The details of the case are shocking. Two years after the murder of Bernice Martin, Richard
Lapointe, a mentally handicapped man, was snatched from his family in the middle of a picnic. For the next ten hours an unrecorded interrogation took place and three contradictory "confessions" were extracted. Mr.
Lapointe was then
jailed for over two years before the trial since he was unable to afford bail. He was convicted of murder.
It's seems clear why he was targeted. His handicaps made him an easy target for trained interrogators who had no physical evidence to rely on.
His supports have
their own take:They say the case is preposterous, that Mr. Lapointe, a victim of numerous mental and physical infirmities, was not capable of such conduct. They say to commit a crime of astounding brutality, Mr. Lapointe, who had no history of violence of any kind, would have decided to sneak out in a 45-minute interval while his wife and son were upstairs. He would have taken a short walk to Mrs. Martin’s apartment, raped her, stabbed her, strangled her with a ligature that required far more dexterity than he had ever shown and set the place on fire.
And then, with no one seeing him come or go, he would have returned home, with no wounds, no blood, no smell of smoke, in time to calmly watch a National Geographic special with his family.
Video taping interrogations was cost prohibitive in 1989. That is not the case today. With storage and equipment costs so low the police have other reasons to avoid taping interrogations today. If the jury saw the techniques that were used to get confessions, a written confession would lack its current stand alone veracity. You can bet that if the jury had to watch 10 hours of intimidation and bullying of a handicapped man, the verdict would have gone a different way.
Labels: clearance rate, railroaded
