semen found at the crime scene. Still though, Virginia wouldn’t accept new evidence because they had a law that gave prisoners just 21 days to bring in anything new after sentencing. Who cares about DNA technology? And Earl was well past that. So, in 1994, the governor steps in.
Earl’s death sentence was changed to life in prison, but he’s still behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. It takes 6 years and even more advanced DNA testing to finally find the truth. A man named Kenneth Tinsley, already serving a life sentence for another rape, was a match. 2000, the governor granted Earl a pardon, he walks out of prison in February 2001.
Free for the first time in 17 years. 6 years later, the state gives him a formal absolute pardon, fully clearing his name. Today, Earl lives a quiet life with his wife on Virginia Beach. He’s working as a maintenance man. And when asked about life after prison, he once said, “This a whole lot better than I expected.” He received nearly $2 million in settlements for what happened to him.
His case helped change Virginia’s backward laws, allowing inmates to now request DNA testing at any point. No more 21-day crap. It also became a key example in the fight to stop the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Even the man who was scheduled to execute him, Jerry Given, became an anti-death penalty activist after Earl’s release.
But you know what? Earl wasn’t the only man sent to death row because cops pushed too far during an interrogation. In the future, cases like ours can be used as examples of what not to do during an investigation or uh interrogation. July 1996, Crystal Champagne left her apartment in Louisiana to walk to the store, but she never came home.
The next day, her body was found sexually assaulted, strangled, and left under a bridge. The community is devastated and the police needed answers fast. So just a few days later, they have somebody in custody. Her 21-year-old step cousin, Damon Thiido. Now, he confessed, but here’s the thing. None of what he said was true. After being brought in for questioning, Damon sat in this interrogation room for nearly 9 hours.
He had no lawyer, was offered no food, and had no idea how much was on the line. Eventually, he broke. They put you in a room and um you know, you’re in a chair with a desk. They’re allowed to um manipulate you, threaten you. He tells police that he had assaulted and killed Crystal. He gives him details, but the problem was that almost every single one of those details was wrong.
He didn’t know where her body had been found. He didn’t know the exact injury she suffered. and his story didn’t line up with the physical evidence. Even the prosecution’s own expert would later describe his confession as false in every significant aspect. So, how did this happen? Damon’s legal team later explained what went wrong.
He’d been hit with the results of a failed polygraph, confronted with his own guilt over his cousin’s death. And even though he didn’t cause it, he started to believe that maybe he’d done something he couldn’t remember. Besides, he was vulnerable, tired, confused, and the officers in that room made it sound like his denial was useless.
So, he said what he thought they wanted to hear. And well, to them, that was enough. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1997. By the time the attorney Dennis Labou met Damon in 1998, he was 23 and already on death row at Angela Prison in Louisiana. He was so depressed that he barely spoke.
At one point, he even considered giving up his appeals and accepting execution just to end it all. But she convinced them to keep fighting. It took years, and most of their early efforts failed. But then a team came together, lawyers, investigators, and advocates who refused to let Damon’s story end in silence. The Innocence Project eventually joined the fight.
They pushed for new testing, fresh analysis, and a deeper look into the case. And finally, in 2012, 16 years after he first walked into that interrogation room, Damon Thiidau was exonerated and set free. The day Damon left prison, he smiled and said one word that summed it all up. Free. You dream of it every day, but it’s not it’s not the same as actually going through it.
It’s it’s it’s a surreal walk. He tried to move on, rented a small apartment, and took a job in a mail room. But at night, he would sometimes wake up in a panic, open the hallway door, and stand there just to remind himself that he could leave if he wanted. That feeling of being trapped never really leaves.
Damon then decided to leave the mail room because it left him feeling confined with too much time indoors. So, he became a truck driver and being on the road made him feel alive. He loved the open space, the quiet, the freedom. He started giving talks, public speaking used to scare him. But now he became one of the most powerful voices for witness to innocence, an organization of death row exoneries.
Damon spoke about the cruelty of solitary confinement, the weight of wrongful convictions, and how easy it is for police to get it wrong when they’re under pressure to solve a case. And through it all, he continued to build a life. He danced at weddings, marched for pride, made friends, laughed, and just kept growing.
Sadly, in 2021, Damon passed away from CO 19 complications. He’d been vaccinated, but his body had been through too much. 16 years on death row had taken its toll, and he didn’t trust the government. So, he hesitated. And by the time he got the shot, it was too late. But those who knew him remember something else. his strength, his heart, and the way he never let bitterness win.
