Amicus Brief That I Examined for This

¶ … Amicus Brief that I examined for this particular assignment is entitled "Floyd v. Cain." It largely functions as a means of providing evidence that people may falsely confess to crimes for a multitude of reasons. Therefore, it implies that not all convictions are actually true, particularly those in which false confessions may have been involved. This particular brief was written due to a legal matter involving John Floyd, who has spent approximately the past 30 years in prison largely due to his confession to a charge of murder.

There are several mitigating factors pertaining to this particular case, most noticeably the fact that Floyd "has a full scale IQ of 59 and, at age 60, reads at the level of a second grader" (APA, 2013). At the time that the American Psychological Association (APA) prepared this brief, there was new evidence in Floyd's case that he may have falsely confessed. Even more significant is the fact that much of the "new" evidence that suggests there was a false confession was previously suppressed at the defendant's original trial.

Ultimately, there were two denials of the motion to grant the defendant a new trial; one by the district court in New Orleans and another by the Supreme Court of the same state. The duration of the brief, then, explicates the phenomena of false confessions, especially under circumstances that are supposedly voluntary. Such a phenomenon is typically met with a degree of disbelief by those who make important decision regarding the freedom of individuals in the criminal justice system such as juries and judges in particular.

However, the bulk of the APA's research in this case demonstrates that people may not always issue confessions in their proper state of minds, or even fully understand the ramifications of such a confession. It would appear that there would be less reason to doubt the circumstances for false confessions in this particular trial, considering the defendant's dearth of intelligence. The principle conclusion drawn from this particular brief is the fact that while confessions may certainly appear compelling, they should not render the consideration of other evidence obsolete.

Confessions, then, are not the final summation of a person's guilt or lack thereof. Courts have a duty to consider other such evidence which is scientifically sound and empirically valid -- unlike some forms of confessions, which may include those under coercion or torturous circumstance -- such as the testing for "DNA testing" (Haedicke, 2010, p. 1) in a murder case like the one in which this brief was prepared for. Essentially, this brief goes on to denote that the results for voluntary false confessions are stratified into two different reasons.

The first of these (which is alluded to in the previous paragraph) pertains to the manner of the interrogation or the line of questioning that provokes it. The second one pertains to the psychological mind state of the individual issuing the confession. This second factor is mutable in some people, and may be exacerbated by certain conditions such as "mental retardation" (Haedicke, 2010, p. 2) -- which very well may have influenced the confession described in.