March 11, 2020 • 35 mins
While eating a hamburger, this kid spontaneously confesses to killing his sister?
Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin take us to Camden, Arkansas, where a twelve-year-old boy is left to fend for himself against police officers who suspect him of murder. The interrogation tape is bad enough – but the worst parts happened off camera. This is the story of Thomas Cogdell.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
writer and I'm Steve Drissen. So far, we've told you
the story of Robert Davis in Virginia and the Dicks
Moore five in Chicago, two cases that show how the
interrogation room works and how racial biases can script false confessions.
Today's episode is about how interrogation tactics designed for seasoned
(00:23):
adult criminals are often used on the most vulnerable among us.
We're going to take you to Camden, Arkansas, where a
twelve year old boy is left to fend for himself
against grown ups who suspect him of murder. The interrogation
tape is bad enough, but the worst parts happened off camera.
(00:44):
This is the story of Thomas Cogdal. I do a
lot of searches online to try to keep up to
date about cases involving false confessions and juveniles. In this
(01:04):
case came on my radar screen. When I saw these
interrogation tapes, I was absolutely floored. You know, Robert Davis
was eighteen, he was well over six ft tall. But
Thomas Cogdal, he was a boy. He hadn't started shaving yet.
This is the first video I'd seen where adult tactics
(01:26):
were being used on someone as young as Thomas twelve
years old. I'm a mom, I've got kids not much
younger than Thomas, and the way the cops railroaded this child,
it brings me to tears when I hear this. You
have two boys, I have three boys. I remember what
my boys were like when they were twelve years old,
and they remind me very much of Thomas Cogdale. And
(01:46):
that the climax of this interrogation they turn off the camera,
that's when the heat really gets turned up. What happened
off camera? I wanted to know what happened. Thomas's story
starts in Camden, Arkansas, a small town about twelve thousand
people a hundred miles south of Little Rock. Now Camden
(02:08):
is a beautiful place, but like too many smaller towns,
modernity has been hard for Camden. Once upon a time,
it was home to a naval ammunition depot that employed
a lot of people, and it was even known for
being the home of the man who invented gray Pet
soft drinks, which were really popular in the fifties and sixties.
But gray Pet fizzled out and the ammunition depot closed
(02:30):
at the end of the Cold War, and ever since
the late eighties early nineties, Camden has been losing jobs, residents,
and morale. Now, at the beginning of the summer in
two thousand six, Thomas and his family had moved into
a tidy, little gray house on Waco Street. They live there,
just the three of them. It's Thomas who's twelve, his
(02:51):
eleven year old sister Kaylee, and their mom, Melody Jones.
Let me tell you a little about Thomas. He's one
of those whiz kids, to the kind of kid who
racks up all a's in school and then comes home
and dives straight into a book. He's well mannered, polite, quiet,
small for his age, with these chubby cheeks that made
him look even younger than his age. And at twelve,
(03:14):
he still spoke with a lisp, this really childlike lisp
that was incredibly endearing. Now, in many ways, Thomas shouldered
a lot of the responsibility around the house. Melody was
on Social Security disability because of mental illness, and the
family got by on her monthly check and food stamps.
Thomas had a sister who was eleven, Kayley. She was
(03:36):
as immature in some ways. As Thomas was mature, she
wasn't as good as he wasn't reading, so he'd spent
a lot of time helping her learn her words and
remember they were new on the block, which unfortunately meant
that Kayley was in for some bullying. But when other
kids would pick on her, Thomas would literally launch himself
at them, chubby cheeks and all. He was the big brother,
(03:57):
it was his responsibility, he felt to defend her. The
two of them got along well for the most part,
but like all children, they had their spats, and it
usually occurred when Kaylee would interrupt something that Thomas was
working on or listening to, or video game he was playing,
and that would frustrate him. But that happens in every family.
(04:17):
So let's fast forward to the morning of August seven,
two thousand six. It was Monday morning, but school was out,
so the kids had stayed up really late the night before.
Kaylee had gone to bed at about two thirty in
the morning, and Thomas had stayed up even later than
her until about five am, eating M and m's and
reading a spooky children's book in his room. He fell
(04:37):
asleep with the book still open to the page that
he had left it at and then the morning comes
at about forty five or so, both Melody and Thomas
are awake. Melody later said she want to check the
mail that morning found a letter for Kayley, who was
still in her bedroom. Melody asks Thomas to come with
her to surprise Kaylee with her letter, but they're met
(04:59):
with a horrible sight. Kayley's in the bedroom. Her hands
are tightly bound with a red dog leash, and her
feet are loosely bound with a cloth measuring tape, the
kind of thing you'd use to measure out and cut fabric.