One of his lawyers once said, “I never saw a more remarkable inner journey.” Damon’s case ended up helping change minds. It pushed for videotape interrogations and highlighted the dangers of techniques that break people down instead of bringing out the truth. He was one of six men exonerated from Louisiana’s death row.
And his name still comes up every time someone asks, “What if we got it wrong?” I used to be one of those people who believed that someone would never confess to something they didn’t do. And society as a whole believes that. But yet here I am. At least every I’d say 30 seconds, uh, Ford was saying, “You keep saying you weren’t there.
You keep lying to us, you’re gonna die. You’re going to get the needle.” How does it feel to die? July 8th, 1997, US Navy sailor Bill Bosow returns home in Norfolk, Virginia after a week at sea. But instead of being greeted by his wife Michelle, he walked into a nightmare. She was dead. sexually assaulted, strangled, and stabbed inside their apartment.
The crime scene didn’t suggest a violent break-in as there was no mess, no signs of a struggle, just a single act of brutality that would haunt the city for decades and ruin the lives of four innocent men. Within 24 hours, the Norfolk police had their first suspect, Daniel Williams, Bosow’s neighbor. Someone said that he had a crush on Michelle and that was enough.
Williams was also a Navy sailor, newly married and trying to support his wife Nicole, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. Can’t make this up. He had no criminal record, no known violence, but yet he’s pulled in anyway. Williams is interrogated for hours. Some reports say 11 straight, and he eventually broke. You have a person sitting over across the table from you that’s getting in your face, yelling at you, calling you a liar, poking you in the chest with their finger.
He confessed to the murder even though there was no physical evidence linking him to the scene. Still, he signed that confession. Why? Later, he said that he was exhausted, scared, confused, and just wanted it to stop. And just like that, the police had their man, or so they thought. Then came the second arrest, Joseph Joe Dick Jr., Williams roommate.
Now, Dick insisted he was innocent. In fact, he had an alibi. This guy was on duty aboard the USS Sapan that night, but after hours of pressure, Dick confessed as well. He was told he might face the death penalty, so he signed. I just wanted to tell him anything to get him off my back to shut and to shut him up. I was tired emotionally, mentally worn down.
Now the police are on a roll looking for a group attack theory. They asked Dick to name some other people. Under pressure, he gives up some names. Some he barely knew. One of these poor bastards was Eric Wilson, another Navy sailor. Wilson had never even met Michelle before. Still, they brought him in. He too confessed after being interrogated.
And then came a fourth, Derek Ty, another sailor. And yet again, another long interrogation and another confession. And now these wonder cops had their four guys, all in the Navy, all with no criminal history and all confessing to a crime that none of their DNA matched. 1999. It wasn’t until nearly 2 years after the murder that police finally turned their attention to Omar Ballard, a violent offender already in prison for assaulting two other women.
His DNA perfectly matched the evidence found at the scene. Ballard confessed, and not just vaguely. His confession matched the forensic evidence in ways the others never could. He tells police he acted alone, dismantling the initial narrative that this was a group assault. The truth is that I alone committed the murders. There was no one with me.
No one was uh ever present in any shape, form, or fashion. But here’s the twist. Even after Ballard confessed, the police didn’t want to drop the case against the Norfolk 4. Instead, they insisted it had to be a group crime, they argued that Ballard just didn’t want to snitch. Besides, they already had confessions.
And to this day, it’s one of the most disturbing parts of the case. Why did four innocent men confess? The answer was the interrogation tactics, my friends. Detectives, particularly this Glenn Ford, used extreme pressure, long hours, intimidation, and threats of the death penalty. These four poor guys were told things like, “Tell us what we want to hear or you’ll die.
” Ford is a very intimidating person. He’s not a big person, but he’s like a bulldog. Once he gets his teeth into you, he doesn’t stop until he gets what he wants from you. Derek Ty said it felt like his only way out. After nearly 11 hours with no lawyers and relentless questioning, he gave in, saying, “I thought my only option was to lie and live or to tell the truth and die.
” So basically, they weren’t confessing. They thought they were surviving. And then came the trials. What a mess that was. Again, no physical evidence linking the four men to the crime. In fact, their DNA had been ruled out earlier on, but prosecutors had leaned in hard on those confessions, even though they were inconsistent, even though they were wrong on the details, and even though Ballard had confessed.
