The last beating that Latasha Crawford received from her boyfriend, Nathaniel Jones, was interrupted by her brother, Errin Crawford and his friend Steven Chaney. Chaney had seen Jones drag Crawford out of a car and up the stairs to the third floor apartment of Saun Jones. Chaney left and alerted Errin, who came to the apartment and took his sister away.
The three went to Chaney's, where a gun was retrieved from bushes outside of the apartment. They then returned to Jones' apartment, where Nathaniel Jones was shot three times as he hid in a bedroom closet. Shaun Jones, the renter of the apartment, told police that Nathaniel had been shot by "several black males" and that after the shots were fired he had heard a female voice say, "Come on, come on, let's go." He gave police the name of Latasha Crawford as the girlfriend of the dead man. She was arrested at her home five days later.
She was arrested at mid-afternoon. Detective Horsley interviewed her and during the course of the interview, Crawford confessed to her role in the death of Jones. Although she had to be awakened for the interview, Horsley later testified that Crawford did not appear under the influence of alcohol or drugs during the interview. Photographs taken of bruises confirmed her beating five days earlier. She was subsequently indicted by the Grand Jury and charged with murder as a joint venturer.
Prior to trial, Crawford's defense sought to suppress the incriminating statements she had made to Horsley. She contended that the statements were not voluntary or made of her own free will. The defense offered testimony of Crawford and an expert psychologist.
Crawford testified that Jones had beaten her five or six times during their relationship. She said that she vomited several times during the interrogation due to the large amount of alcohol she had consumed the night before and the cocaine she had ingested during the previous four days. She felt she was pressured into speaking to Horsley, "beaten and torn down" and was not capable of refusing to answer his questions.
The expert psychologist offered that the confession was not voluntary because her free will was overborne by the police. Specifically, her free will was overborne because of the alcohol and cocaine she had ingested and because of her relationship with Jones and her prior history of being beaten by Jones. These factors created the particular mental state of a battered woman. In short, she was incapable of refusing to answer questions put to her by Horsley.
The trial judge refused to consider (over defense objections) the expert testimony at the suppression hearing. He reasoned that because of prior exposure to the subjects of battered woman syndrome and post traumatic stress disorder, he did not need expert assistance in ruling on the voluntariness of the confession. He further disallowed expert testimony at trial because both of the phenomena are within the common knowledge of jurors, and expert testimony was not required.
At trial, the defendant's statements were the only evidence offered against her. The jury found the confession voluntary and found her guilty of murder.
Holding: The trial court erred in refusing to allow expert testimony regarding defendant's state of mind. Evidence regarding battered woman syndrome and posttraumatic stress disorder were relevant on issue of voluntariness of her confession to police. This was true for both the suppression hearing and at jury trial. Because the only evidence of her guilt was her own confession, the trial court's error was prejudicial, the judgment was reversed, the jury verdict set aside and the case was returned to the Superior Court.
EVALUATING VOUNTARINESS
- Full record of the encounter between suspect and questioner
- Dynamics surrounding the crime and its investigation
- Expectations of the suspect about questioning
- Motivations of suspect for responding
 | Michael Welner, M.D. Chairman The Forensic Panel |
Dr. Welner comments: Suppression motions challenge the ability of a suspect to offer a knowing, intelligent, and voluntary statement to questioning officers. For the objective psychiatric consultant, unless the suspect was frankly disoriented, semiconscious, or substantially retarded, the examination is most likely to focus on the voluntariness of the confession.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in Colorado v. Connelly (479 U.S. 157, 1986), admitted the volunteered confession of a psychotic person on the grounds that he had not been coerced. Therefore, coercion in the interrogation is the typical focus of the mental health evaluation. In some cases, questions of voluntariness of statements are expanded by the defendant's charge that his will was overborne.
Scientific consideration of the voluntariness of confessions has been advanced most visibly by the British researcher Gudjunsson, who has conducted several protocols involving adolescent and intellectually disabled defendants. The research was too limited to draw meaningful scientific conclusions, but called attention to the vulnerability of suspects who relate to the examiner in a dependent and especially obedient manner. The dynamic between questioner and suspect bears consideration when a suspect asserts he gave a confession that he later qualifies as simply untrue, or a false confession.
Involuntary confessions differ from false confessions, however. And unfortunately, forensic examiners often have little understanding of what police may legally do in an interrogation. Is a tricked suspect an involuntary confessor? The motivations behind the intent of the suspect are so much more complex than the fears of consequences that immediately come to mind.
Subtle pressuring forces always buffet the suspect from within and without. Otherwise, law enforcement would never get a confession from anyone who initially begins questioning with a denial and series o contradictions. Perhaps there is the prospect of a plea deal for cooperation, compassionate disposition in a jail, guilty conscience o sensitivity for the victim, fear of an accomplice, fear of exposing the family to shame by more exhaustive investigation, or desire to protect someone else. When coercion does not happen, the relationship between the questioner and the suspect is predictably too superficial to result in overborne will. As for subtlety, seduction into confession requires an openness to being seduced. For this reason, questioning the defendant's expectations of the interrogation is a key component of evaluating voluntariness.
There is sufficient vagueness in what the word voluntary means scientifically to allow creative interpretation of facts by expert testimony One crude byproduct of this muddiness is the bundling of a variety of psychiatric diagnoses in an attempt to establish that the person was too sick to voluntarily offer a confession. This piling on may prompt the court to consider carefully voluntariness in the context of poignant diagnoses like posttraumatic stress disorder and battered woman syndrome. Creative psychiatric interpretation can underscore the dependent and submissive features associated with battered woman syndrome.
In reality, however, in the absence of a true record of behavior, questions, responses, and actions, extrapolating from even a correct diagnosis is a house of cards. Diagnoses have relevance to questions of voluntariness only if the facts and circumstances warrant an explanation for how a person could have her will overborne such that the confession represented an incriminating belch.
Therefore, the examiner reviewing the confession must rule out other forms of gain that might have been attached to the confession. If no prospective benefit existed, then diagnostic considerations are that much more important. In questions of involuntary confession, absent evidence of coercion, only evidence of unusual behavior warrants inclusion of psychiatric input. And at that point, court savvy must take over in order to avoid facile conclusions necessarily linking psychiatric diagnoses to decapitation.
