Tom Perez Sr. lived with his son, Tom Perez Jr., in Fontana, California.
The father went out of town to visit relatives, and didn’t bother to tell his son. Not knowing where his father was, Tom Jr. reported him missing.
The cops decided Tom Jr. must have killed his father, and badgered him to tell them where the body was. After hours of relentless interrogation, deprived of sleep, and after the cops threatened to euthanize his dog, Tom Jr. broke down and confessed to the “murder.”
Then his father returned home from his trip, alive and well. But guess what, the cops didn’t tell Tom Jr.! Instead, they pursued the notion he must have murdered someone else, and “continued investigating him, looking for a victim who did not exist.”
The city of Fontana eventually paid Tom Jr. a $900,000 settlement. The cops? They were promoted, not fired. Read story here.
Courts have ruled that police can lie to suspects. They can tell an interrogation subject they have a body when they don’t; tell him they found his DNA at the crime scene when, in fact, the DNA test came back negative or inconclusive. They can seek to gain his cooperation by threatening to kill his dog.
Browbeating interrogation subjects into confessing crimes they didn’t commit, and in some cases didn’t even occur, isn’t hypothetical; it happens all the time. There are many, many such cases on record.
The standard advice lawyers give is “don’t talk to the police.” If you’re under suspicion, they will never try to clear you. Their sole aim is to pin the crime on you.
But Tom Perez Jr. had no reason to think he would come under suspicion. He went to the police because his father went missing, a very natural thing for a concerned relative to do. He freely gave the cops any and all information that might help in locating his father. He didn’t expect to walk (and talk) his way into a police ambush. But that’s what was waiting for him at the police station.
He was compensated for his trouble; $900,000 is a lot of money. From his point of view, maybe it wasn’t enough. And maybe these cops should have been fired, but from a police chief’s point of view, experienced detectives are hard to replace, and a chief can’t fire cops who didn’t violate any laws or policies. What if it’s the training, policies, and procedures themselves that are at fault?
Given the prevalence of false confessions in America’s criminal justice system, it would seem so. And it’s not only policing that’s flawed; there are systemic problems on the legal side, too. Read this story about why, once a flawed criminal case gets into the courts, “Convicting an innocent person is easy; undoing a mistake is almost impossible.” Hundreds or thousands of innocent people, freed and still behind bars, could tell you all about that.