And there's a plastic bag over her head. Melody removed
the bag and it was immediately clear Kayley was dead.
(05:22):
Melody's screamed. She screamed so loudly that the neighbors hear her.
She becomes hysterical. Thomas has the presence of mind to
call an ambulance arrives. The neighbors are gathering outside. Everybody's concerned,
but no one's being brought out to that ambulance for treatment. Slowly,
word is beginning to spread among the neighbors. The Kayleie
(05:43):
Cogdal have been found dead. When police arrive at a
crime scene, they look for evidence of forced entry, and
they didn't see any evidence of forced entry. That means
that either somebody in the home had let the murderer in,
or that the murder had been committed by somebody who
was in the home at the time of the crime.
(06:04):
Kaylee had not been sexually assaulted. Instead, she'd been smothered
to death. The absence of any sexual attack meant that
both Thomas and his mother, Melody were suspects. Now at
this point in the investigation, police have thought the time
of death was about six to eight hours before the
body had been discovered. Working back from five, that would
(06:25):
have placed the murder around three forty five to forty
five in the morning, and because Thomas had said that
he was awake, still reading a book at the time,
suspicion began to focus on him. The police bring both
Melody and Thomas in for questioning later in the day,
and it's Melodies turned to go first. The mom. Now,
she's questioned about four thirty PM for about an hour
(06:48):
and long story short, she denies doing anything that Kaylee,
and in fact spends most of that interview answering questions
about Thomas. At the end of that interview. The end
of the hour, she gives the police per mission to
question Thomas. Now this is interesting and problematic, right. I mean,
Melody is a suspect as well as Thomas, and she's
the one who is giving the police consent to question
(07:10):
her son, the other suspect. It's totally inappropriate. But the
police relied on that consent that they've gotten from Melody
from Thomas's mom, plowed ahead with questioning Thomas all by himself,
no lawyer, no parents, no nothing, starting at about five thirty.
So Thomas, a twelve year old boy who had never
had any contact with law enforcement, is left to fend
(07:33):
for himself against seasoned homicide detectives. All of the beginning
of Thomas's interrogation is captured on videotape, and when you
watch this tape, you see a small boy sitting in
a chair at a table in a small room with
no windows, no clock. Thomas is about to undergo about
five hours of questioning at age twelve, by himself. Now,
(07:56):
the first segment of this tape runs from about five
thirty in the afternoon to six and it's hard to watch.
It's brutal. It literally gutted me and caused me to
cry exactly. I mean. At first, Thomas keeps his cool.
You can see the honor Roll student in him, trying
to be the big man who helps the police. He
calls his interrogators sir. He answers them quickly and politely.
(08:20):
The only way you can tell he's nervous is by
the way he's wringing his hands over and over again,
almost NonStop. But it gets awful, and it gets awful quickly.
The police start out by telling Thomas that he has
to choose between incriminating himself and incriminating his own mother.
(08:42):
In the bottom line is nobody broke in that house
last night. There's no indication of any break here. So
your sister died and there was only two people in
the house. It could have killed you. That's the only
way he can be. Boy, no other way, you or
(09:03):
your mother. That's the only way it can be. Boy.
There ain't no other way. And again, did your mother
kill her? Not that I know of. They say, why
would you kill your sister? And he says I wouldn't,
But they've continued to press you had to have killed her,
because if your mother didn't, that just leaves you had
(09:27):
to your mother didn't just leave she Thomas begins to cry,
actually wail, and the sound of his high pitch whailing
is what caused me the greatest distressed because it sounded
almost like the way an animal would sound, a baby
animal if their foot were caught in a bear trap,
or an animal try it had. One of the detectives
(10:09):
says to him, why are you crying, Thomas, And Thomas says,
because you're accusing me of something I didn't do. He
(10:36):
had the presence of mind to articulate exactly what he
was feeling. Unbelievable from a twelve year old little and
a twelve year old who had just gone through this
this level of trauma. I mean to be that self aware.
