Advocates endorse Assembly bill for videotaping of police interrogations
A former Troy man who confessed to killing his infant son and was later acquitted joined advocates Monday to call for strict videotaping of police interrogations to prevent defendants from being railroaded.
“I was tricked,” Adrian Thomas said of his handing by Troy Police detectives. “This should never happen to anybody ... this should never happen on the inside of an interrogation room, period.”
“They said if I don’t talk, they are going to scoop up my wife, which at that time I believed was going to be an arrest,” he added.
He said he was interrogated over two days at Troy Police headquarters.
“I got maybe one hour of sleep,” se said. “I was so distraught that I had to go to a mental health facility.”
The confession was prompted by police, he said. “I was just repeating what they were saying at the time because I didn’t know what happened to my son.”
“Adrian was lied to,” said Arthur Frost, his Rensselaer County public defender. “Adrian was manipulated ... these (interrogation) techniques are designed to specifically wear down a suspect, designed to give the suspect a false choice where they can choose between an extreme example: ‘You killed your son on purpose’ and a lesser but still evil motive, ‘you killed your son but it was an accident. Pick one, Adrian.’”
Thomas and legal advocates held Monday’s press conference to endorse an Assembly bill that imposes broad requirements for videotaping police questioning of suspects in violent felony crimes, and makes it difficult for police to bring cases where interrogations are not recorded from the time anyone is brought in for questioning.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has his own proposal for police videotaping, but Thomas and his supporters said it did not go far enough.
Thomas confessed to the child-abuse killing of his infant son after more than 9 hours of questioning by police. His guilty verdict in 2009 was later reversed by the Court of Appeal because “police coerced the defendant’s confession with threats and false promises,” the NYS Defenders Association said Monday.
He was acquitted at a second trial in which his lawyer successfully argued the baby died from a infection, not abuse.
Frost said Thomas’s case “was particularly heinous because although he was interrogated for 9 ½ hours, that was over two days. He was interrogated after having slept an hour and a half over two days.
“He was interrogated after he was taken from a mental health hospital where they knew he was despondent and suicidal ... he was in custody and he was interrogated for hours and hours and hours.”
The video of the complete interrogation was key to having the verdict overturned, Frost said. Thomas, 33, said he lived in Troy from 2001-08 and has relocated out of state.
“The problem that we have is without recording, it is very difficult to establish through testimony alone what happened in an interrogation room over the course of many, many hours,” Frost said. “Adrian Thomas was interrogated for 9 ½ hours.
“If we didn’t have a tape of a recording of that, what would have been presented was memory, the testimony of the police officers who had engaged in these coercive practices.”
He said that court hearings often take place years after the initial crime investigation and memories are unreliable. “It’s not a credible way of doing business and we all know that. That’s why all the states are moving in this direction.”
Frost said few police departments in New York videotape interrogations, despite available funding to do so. This can be done easily now thanks to digital video equipment, he said.
“There’s resistance to it because they don’t understand that this is the best practice and this is what promotes justice from both ends.”
“We know thousands of people have confessed and later exonerated by DNA evidence,” he said. “We know it happens. Does it happen all the time? No, of course not. But does it happen often enough that we ought to be terrified? Absolutely.”