Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Psychological Vulnerability 477
he was assaulted. Last night I was frightened, I thought that if I admitted it you
would go easy on me because you were scaring me . . . I just wanted to be locked
up. I’ve prayed for death many times but it never comes.
When asked to explain why he had been able to give details of the murder
Mr Long stated:
All I can say is you said people have seen me with the boy and you told me the
streets they had seen me in and things like the belt. I said I had because I wanted
the officers to stop questioning me. I wanted you to put me away because I can’t
face the world. I can’t live without lying and trying to be one of the boys. That’s
all I can say; that is the truth.
It was noted by the Court of Appeal that there were serious procedural shortcomings
with regard to the case, including the facts that Long had not been
advised about his right to legal advice, no contemporaneous record was made
of the police interviews and after the initial admissions to the murder on 26
January no statement was taken immediately afterwards.
Importantly, in my view, the initial admissions suggested little familiarity
with the crime (e.g. Long made no mention of a serious sexual assault that
accompanied the murder, he was wrong about where the assault had taken
place and where the boy had been stabbed and did not mention a broken belt
with the word ‘Elvis’ on it found near the murder scene). The incriminating
details were to come in subsequent interviews.
At the appeal hearing in 1995 the Crown sought to uphold the conviction on
the basis that there were details revealed in the confessions that could only have
been known by the murderer. The judges were not impressed by the prosecutor’s
arguments regarding special knowledge and concluded:
After considering severally and cumulatively the matters he relied upon we are
not convinced that they could safely be relied upon to demonstrate knowledge in
the appellant only available to the murderer.
Defence counsel argued that in view of the fresh medical evidence, if it had been
available at trial a successful submission might well have been made for the
judge to stop the trial at the end of the prosecution case. He cited the authority
in the case of MacKenzie as the basis for his legal argument. The appeal judges
accepted the first two points, namely that the prosecution case depended wholly
upon confessions, and Long did, at the time of making the confessions suffer
from a significant degree of ‘mental handicap’ (in the case of Long, the ‘mental
handicap’ did not refer to learning disability, but depression). The judges did
not accept that the confessions were so unconvincing as to meet the criterion
set out in MacKenzie. Nevertheless, they were
. . . firmly of the view that his confessions cannot now be regarded as reliable.
I had interviewed and tested Long extensively in 1992 at the request of his solicitors.
He told me that before his arrest he was very immature, was dependant