I'm crying because you're accusing me of something I didn't do.
And the detective he's not yelling, he's not screaming, but
he's pressing the point it had to be you boy.
(11:00):
So Thomas, right as a is a smart kid. He's
an honor roll student, and you can see his mind
starts spinning. He's trying to figure a way out of
this horrific situation, and he asks the officers, is there
any way I can prove to you that I didn't
do this way personally, he woke and his idea for
(11:25):
proving his own innocence is this heartbreakingly childlike idea. He
fell asleep that night at five am with a book
in his lap, and he tells the officers that if
he had woken up and killed his sister, the book
would have fallen off his lap and be on the
floor of his bedroom. And he says, go back and
look in my bedroom. You'll see that there's no book
on the floor, which proves I didn't do this. The
(11:48):
officers reject this theory, right, and instead they tell Thomas
he had no choice but to confess. You're going to
have to tell us everything. Thomas keeps denying his guilt
as the pressure is turned up dozens of times. Over
and over. He tells him he didn't kill his sister,
and of course it's the officer's job to cut through
(12:10):
those denials, to make him believe the case against him
is rock solid, to bring him down to that point
of hopelessness. So they lie to twelve year old Thomas.
They lie. They say to him, their investigation is going
to find his fingerprints on the plastic bag that was
over Kayley's head, and his fingerprints are going to be
at a certain angle that somehow indicates that he had
(12:33):
held the bag over his sister's head. And then they
offer inducements to get him to confess. Thomas, you're twelve
years old. If you confess, we're who are here to
help you and your mother. You've got to be flat
honest with us so that we can help you. You're
gonna need some help to get rid of this guilty,
(12:53):
but you've got to be flat honest with us so
we can help you. Okay, what's the help theme again
versus punishment? We're here to help you, that's what we
want to do. Tell us. And it's at this point
during the interrogation that the officers introduce their theory of
the crime. In other words, they start telling Thomas what
(13:15):
it is they want him to say. Could it have
been an accident? They asked Thomas, even though the crime
scene obviously indicates that what happened to Kayleie was with
clearly no accident, And Thomas, who's crying and scared out
of his mind, says he and I don't remember. Okay, well,
it's a possibility it could have been an accident, and
(13:37):
I don't remember it. This goes on, okay, it goes
on for more than an hour, and by the end
it culminates in this horrible ten minutes segment where Thomas
has left alone. The officers step out of the room,
but the cameras still running, and he starts rocking back
(13:57):
and forth in his seat and muttering to himself. It's
like halfway distinguishable gibberish. So I didn't. Oh, you want
why mom wouldn't do this. She loves her daughter, doesn't
(14:22):
she She loves me. I didn't do it, that's the
bottom line. But they don't believe me. Help. I'm scared.
We've seen cases where people are reduced to a place
(14:43):
where they're crawled up in a fetal position on the
floor from these tactics, and they're working their magic on Thomas.
I mean, it's so hard to watch. This is psychological torture,
and this moment, the emotional breakdown of Thomas. This is
the moment when police decide to turn off the video camera.
(15:06):
There's no excuse for that. I think what they began
to realize was that this was awful what they were
recording on tape and Thomas had reached a place where
he was having a breakdown and he still would not
confess to this crime. So they needed some time to
try to work on him outside of the interrogation room
(15:29):
with the camera off. Exactly an outside of this camera
which was recording this trail of emotional destruction that would
turn off any judge, any jury, any listener in America.
(15:56):
So they turned off the camera for what they later
called a break in questioning, right, a break that ended
up lasting about three and a half hours. Now, it's
perfectly legal for them to turn off the camera, right,
That's the thing there was, and in fact, there still
is no law in Arkansas requiring interrogations to be recorded
in full. We need to have the truth, the whole truth,
(16:20):
and nothing but the truth of what happens in the
interrogation room. We can't allow law enforcement officers to have
the discretion on when depressed the stop button. Later, when
the state was prosecuting this case, it said that all
that happened during this break was that the deputy prosecutor
sat with Thomas while he had something to eat, right,
(16:43):
And during that break, while he was eating, the prosecutors
said that Thomas just spontaneously decided to blurt out a
confession to killing his sister, right, not being questioned, not
being pressured, not being manipulated, not being lied to. He
just blurts it out in the middle of eating this hamburger.
