A study by Profs. Hugo Bedau of Tufts University and Michael Radelet of the University of Florida found three factors common among wrongful capital convictions. One third involve perjured testimony, often from jailhouse snitches claiming to have heard a defendant's prison confession. One of every 7 cases, Bedau and Radelet found, involves faulty eyewitness identifications, and a seventh involve false confessions, like Gauger's. False confessions occur with greater frequency than recognized even by law-enforcement professionals, argues Richard Leo of the University of California Irvine.
Children are vulnerable, too.
After a crime laboratory found semen on the dead girl's clothes, police began looking for an older suspect. An educated innocent person, likely to trust police, may be especially prone to police trickery which courts allow as often necessary to crack savvy criminals. I know it sounds naive now, but when they told me they wouldn't lie to me, I believed them. The falsely convicted is almost always an outsider often from a minority group. In Illinois, six of the nine dismissed from death row were black or Hispanic men accused of murder, rape, or both of white victims.