Eventually, Eric Wilson was convicted of rape and served his full 8 and 1/2ear sentence. Meanwhile, Williams, Stick, and Ty were given life without parole. Years later, the Innocence Project gets a wind of this, and other legal advocates as well. Investigations revealed how the interrogations were coercive. The confessions didn’t match the crime scene, and the DNA, the only real evidence, pointed only to Ballard.
It took decades of appeals, petitions, and national pressure before things changed. 2009, then Governor Tim Kaine granted conditional pardons to Williams, Dick, and Ty. It let him out of prison, but it didn’t clear their names. They still had to register as sex offenders. Wilson had already completed his sentence by then, but his conviction still stood.
Finally, in 2017, after more exculpatory evidence surfaced and the state admitted to its mistakes, Governor Terry McAuliffe issued absolute pardons, and all four men were finally exonerated. McAuliff said, “These pardons closed the final chapter on a grave injustice that has plagued these four men for nearly 20 years.
” The four men later received a combined $8.4 4 million settlement from the city and state. But ain’t no amount of money given back any of those years they lost. I’m telling you, I think you’re a liar and you’re going to prove it to me. The doctor said just like that. I swear to God, I didn’t do nothing.
September 23rd, 2008, a father of seven rushed to the hospital. His son Matthew was critically ill. Hours later, Matthew’s gone. and the father, Adrienne Thomas, was under suspicion of murder. Police believed Matthew’s injuries pointed to abuse, but instead of waiting for conclusive medical reporting, they zeroed in on Adrien, and what followed was nearly 10 hours of relentless interrogation.
And again, Adrien had no lawyer and no breaks. The grieving father was confined to a small room with two detectives on the hunt for a confession and a ticking clock. From the start, Adrien insisted he hadn’t harmed his son. But the officers kept pushing, telling him his wife could be arrested if he didn’t confess, that his son’s life depended on him remembering what happened, and that if he just explained, doctors might still be able to help.
Yeah. He thought his son was still alive. Oh, they didn’t tell him that. Matthew had already been declared brain deadad and there was no saving him. Eventually, after hours of psychological pressure and lies, Adrien said what they wanted to hear, that he had thrown his son onto a bed three times in a moment of frustration, and he later signed a confession.
And just like that, the case was closed. But the truth was far more complicated. 2009, Adrien Thomas was convicted of seconddegree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life. The key evidence was that videotaped confession. Now, during the trial, Adrian told the jury that he had lied to police just to get out of the room and be with his wife at the hospital.
He said the confession wasn’t true. Medical experts were also divided. One doctor claimed the baby died of head trauma, but others, including renowned neuropathologist Dr. Jan Lema, testified that Matthew actually died of septic shock from a bacterial infection, a condition completely missed in the original diagnosis. Despite the doubts and conflicting science, the jury sided with the prosecution and Adrien was sent to prison.
Years later, filmmakers Grover Babick and Blue Ho came across the full interrogation footage. Shocked by what they saw, they used it to create the award-winning documentary Scenes of a Crime, which exposed the subtle and not so subtle tactics used to break a suspect. Viewers can see it all. The fake urgency, the lies about evidence, the emotional manipulation.
At one point, a detective tells Adrien, “You got to find that memory right now, Adrien. You got to find that memory. This is important for your son’s life.” Even though the officers already knew his son was gone, the documentary brought national attention to Adrienne’s case and sparked new conversations about false confessions and how easy it is to get one when a person is scared, confused, and completely worn down.
2014, New York’s highest court stepped in. The judges ruled unanimously that the interrogation tactics used were too coercive and that Adrien’s confession should never have been used in court. He’s granted a new trial. Now, this time the tape was off the table. The prosecution had to build their case without it.
And without it, they almost had nothing. The jury deliberated for 2 days and finally on June 12th, 2014, Adrien P. Thomas was found not guilty. After nearly 6 years behind bars, he walks out a free man. Adrienne’s case wasn’t just about one interrogation gone wrong. This one raised serious questions about a widely used technique called the raid technique.
A method involving confronting suspects with fake evidence, downplaying consequences, and emotionally cornering them until they confess. Experts like Saul Cassen and Richard Offshet argue that it’s incredibly effective at getting confessions, but not at getting truthful ones. Also, according to the Innocence Project, nearly 30% of DNA exonerated cases involved false confessions.
And well, that’s not a fluke. It’s a pattern. In Adrienne’s case, he almost spent his life in prison for a crime that may have not even happened. The raid technique was used in this next case as well, but this person wasn’t nearly as lucky. It might make you look a little bad or make you look like you were more involved than you want to be uh looked at.