And this is a common refrain that we hear from
law enforcement officers, the spontaneous confession. And why is it common. Well,
(17:09):
if someone blurts out a confession without any prompting or
persuasion by the police, police officers don't need to read
them their miranda rights. It's not until ten PM that
officers turn the video camera back on. We're back now
in the same interrogation room with Thomas sitting in the
same seat as in the earlier session. But what we
(17:30):
now see and here is a very different Thomas Condolt
I am to Actually, it's like a completely different person
in that interrogation room. He is calm, he is cool,
he is collected, he is seems to be eager to
(17:52):
want to help police officers. And it's as if someone
presses the play button and he starts telling a story
that involves and implicates him in his sister's death. Exactly.
He's almost cheerful while he's reciting the story one that
sounds really rehearsed and practiced. He tells a story in
which Kaylee had been in her bed, apparently sleeping, and
(18:14):
Thomas had tied her hands and feet to slower down.
He says when she got out of bed, he didn't
mean to hurt her, and then he described putting a
plastic bag over her head, leaving the room, then going
back and loosening it so that air could get in there.
But even this story, right, this confession to be involved
(18:36):
in the death of his sister, it develops inconsistencies. The
police have him go through it a second time, and
this time they have him take out the part where
it was an accident. On the second go round, Thomas
said he put two bags on Kayley's head because the
first one had a hole in it, and he said
he held the bags there until she started twitching. In
(18:58):
this account, he says he tied her up after she
was smothered. Bangs more more bags. Why don't you use
to because the other one had a hole in it. Okay,
so she's jarred, You've gone. You've got these things to
tie her risks and to tie her legs, and you
do that for figure that she's gonna wake up and
(19:19):
come hurt you. So what you're telling us, damn, what
do you do? And turn onto TV? As I said,
live and go back to me falsely. And it's this story,
this confession, that leads to Thomas's arrest and being charged
(19:40):
in juvenile court with his own sisters murder. But it's
still not quite the end of the story because as
soon as Thomas gives this strangely calm confession, the police
bring in his mother, Melody. They're probably hoping that Thomas
is going to confess to his mom and then they'll
have another piece of evidence that they can use against
tom Us. But what does Thomas say, Well, he leans
(20:03):
over and he whispers to his mother something that he's
obviously trying to say without the camera picking it up.
Thomas whispers to his mom not to worry, just go
along with it. He didn't really do it, and they
won't sign his fingerprints on the bag. The interrogators want
to know what he whispered to his mother, so they
(20:25):
asked her when they have her alone again, did go
along with what he says? He said he didn't do it,
and then he wouldn't find his fingerprints, What does he mean?
Thomas knows his fingerprints aren't on the bags that were
(20:45):
found over his sister's head because he never touched those bags.
He believes that the absence of his fingerprints will prove
his confession false and set him free. And then he
appears to think that, having done as he was told,
after having confessed to the murder of his own sister,
he's going to walk out of that room and go
(21:07):
to his cousin's house. Instead, police come back in, placed
Thomas under arrest and charge him with the murder of
his own sister. So let's talk a little bit about
Thomas's confession. One of the best ways to measure the
reliability of a confession is to look at the evidence
(21:29):
that corroborates it, and in Thomas's case, there was no
corroboration linking Thomas to this cry. They took that cloth
measuring tape and they sent it to the lab for
DNA testing. Thomas's DNA wasn't on that cloth measuring tape. Instead,
another male's DNA was on that tape, and the story
(21:49):
didn't account for other findings that the medical examiner had made.
Kayley had bruising on her forehead, suggesting that there was
some beating or some kind of a struggle before she
had been old, and Thomas's confession said nothing about a
beating or a struggle. There's such a lack of corroboration
of Thomas's story and the psychological tactics that were used
(22:10):
to extract this story, including fact feeding, including threats and promises.
