Adrian Thomas demonstrated on videotape how he violently slammed his 4-month-old son to a mattress on the floor of his apartment. The child died a short while later. The videotape was made during an interrogation session conducted by Troy police that spanned several hours and produced Thomas's admission of guilt. The recorded enactment and confession were crucial evidence at his 2009 trial, which ended with his conviction for murder and a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.
Thomas claimed that his confession was coerced by the police, whose overbearing tactics — including threats to arrest his wife, false representations that his son was clinging to life, and assurances that Thomas would not be arrested — led him to falsely incriminate himself.
The trial judge ruled that Thomas's confession was voluntary. The 12 jurors who watched the videotape and found him guilty agreed, as did all five of the Appellate Division judges who affirmed his conviction on appeal. Two weeks ago, the Court of Appeals disagreed and unanimously reversed Thomas's conviction.
Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman wrote that Thomas' confession was coerced and should not have been admitted as evidence. It did not address whether Thomas should have been allowed to present expert testimony to help educate the jurors about false confessions.
No one disputes that involuntary confessions are constitutionally offensive. Police methods that rely on compulsion to extract incriminating information from suspects violate fundamental precepts of justice. Confessions produced by coercion also may be quite unreliable; suspects who reach a breaking point are apt to say anything.
Nevertheless, as the very different perspectives of the judges and jurors in Thomas' case evidence, it can be highly disputed whether a confession is, in fact, involuntary.
We can only speculate about what might have happened had Troy police not recorded Thomas's interrogation. In solely written form, Thomas's admission that he forcefully flung the baby down is shorn of the dramatic ambiguity that is captured visually and audibly as the video recording of the interrogation session unfolds hour upon hour.
Lost would be Thomas's damning demonstration, using a police officer's notebook, of how he threw the child to the mattress on the bedroom floor. Also lost would be Thomas' initial protestations of innocence that gradually eroded and gave way to the admissions that followed the officers' insistent cajoling and use of deception.
Without the video recording, the best evidence of Thomas' confession and the police interrogation that produced it, would have been lost to the prosecution, the defense, the jurors, and the judges that passed judgment.
New York lags several states that require police interrogations to be recorded in serious cases. When the Legislature expanded the law mandating collection of DNA in 2012 to include almost all defendants convicted of misdemeanors, the measure was hailed as one that would help apprehend the guilty and also protect innocents. It was recognized as a partial reform. DNA evidence is absent in the vast majority of crimes. Passage of the legislation was coupled with a promise to revisit other much-needed reforms that would similarly promote justice.
Legislation mandating the recording of police interrogations is a reform that is long overdue. It would benefit all parties in a criminal case and New York's justice system in the search for truth.
Adrian Thomas' case is replete with tragedy. If some good is to come of it, it may be in impressing the vital role that recording police interrogations has in helping find the truth and ensuring that justice is served.
Acker is a distinguished teaching professor, and Redlich an associate professor, at the UAlbany School of Criminal Justice.