March 1st, 2006, a boy sat in a beige interrogation room in Wisconsin, barely speaking above a whisper. His name is Brendan Dassie. And in the next few hours, he’s about to confess to a brutal murder on tape. And the thing is, he didn’t do it. And if Brendan’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because of Making a Murderer, the Netflix docu series that made millions of people question everything they knew about the justice system.
Brendan was accused of helping his uncle, Steven Avery, sexually assault and murder 25-year-old photographer Terresa Halbach. In 2005, the story was huge. There was a car, a bonfire, a salvage yard, and eventually two arrests. Brendan’s confession was the turning point. Prosecutors called it the smoking gun, the thing that sealed the deal.
But when the tapes came out, people saw something else entirely. We’re in your corner. We already know what happened. Now tell us exactly. Don’t lie. We can’t say it for you, Brad. Okay, but first who was Brendan Dassie? You see, Brendan wasn’t the kind of kid who stood out. He lived in a trailer near his uncle’s auto salvage yard in Monitook County, Wisconsin.
He liked video games and wrestling. He was shy, soft-spoken, and had trouble with school. He had an IQ in the low7s and was diagnosed with a learning disability. So when it came to understanding people or standing up to pressure, he was incredibly vulnerable. And in that interrogation room, he was completely alone.
Again, no lawyer, no parents, and just two detectives and hours of questions. Brendan was questioned over several days. But it was the March 1st interrogation that changed everything. Detectives Tom Fazbender and Mark Wigert used that same method we talked about called the raid technique. But here’s the problem. This technique was never meant for minors and definitely not ones like Brendan.
The officers fed him details, pressured him to agree, and praised him when he said what they wanted to hear. And when he didn’t, they kept pushing. At one point, they asked, “What did Steven do to her head?” Brendan stared at him confused. He guessed. He cut her hair. They pressed again. Finally, they just came out and said it.
Who shot her in the head? Brendan hesitated, but he said Steven did. That’s how it went again and again. He was guessing, trying to give the right answers, probably thinking that if he did, they would let him go. He even mentioned that he had a project at school and asked if he would still be able to make it.
How long is this going to take? It shouldn’t take a whole lot longer. Do you think I can get there before 129? Um, probably not. What’s at 129? Well, I had a project to six door. Okay. But what Brendan didn’t understand was that when this was over, he had just confessed to rape and murder. And here’s another thing about the case.
There was no physical evidence tying Brendan to anything. No DNA, no fingerprints, no blood. Natada. Even more disturbing, much of what he said in his confession didn’t match any of the facts. He said Teresa was stabbed. There were no stab wounds. He said the body was on the bed, but nothing from the scene back that up.
His details shifted every time. He stabbed her and he told me to cut her throat and cut her hair off. Still, prosecutors moved forward. They held a press conference, quote the confession word for word, and told the public exactly what they wanted them to believe. Brendan and Steven Avery were guilty. 2007, Brendan’s trial began.
The jury watched part of the interrogation footage, but not all of it. They didn’t see Brendan tell his mother, “They got into my head.” They didn’t see how confused and scared he looked after hours of being worn down. They just saw a confession and they heard the prosecution’s argument telling him, “Innocent people don’t confess.
” But that’s not true, especially when it comes to minors. Research shows that minors are far more likely to falsely confess under pressure. And Brendan checked every risk factor. Being underage, quiet, suggestable, and eager to please adults. Brendan, how do you feel about this now? Really sad. Tell me why you feel really sad.
That I helped them and I shouldn’t do. Still, this jury convicts him, gives him life in prison with a chance at parole in 2048. In 2016, a federal judge reviews the case and rules that Brendan’s confession had been coerced and unconstitutional. And finally, it looked like he was going to go free, but the state appealed.
In a razor thin 4:3 decision, a higher court reversed the ruling. They said the confession was voluntary. Brendan’s legal team, led by attorneys from Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. But in 2018, the court declined to hear it. And just like that, the door slammed shut.
Today, Brendan is still behind bars. The guy’s now in his 30s, serving over half of his life for something many believe he didn’t do. His confession remains one of the most widely discussed examples of just how badly an interrogation can go when it involves a vulnerable teen. Legal experts, child psychologists, and even former law enforcement officers have spoken out about how Brendan was treated.