This confession bears so many red flags. But let's talk
for a minute though, about that three and a half
hour period when the video camera was turned off. When
you look at this and it just stinks to high heaven,
when they pressed that stop button and then somehow low
and behold come back with a confession and a completely
(22:32):
different child. What happened during that time? How did Thomas
turn from this panicked child having an emotional breakdown to
a cool, calm, confidence, confessed murderer. To hear it from Thomas,
this was no spontaneous outburst, suggesting that he was guilty
(22:52):
the whole time. This was part of an interrogation process
that actually was ramped up during the three and of
our period. Thomas has said that the interrogation continued after
he had that emotional breakdown and was taken out of
the room that off camera, the police had continued telling
him that it was either going to be you or
your mother, and that he needed to stand up and
(23:15):
be a man and admit what he did and if
he did, then he'd be able to go home. Right
That's why he later thought he was going to be
able to go back to his cousin's house after confessing
to the murder of his own sister. And Thomas also
told his court appointed psychologist that they told him that
if he didn't confess, he a twelve year old, would
(23:36):
be charged as an adult and could get the death penalty,
or his mother could get the death penalty if he
didn't confess, because there were only two people who could
have been guilty of this crime, Thomas or his mother.
So we have these two different stories of what happened
during this three and a half hour period. Off camera,
the prosecutor says Thomas is eating and he spontaneously confesses.
(23:59):
But tom Mus has a story of continuing pressure, continuing manipulation,
all occurring off camera. So how do we weigh those
two accounts well? During Thomas's break in questioning Melody, the
mom is reinterviewed a second time on video camera, and
during that second interview of Melody, you can hear a loud,
(24:21):
deep male voice yell Thomas, I'm not going to ask
you again. Thomas is being questioned. That much is really clear,
and he's being yelled at. That horrible process that we
saw earlier is still happening just off camera. Thomas is
(24:42):
convicted despite the heroic efforts of a very good attorney
who Laura and I met for the first time in
this case. Thomas's attorney was a public defender named Dorsey Corbin.
My name is Dorsey Corbin, and I represented Thomas Cogdale
from seven months after he was charged with murder until
(25:02):
the Supreme Court handed down its opinion on May six two.
She had challenged the confession aggressively before trial and lost,
and she had tried this case very effectively. Confessions are
one of the most powerful forms of evidence, and it
can be incredibly hard to undwind these cases after the
fact of false confessors who took their case to trial
(25:26):
were convicted even though they were factually innocence of these crimes. Okay,
can I talk about things that don't make sense in
this whole case. The police they originally thought that Kaylee
must have died somewhere between two thirty or three thirty,
and that was the time frame that Thomas used in
his confession. Lividity is the process of which after death,
(25:48):
your blood settles because of basically gravity, So if you're
laying on your bike, you're gonna have red marks on
the back where the blood settles. The medical examiner test
of FID that lividity stops after six to eight hours. However,
the pictures taken at the crime scene at twelve o
two pm in the afternoon, and it won fifty in
(26:10):
the afternoon showed continuing lividity. The time of death being
six to eight hours before two pm in the afternoon
is well after the time Thomas had gone to sleep,
and the police never made him change that part of
his story. He didn't do this in his sleep and
somehow managed to leave no fingerprints, no DNA. It just
(26:35):
didn't happen at the hands of Thomas. The judge had
heard all of the evidence from the very beginning. The
power of the confession again was so strong that the
juvenile court judge believed the confession. Very few people can
understand how or why anyone would admit to a crime
(26:58):
they didn't commit. So Thomas is sent off to a
juvenile detention facility in Texarcana, where he was sentenced to
stay there until his eighteenth birthday. Dorsey Corbin, meanwhile, his
public defender, continued fighting his case. She took Thomas's case
to the Arkansas Court of Appeals and argued about the
confession they're lost, and then she decided to take the
(27:20):
case to the Arkansas Supreme Court. And that's when we
got involved. When we first heard about Thomas's case, it
was right when we were getting ready for Brendan d
Ass's post conviction hearing in Manitoua, Wisconsin, and we reached
(27:44):
out to Dorsey Corbin, and when she learned that the
Arkansas Supreme Court had agreed to hear Thomas's case, she
asked us to file an amicus brief. Write a brief
from experts explaining the problem of false confessions and explaining
how kids like Thomas are more likely to falsely confess
than adults believe it or not. When you're in the
(28:06):
part of the appeals process called a direct appeal, you
can't file it based on whether the confession is true
or false. Instead, the only argument that you can make
is whether the confession was coerced or forced, and whether
there were any problems with the way in which police
read the defendant his Miranda rights. These are the right
to remain silent, the right to have a lawyer with
(28:28):
you during questioning. The defendant has to knowingly and intelligently
waive his Miranda rights. So if the suspect, because of
his or her vulnerabilities, doesn't understand those rights, that's another
way to attack the confession. What was Dorsey doing in
this case? For Thomas? Here we have a twelve year
old in the interrogation room who's being told that he
(28:48):
has a constitutional right to silence and a lawyer, all
these difficult concepts. They tell him he has these rights,
and then they ask him, do you agree to waive
these rights? Well, you sigh a waiver And this is
where inquisitiveness saved the day for Thomas. The detective asks
(29:08):
him to sign a waiver and Thomas said, what's a waiver?
