Despite the desperate desires to turn this into a poly bashing fest,
the known facts seem to be these,
- Angela Correa (age 15) was raped, beaten, and stranggled on 11/15/89
- Jeffery Deskovic was identified as a suspect
- a polygraph was conducted
- Jeffry Deskovic did not confess to the polygraph examiner
- he is reported to have confessed to a police interviewer after what is described in the NY times as a lengthy, 5 or 6 hour, interview
- Jeffry Deskovic was convicted on his confession and was incarcerated for 16 years
- DNA exonerated Jeffrey Deskovic as the source of semen obtained from the victim, Angela Correa
- DNA matched that of a man who is serving time for another Westchester murder
- The murder was not named in the NY times article, but is reported to have confessed to killing Angela Correa
We also know there is no continuous recording of the polygraph or interview.
Speculations about the test itself, are just that - speculations.
FERNANDA SANTOS NY Times 9/21/06:
Quote: Mr. Scheck said that Mr. Deskovic was the 184th person nationwide to be exonerated because of DNA evidence since 1989, and that his case highlights the importance of having the authorities videotape interviews with suspects, as many police departments nationwide have begun to do.
“We’ve learned a lot about false confessions in the past decade,” Mr. Scheck said at a news conference. “Videotaping of confessions and training of police officers can definitely lead to different results.”
FERNANDA SANTOS NY Times 9/21/06:
Quote: In convicting Mr. Deskovic, the jury effectively chose to give more weight to his tearful confession than to the DNA and other scientific evidence.
The conviction seemed to indicate that jurors believed the prosecution theory that semen found in Ms. Correa’s body was likely from a consensual sexual relationship with someone else.
Many convicted criminals were compelled to give DNA samples in recent years, and the source of the semen in the victim’s body was apparently identified that way. Until such database comparisons were available, there was no way for Mr. Deskovic to disprove the prosecution’s theory, because there was no way to pinpoint whose semen it was.
JONATHAN BANDLER THE JOURNAL NEWS 9/21/2006:
Quote: Before trial, prosecutors learned that DNA evidence from Correa did not match Deskovic. But they went ahead, relying on the confession.
It was not the polygraph that put this young man in prison for so long. The polygraph is just a test. Without looking at the data we don't really know anything except what we have read about that test. There are many more powerful factors here than the polygraph test.
Matt Elzweig, Our Town Downtown 11/13/2006:
Quote:Who knows if Jeff Deskovic would have eventually gotten out by virtue of the fact that the old DNA technology had excluded him as a suspect when compared to the DNA found on the victim, but most important to getting him out of prison was the NY State DNA databank, a state version of the FBI’s CODIS (Combined DNA Index System), which was not fully operational until 1998. With it, it suddenly became possible to test Deskovic’s DNA against a huge database of offenders. This is how Steven Cunningham, who actually raped and killed Angela Correa, was found.
At the time he admitted to killing Angela Correa, Steven Cunningham was reportedly incarcerated for another murder which occurred after Jeffrey Deskovic was convicted.
We do not know whether Steven Cunningham had been identified as a suspect or person of interest during the investigation of Angela Correa's murder.
Absolutely no-one with any sense of human decency can take any pleasure in this series of tragedies.
JONATHAN BANDLER THE JOURNAL NEWS 9/21/2006:
Quote: Morrison and Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, said it was remarkable how quickly the case turned around in just a few months. They credited Westchester District Attorney Janet DiFiore for pushing the county forensics lab to test the DNA samples that had been saved.
DiFiore was not in the courtroom but she said later that prosecutors had fulfilled their legal obligations in the case over the years but that more had to be done.
"This case is really about what our moral obligation is," she said. "This was a very righteously prosecuted and investigated case. It's a very dramatic reminder to all of us that the system is not infallible."
Quote:No one becomes a polygraph examiner or police interrogator in the hope of obtaining false confessions and sending the innocent to prison. To the polygraph examiners who follow this message board: please take the lessons of the Jeffrey Deskovic case to heart rather than seeking rationalizations for what happened. Read the full report and learn from it. If you're not already doing so, start recording your examinations from beginning to end, and don't say or do anything in the polygraph suite that you'd be embarrassed or ashamed to have seen and heard by a judge and jury.
No disagreement with that.
We do know that factors associated with false confessions include young age, lengthy confrontational interviews, developmental or psychological difficulties, and of course, torture.
Jeffrey Deskovic is described by reporters as a youth with psychological, social or developmental difficulties, but the details are unclear. He is reported to have told the investigator that the sometimes heard voices that made him do things he shouldn't.
Brettski wrote on Jul 13
th, 2007 at 3:51am:
After having read the report, I'm skocked by the revelation that 24% of false convictions are due to false confessions.
Be a little careful. The report doesn't say 24% of false convictions; it say 24% of the 180 false convictions that were later overturned by DNA evidence. Its very important, and very interesting, but we don't know exactly how that figure generalizes to false convictions as a whole.
Banging the drum for your personal satisfaction re "polygraph interrogation" is self-serving. This case is not really about the polygraph.
So,
Try, people, not to take so much personal pleasure in these persons' tremendous misfortunes.
A young girl was raped and killed, a family lost a daughter, and a young man lost 16 years of his life - a reminder that this is serious work.
l
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DNA Frees Polygraph Victim Jeffrey Mark Deskovic (Read 55239 times)
