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EXPERT TESTIMONY ON FALSE CONFESSION AND CROSS-RACIAL IDENDITIFICATION/MISIDENTIFICATION PROPERLY PRECLUDED; THREE-JUDGE DISSENT (CT APP).

The Court of Appeals, in a full-fledged opinion by Judge DiFiore, over a three-judge dissent, determined the trial judge, after a Frye hearing, properly precluded expert testimony of Dr. Redlich on false confessions. In addition, the trial court properly precluded expert testimony on cross-racial identification/misidentification:

On this record, the trial court did not abuse its discretion in finding that the proffered testimony would not have aided the jury. Although Dr. Redlich is an impressively credentialed researcher, properly qualified by the trial court as an expert in her field, the trial court found that her testimony at the Frye hearing revealed her difficulty in linking her research on the possible causes of false confessions to the case at hand. Despite her review of the witnesses’ testimony at the Huntley hearing, she did not explain how her testimony was at all relevant to the circumstances presented by defendant’s interrogation, even by crediting defendant’s account of the events … . For instance, defendant flatly denied ever making the second, more detailed, confession—so, expert testimony regarding dispositional and situational factors that create a risk of a false confession has no relevance to the oral or written version of that statement. Moreover, defendant maintained that the first handwritten statement was the product of outright coercion—including a physical assault the night before and the deprivation of food and medicine—rather than resulting from psychological coercion of police interrogation that creates the risk of false confession, consistent with a recondite theory of which Dr. Redlich would have testified. There is a difference between the classically, inherently coercive interrogation that produces an involuntary confession—an issue that the jury is well-equipped to understand … —and the phenomenon of false confessions involving the interplay of situational and dispositional factors that produce a coercive compliant false confession from an innocent suspect, an occurrence that the jury may find counterintuitive. People v Powell, 2021 NY Slip Op 06424, CtApp 11-18-21

 

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