You know, waiver is a legal term exactly. You know,
every time you go bungee jumping you have to sign
a waiver to protect the business from getting sued. Here's
Thomas about to go off the cliff, right, I mean
a different kind of cliff. So the detective freezes and
(29:32):
he has never been asked that question. He says, well,
this simply states that what you were doing, you were
doing of your own free will. That's not what a
waiver means. That that's not what it means to give
up your rights. This is the issue that Dorsey Corbin,
Thomas's lawyer, brought before the Arkansas Supreme Court, and it
(29:53):
was the issue that we supported her with by writing
an amicus brief that not only talks about how insane
it is the twelve year olds like Thomas are allowed
to waive their constitutional rights without any adult advising them,
but that also highlighted all of the reasons why this
confession we thought was not worth the tape it was
recorded on, and it worked. The Arkansas Supreme Court held
(30:16):
that the detectives explanation of what a waiver was was wrong,
and that as a result, Thomas did not knowingly and
intelligently waive his miranders. The confession was out and the
conviction was overturned. It angers me so much that police
(30:38):
officers lie to children, isolate children, and do all the
terrible things that they did to Thomas in this interrogation,
and God only knows what they did to him for
the three and a half hours that they didn't bother
to put the tape on. Because he was an honor
roll student, he wanted to make sure he understood this
(30:59):
new word he hadn't heard before, waiver. That's what freed him.
How many other Thomas Cogdals are They're out there, children
twelve fourteen years old who were interrogated in just this way,
but who didn't have that moment of good fortune in
a way to be able to ask what a word means.
As the captain of the police foresaid at the time
(31:21):
of trial, had we known at the interview what we
know now, we would have conducted the interview differently. That
speaks volumes. They focused in on Thomas, they had tunnel
vision and their sole goal was to get a confession
out of a scared twelve year old boy. Congratulations, they
did it. No one else has ever been charged with
(31:44):
the murder of Kayleie Cogdal. Thomas deserves closer, and equally importantly,
Thomas's sister deserves justice. Melody never confessed to this crime.
And the bottom line is police and prosecutors made a
judgment that there wasn't enough evidence pointing to an alternative suspect.
We were there on the scene. We can't tell you
what the evidence on the scene Shower who had pointed to.
(32:07):
But what we do know is that Thomas's confession is false.
Two weeks or so after the Arkansas Supreme Court, throughout
his conviction, Thomas was free living with his grandparents. When
he was younger, his mother had taken Thomas and his
sister to the Department of Human Services and basically said, here,
(32:29):
take these kids. I can't deal with him anymore. I
suspect that when Thomas came back he felt somewhat of
a burden to be more of a caretaker for both
his mother and for his sister after the murder. I
think it was very important for Thomas to live with
people who would take care of him, nurture him, and
(32:52):
love him. He found that with his grandparents, and they
were so very happy to have him their home. Despite
the ordeal of trial and conviction, everything that Thomas went
through after he was released, he still had dreams. He
wants to be an astronomer, and he wants to go
(33:13):
or people don't know him. Thomas, wherever you are, we
wish you all the best. My friend and Dorsey, thank
you so much for allowing us to play a role
in this case. It's a great honor to be able
to work with people like Dorsey to fight for the
freedom of kids like Thomas. But there are larger questions here.
What can we do to prevent these kinds of cases
(33:35):
from happening again? What kinds of reforms are needed. One
of the laws that Steve has been fighting for is
a law requiring lawyers in the interrogation room for kids
like Thomas, not allowing them to give up their rights
to a lawyer, but rather insisting that they have someone
there by their side to advise them. And they need
help in understanding what the Miranda warnings are and understand
(33:58):
what the concepts is are of giving them up. That's
why you need lawyers to be an advocate for that
child in the interrogation room. Thanks for listening to Thomas
Cogdle's story. Next week, we'll take you to a small
farm town in Nebraska that was racked by a double murder,
(34:19):
a false confession, and a surprising twist that sounds like
it's right out of a Tarantino movie. Until then, thanks
for listening. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of
Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One.