And maybe the most haunting part is that if this interrogation hadn’t been recorded, if we hadn’t seen it with our own eyeballs, no one would have believed how it happened. If this teaches us anything, it’s this. Confessions aren’t always the end of the story. Sometimes they’re just the beginning of a much bigger mistake. You killed him and he’s dead and your dog is sitting here looking at you knowing that you killed your dad.
It’s August 7th, 2018. late in Fontana, California around 1000 p.m. when Thomas Paris Jr. noticed something strange. His father, Papa Tom, had taken their Labrador, Margo, for a quick walk to the mailbox. But only Margot had returned, and the leash was dangling from her collar. No sign of Papa Tom.
At first, Paris didn’t panic. His father was 71, a bit secretive, and not exactly new to the dating game. Maybe he ran into a friend. Maybe he just forgot to call. But as hours passed and still no word, the worry crept in. The next day, Perez picks up the phone and reports him missing. What follows wasn’t help. It was a nightmare.
Hours later, Perez walked into the police station is asked. Oh, he had no idea he was already a suspect. Detectives from Fontana PD were ready with their theory and they weren’t asking questions to find the truth. They were out to get a confession. And so they told him the unthinkable. They said his father was dead.
The body was at the morg. The family dog had come home traumatized and covered in blood. The evidence they claimed was everywhere. On the walls, on the floor, on Marco’s paws, and even on Paris himself. Oh, they didn’t just accuse him. They broke this kid down one blow at a time. They brought in Margot, the dog, told him she witnessed the brutal crime and would be put down like a stray.
Yes. Daddy’s dead because of you. No. Yes. Not only that, but poor Morgan here. Margo. Margo. Sorry. Margot had to witness it. They would even parade a family friend into the room and try to use him to get Perez to confess. Dude, they got you a murder. Dude, they got you a murder. Impossible.
They took naked photos of him claiming that they were looking for wounds from some imaginary struggle. They lied about DNA, about blood, about what he did. And through it all, Paris kept insisting. I didn’t do anything. But they didn’t stop. for 17 straight hours. Harris wasn’t just tired. He was unraveling.
His meds for anxiety and depression had worn off by now. He’s sleepdeprived, confused, and spiraling. He starts tearing out his hair, ripping off his clothes, and hitting himself. And then he cracked. Did you stab him? I didn’t think that I did. But if you did, where would you have stabbed him? It might have been the belly. Then they left him alone with the weight of a lie he didn’t even believe.
He took the lace out of his shoe, tied a slip knot to the desk, and he tried to end his life, but the lace snapped, and sometime after that, just hours later, Fontana police got a call. Paris’s father was alive. As it turned out, Papa Tom had simply flown up to visit his daughter in Northern California. He left without a word, hopped on a flight from LAX, but was fine.
The police didn’t call Paris to tell him. Oh, they didn’t rush to clear things up. Instead, they had him committed to a psychiatric ward after they already knew his father was alive. Harris spent three more days there, not knowing the truth, thinking he might have killed the man he loved the most. It wasn’t until he was released and saw his dad again that he knew for sure.
And what about Margot? Oh, the police really sent her to be euthanized and she was only saved because of a microchip. Perez was never charged because obviously there was no crime, just a lie repeated until it broke a man. And when Perez finally sued, Fontana called the $900,000 he got as a settlement a business decision. They didn’t admit any fault nor change their policy on lying to suspects.
In fact, their police chief openly defended the tactic because under current law, that kind of psychological manipulation is still legal in most of the US. But Dolly G, a federal judge, reviews the interrogation footage and uh sees it differently. He writes, “A reasonable juror could conclude that the detectives inflicted unconstitutional psychological torture.
Their tactics indisputably led to Paris’s confusion and disorientation to the point he falsely confessed and tried to take his own life.” And sadly, as we already saw, what happened to Thomas Paris Jr. isn’t just a tragic one-off. This is a big problem. According to reports, roughly 13% of all exoneration since 1989 involved false confessions.
And many of those cases, the real perpetrators went on to commit more violent crimes while the wrong person sat in prison. The tactics we’ve seen in many of the cases in this video, relentless pressure, bluffing, false evidence, and flatout lies, are all part of an old school approach to interrogation. one that’s been glorified for decades in crime dramas and TV procedurals.
But instead of finding the truth, this method often focuses on one thing, just get that confession, no matter how you do it. Some states, like California, have tried to push for change, banning deception in the interview room or switching to science-based methods. But those efforts have mostly stalled, blocked by budget concerns or push back from within law enforcement.
And so for now, we guess not much has changed, which probably means the next false confession might already be happening.
