A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Barbarous Souls tells the story of Darrel Parker’s wrongful conviction for Nancy’s murder. Lincoln native David Strauss weaves a shocking true crime story with an exposé of still-prevalent methods of interrogation—methods that often lead to false confessions and the conviction of innocent suspects. After he was convicted, Parker served thirteen years of a life sentence before agreeing to a deal that would free him but not clear his record. It was later discovered that a murderer who died in prison in 1988 had taped a confession to the crime.
A roller-coaster ride in the tradition of John Grisham’s The Innocent Man, Barbarous Souls is a thorough examination of a wrongful conviction based on a false confession, and an illuminating portrayal of a widespread phenomenon that still plagues the justice system.
Jim Fisher, criminal justice professor and former FBI agent, reveals how he uncovered the framing of two boys in a pair of unrelated murders committed in 1956 and 1958.
In the first of the cases, eleven-year-old Charlie Zubryd confessed that at the age of eight, he had murdered his widowed mother by driving a hatchet into her skull. The crime was committed in the basement of the modest Zubryd home in a rural section of Sewickley Township in western Pennsylvania, an area not far from Pittsburgh. Following intense police questioning, young Zubryd confessed to the crime in March 1959, a full twenty-eight months after the bloody murder of his mother.
Too young to prosecute, Charlie Zubryd was adopted after his confession and a brief stay in a mental ward. A childless couple gave Zubryd a new name and identity. It would be twenty years before Charlie Zubryd—now going by the name Chuck Duffy—would have any contact with his biological family.
When Zubryd/Duffy made an effort to get his real family back, he was rejected because his relatives still believed he had murdered his mother. In fact, until Fisher began to investigate the case in 1989, Chuck Duffy himself was not sure he had not killed his mother during some kind of mental blackout.
The second murder occurred in 1958, two years after the Zubryd case. Thirteen-year-old Jerry Pacek endured forty-one hours of police grilling before he confessed to raping and killing fifty-year-old Lillian Steveck as she walked home one evening from a bus stop in Breckenridge, Pennsylvania. Pacek told the same Allegheny County homicide detective who had framed Charlie Zubryd that he had killed the woman with a variety of blunt objects, none of which were ever found. The thirteen-year-old boy was tried and convicted of the murder the following spring. He was sent to Camp Hill Prison, where he remained incarcerated for ten years.
Fisher’s investigation cleared the names of both the wrongfully accused boys. Because of his investigation, the Zubryd case was reopened, which led to the identification of a vicious killer. In 1991, Fisher’s investigative efforts convinced the governor of Pennsylvania to grant a full pardon to Jerry Pacek, who as a teenager had served ten years in an adult prison for a murder he had not committed.
Jim Fisher and the Zubryd and Pacek stories have been featured on a number of nationally broadcast television programs.
Ernesto Miranda was an uneducated Hispanic man arrested in 1963 in connection with a series of sexual assaults, to which he confessed within hours. He was convicted not on the strength of eyewitness testimony or physical evidence but almost entirely because he had incriminated himself without knowing it—and without knowing that he didn’t have to. Miranda’s lawyers, John P. Frank and John F. Flynn, were among the most prominent in the state, and their work soon focused the entire country on the issue of their client’s rights. A 1966 Supreme Court decision held that Miranda’s rights had been violated and resulted in the now-famous "Miranda warnings."
Stuart personally knows many of the figures involved in Miranda, and here he unravels its complex history, revealing how the defense attorneys created the argument brought before the Court and analyzing the competing societal interests involved in the case. He considers Miranda's aftermath—not only the test cases and ongoing political and legal debate but also what happened to Ernesto Miranda. He then updates the story to the Supreme Court’s 2000 Dickerson decision upholding Miranda and considers its implications for cases in the wake of 9/11 and the rights of suspected terrorists. Interviews with 24 individuals directly concerned with the decision—lawyers, judges, and police officers, as well as suspects, scholars, and ordinary citizens—offer observations on the case’s impact on law enforcement and on the rights of the accused.
Ten years after the decision in the case that bears his name, Ernesto Miranda was murdered in a knife fight at a Phoenix bar, and his suspected killer was "Mirandized" before confessing to the crime. Miranda: The Story of America’s Right to Remain Silent considers the legacy of that case and its fate in the twenty-first century as we face new challenges in the criminal justice system.
The book has recently taken on an eerie relevance as a consequence of controversial American and British interrogation practices in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In a new introduction, Langbein contrasts the "new" law of torture with the older European law and offers some pointed lessons about the difficulty of reconciling coercion with accurate investigation. Embellished with fascinating illustrations of torture devices taken from an eighteenth-century criminal code, this crisply written account will engage all those interested in torture's remarkable grip on European legal history.
In Troubling Confessions, Peter Brooks juxtaposes cases from law and literature to explore the kinds of truth we associate with confessions, and why we both rely on them and regard them with suspicion. For centuries the law has considered confession to be "the queen of proofs," yet it has also seen a need to regulate confessions and the circumstances under which they are made, as evidenced in the continuing debate over the Miranda decision. Western culture has made confessional speech a prime measure of authenticity, seeing it as an expression of selfhood that bears witness to personal truth. Yet the urge to confess may be motivated by inextricable layers of shame, guilt, self-loathing, the desire to propitiate figures of authority. Literature has often understood the problematic nature of confession better than the law, as Brooks demonstrates in perceptive readings of legal cases set against works by Rousseau, Dostoevsky, Joyce, and Camus, among others.
Mitya in The Brothers Karamazov captures the trouble with confessional speech eloquently when he offers his confession with the anguished plea: this is a confession; handle with care. By questioning the truths of confession, Peter Brooks challenges us to reconsider how we demand confessions and what we do with them.
Editors Rob Warden and Steven Drizin—leaders in the field of wrongful convictions—have gathered articles about some of the most critical accounts of false confessions in the U.S. justice system from more than forty authors, including Sydney H. Schanberg, Christine Ellen Young, Alex Kotlowitz, and John Grisham. Many of the pieces originally appeared in leading magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, The Nation, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times.
By grouping the cases into categories—including brainwashing, fabrication, mental fragility, police force, and unrequited innocence—the editors demonstrate similarities between cases, thereby refuting the perception that false confessions represent individual tragedies rather than a systemic flaw in the justice system. These incidents are not isolated; they are, in fact, related, and more shocking for it. But the authors of the articles excerpted, adapted, and reprinted in this collection want more for their subjects than outrage; they want to fuel change in the practices and standards that illicit false confessions in the first place. To this end, Warden and Drizin include an illuminating introduction to each category and recommendations for policy changes that would reduce false confessions. They also include a postscript for each case, providing legal updates and additional information.
Payne draws on interviews, unedited television film, newspaper archives, and books written by perpetrators to analyze confessions of state violence in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and South Africa. Each of these four countries addressed its past through a different institutional form—from blanket amnesty, to conditional amnesty based on confessions, to judicial trials. Payne considers perpetrators’ confessions as performance, examining what they say and what they communicate nonverbally; the timing, setting, and reception of their confessions; and the different ways that they portray their pasts, whether in terms of remorse, heroism, denial, or sadism, or through lies or betrayal.
Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity.
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