Special thanks to our executive producer Jason Slam and the
(34:41):
team at Signal Company Number one Executive producer Kevin Wardace,
Senior Producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by
Connor Hall. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You
can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura night
Rider and you can follow me on Twitter at s Driven.
For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast
(35:03):
dot com and be sure to follow the show on
Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast,
and on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
writer and I'm Steve Drissen. So far, we've told you
the story of Robert Davis in Virginia and the Dicks
Moore five in Chicago, two cases that show how the
interrogation room works and how racial biases can script false confessions.
Today's episode is about how interrogation tactics designed for seasoned
(00:23):
adult criminals are often used on the most vulnerable among us.
We're going to take you to Camden, Arkansas, where a
twelve year old boy is left to fend for himself
against grown ups who suspect him of murder. The interrogation
tape is bad enough, but the worst parts happened off camera.
(00:44):
This is the story of Thomas Cogdal. I do a
lot of searches online to try to keep up to
date about cases involving false confessions and juveniles. In this
(01:04):
case came on my radar screen. When I saw these
interrogation tapes, I was absolutely floored. You know, Robert Davis
was eighteen, he was well over six ft tall. But
Thomas Cogdal, he was a boy. He hadn't started shaving yet.
This is the first video I'd seen where adult tactics
(01:26):
were being used on someone as young as Thomas twelve
years old. I'm a mom, I've got kids not much
younger than Thomas, and the way the cops railroaded this child,
it brings me to tears when I hear this. You
have two boys, I have three boys. I remember what
my boys were like when they were twelve years old,
and they remind me very much of Thomas Cogdale. And
(01:46):
that the climax of this interrogation they turn off the camera,
that's when the heat really gets turned up. What happened
off camera? I wanted to know what happened. Thomas's story
starts in Camden, Arkansas, a small town about twelve thousand
people a hundred miles south of Little Rock. Now Camden
(02:08):
is a beautiful place, but like too many smaller towns,
modernity has been hard for Camden. Once upon a time,
it was home to a naval ammunition depot that employed
a lot of people, and it was even known for
being the home of the man who invented gray Pet
soft drinks, which were really popular in the fifties and sixties.
But gray Pet fizzled out and the ammunition depot closed
(02:30):
at the end of the Cold War, and ever since
the late eighties early nineties, Camden has been losing jobs, residents,
and morale. Now, at the beginning of the summer in
two thousand six, Thomas and his family had moved into
a tidy, little gray house on Waco Street. They live there,
just the three of them. It's Thomas who's twelve, his
(02:51):
eleven year old sister Kaylee, and their mom, Melody Jones.
Let me tell you a little about Thomas. He's one
of those whiz kids, to the kind of kid who
racks up all a's in school and then comes home
and dives straight into a book. He's well mannered, polite, quiet,
small for his age, with these chubby cheeks that made
him look even younger than his age. And at twelve,
(03:14):
he still spoke with a lisp, this really childlike lisp
that was incredibly endearing. Now, in many ways, Thomas shouldered
a lot of the responsibility around the house. Melody was
on Social Security disability because of mental illness, and the
family got by on her monthly check and food stamps.
Thomas had a sister who was eleven, Kayley. She was
(03:36):
as immature in some ways. As Thomas was mature, she
wasn't as good as he wasn't reading, so he'd spent
a lot of time helping her learn her words and
remember they were new on the block, which unfortunately meant
that Kayley was in for some bullying. But when other
kids would pick on her, Thomas would literally launch himself
at them, chubby cheeks and all. He was the big brother,
(03:57):
it was his responsibility, he felt to defend her. The
two of them got along well for the most part,
but like all children, they had their spats, and it
usually occurred when Kaylee would interrupt something that Thomas was
working on or listening to, or video game he was playing,
and that would frustrate him. But that happens in every family.
(04:17):
So let's fast forward to the morning of August seven,
two thousand six. It was Monday morning, but school was out,
so the kids had stayed up really late the night before.
