Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Four High Profile American Cases 563
more cautious about accepting uncorroborated confessions and providing suspects
with ‘special knowledge’ material prior to or while interviewing them.
Outcome
Lucas’s execution was set for 1801 hours in Huntsville, Texas, on Tuesday
30 June 1998. The previous February Karla Faye Tucker had become the first
woman to be executed in the State of Texas since the Civil War. On 26 June,
four days before Lucas’s execution, the Governor of Texas, George W. Bush,
granted clemency and reduced Lucas’s death sentence to life imprisonment.
Announcing that he was commuting the sentence to life, Governor Bush stated:
I believe that there is enough doubt about this particular crime that the State of
Texas should not impose its ultimate penalty (Usborne, 1998, p. 21).
The day before the State Board of Pardons and Paroles had apparently reached
the same conclusion and recommended to the governor that he commute the
death sentence to a life term imprisonment.
This was the first time that Texas had commuted a death penalty since execution
was reintroduced in 1976 (Usborne, 1998). Lucas’s life was spared, but this
was not a complete victory, because he was not fully vindicated on this charge.
At the time of the clemency the case was pending before the United States
Supreme Court for Certiorari. Mr Lucas died of a heart failure on 12 March
2001.
JOHN WILLE
In 1985 John Wille, his girlfriend Judith Walters and Walters’s 14-year-old
daughter Sheila confessed to their involvement in the murders of Nichole
Lopatta, aged 8 years, and Billy Phillips, a schizophrenic and a hemiplegic
(he had a pronounced limp and a reduced use of an arm). Wille and Walters
were extensively interviewed by the police over a period of three weeks in
August 1985. During their interrogation, they both made confessions to several
murders. Several of the interviews were tape-recorded. Sheila Walters was
interviewed extensively by FBI agents on 3 September, after being isolated
from her grandmother, and implicated the other two in the murders of Lopatta
and Phillips. The interview was in two parts. There is only a tape-recording
of the second half of the interview. There were clearly important conversations
between Sheila Walters and the FBI prior to the taped interview, which
had apparently not been recorded. Several other police officers were present
during these interviews. All three people subsequently retracted their confessions
and have proclaimed their innocence ever since. In 2000, Dr MacKeith
and I testified at a trial level court hearing in Louisiana. The case is still
pending.
Nichole Lopatta had been abducted, raped and murdered at the beginning
of June 1985. She was last seen on 2 June. The alleged sequence of events by