Crime Classification Manual

Wrongful Convictions 499
before. A store employee who had witnessed one of the holdups called police
and identified Nicholson as the robber. Other employees supported the
identification in one-on-one viewings. Police also looked at Nicholson’s extensive
criminal record in determining whether to arrest him. Nicholson was
charged in both robberies, was convicted, and was awaiting sentencing when
a convicted robber contacted his attorney. More than a year after Nicholson’s
arrest, Louis Greenley, who was serving a twenty- to fifty-year term for
shooting an off-duty police officer during a robbery at a nearby pharmacy,
took credit for the supermarket robberies. His claims of “wanting to do the
right thing” were met with skepticism by prosecutors, who naturally suspected
he had little to lose by adding a few more years to his lengthy sentence.
However, he was able to support his claim with evidence that he had
been involved in a traffic accident shortly after and near the scene of one of
the robberies. After an investigation, prosecutors agreed to drop the charges
and free Nicholson. Nicholson spent fifteen months in prison before his
release.
Care should be taken when interviewing children or other easily influenced
witnesses. Numerous child care cases involving multiple accusations
of sexual abuse arose in the early 1980s. Convictions in most of those cases
were later overturned because of how the children were repeatedly and intensively
questioned. Most started with one accuser, but led to mass allegations
of widespread abuse. Some led to changes in the law. In the case of
Margaret Kelly Michaels, the New Jersey Supreme Court set new standards
for interviewing children in abuse cases. Michaels, a college senior from
Pittsburgh who was hired by Wee Care Day Nursery in Maplewood, New
Jersey, was convicted of more than one hundred counts of abuse for allegedly
molesting dozens of children under her care for the seven months she
worked there. She was sentenced to forty-seven years in prison and served
almost five years before an appellate court freed her because of improper
interviewing techniques that the prosecution had used. Investigators repeatedly
questioned the children, asking them leading questions, ignoring negative
responses while reinforcing positive ones, and going so far as giving the
children badges and telling them they could be “little detectives” if they
helped keep Michaels in jail, tapes of the interviews showed.
In response, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that once a defendant
can show some evidence that interviews are biased, he or she is entitled to a
hearing in which the burden shifts to the prosecution to show they were not.
And while experts are not permitted to testify about a witness’s credibility,
the court allowed psychiatric professionals to comment on the interview
techniques and their effect on the reliability of the children’s statements.
Prosecutors chose not to retry Michaels.