Kaylee had gone to bed at about two thirty in
the morning, and Thomas had stayed up even later than
her until about five am, eating M and m's and
reading a spooky children's book in his room. He fell
(04:37):
asleep with the book still open to the page that
he had left it at and then the morning comes
at about forty five or so, both Melody and Thomas
are awake. Melody later said she want to check the
mail that morning found a letter for Kayley, who was
still in her bedroom. Melody asks Thomas to come with
her to surprise Kaylee with her letter, but they're met
(04:59):
with a horrible sight. Kayley's in the bedroom. Her hands
are tightly bound with a red dog leash, and her
feet are loosely bound with a cloth measuring tape, the
kind of thing you'd use to measure out and cut fabric.
And there's a plastic bag over her head. Melody removed
the bag and it was immediately clear Kayley was dead.
(05:22):
Melody's screamed. She screamed so loudly that the neighbors hear her.
She becomes hysterical. Thomas has the presence of mind to
call an ambulance arrives. The neighbors are gathering outside. Everybody's concerned,
but no one's being brought out to that ambulance for treatment. Slowly,
word is beginning to spread among the neighbors. The Kayleie
(05:43):
Cogdal have been found dead. When police arrive at a
crime scene, they look for evidence of forced entry, and
they didn't see any evidence of forced entry. That means
that either somebody in the home had let the murderer in,
or that the murder had been committed by somebody who
was in the home at the time of the crime.
(06:04):
Kaylee had not been sexually assaulted. Instead, she'd been smothered
to death. The absence of any sexual attack meant that
both Thomas and his mother, Melody were suspects. Now at
this point in the investigation, police have thought the time
of death was about six to eight hours before the
body had been discovered. Working back from five, that would
(06:25):
have placed the murder around three forty five to forty
five in the morning, and because Thomas had said that
he was awake, still reading a book at the time,
suspicion began to focus on him. The police bring both
Melody and Thomas in for questioning later in the day,
and it's Melodies turned to go first. The mom. Now,
she's questioned about four thirty PM for about an hour
(06:48):
and long story short, she denies doing anything that Kaylee,
and in fact spends most of that interview answering questions
about Thomas. At the end of that interview. The end
of the hour, she gives the police per mission to
question Thomas. Now this is interesting and problematic, right. I mean,
Melody is a suspect as well as Thomas, and she's
the one who is giving the police consent to question
(07:10):
her son, the other suspect. It's totally inappropriate. But the
police relied on that consent that they've gotten from Melody
from Thomas's mom, plowed ahead with questioning Thomas all by himself,
no lawyer, no parents, no nothing, starting at about five thirty.
So Thomas, a twelve year old boy who had never
had any contact with law enforcement, is left to fend
(07:33):
for himself against seasoned homicide detectives. All of the beginning
of Thomas's interrogation is captured on videotape, and when you
watch this tape, you see a small boy sitting in
a chair at a table in a small room with
no windows, no clock. Thomas is about to undergo about
five hours of questioning at age twelve, by himself. Now,
(07:56):
the first segment of this tape runs from about five
thirty in the afternoon to six and it's hard to watch.
It's brutal. It literally gutted me and caused me to
cry exactly. I mean. At first, Thomas keeps his cool.
You can see the honor Roll student in him, trying
to be the big man who helps the police. He
calls his interrogators sir. He answers them quickly and politely.
(08:20):
The only way you can tell he's nervous is by
the way he's wringing his hands over and over again,
almost NonStop. But it gets awful, and it gets awful quickly.
The police start out by telling Thomas that he has
to choose between incriminating himself and incriminating his own mother.
(08:42):
In the bottom line is nobody broke in that house
last night. There's no indication of any break here. So
your sister died and there was only two people in
the house. It could have killed you. That's the only
way he can be. Boy, no other way, you or
(09:03):
your mother. That's the only way it can be. Boy.
There ain't no other way. And again, did your mother
kill her? Not that I know of. They say, why
would you kill your sister? And he says I wouldn't,
But they've continued to press you had to have killed her,
because if your mother didn't, that just leaves you had
(09:27):
to your mother didn't just leave she Thomas begins to cry,
actually wail, and the sound of his high pitch whailing
is what caused me the greatest distressed because it sounded
almost like the way an animal would sound, a baby
animal if their foot were caught in a bear trap,
or an animal try it had. One of the detectives
(10:09):
says to him, why are you crying, Thomas, And Thomas says,
because you're accusing me of something I didn't do. He
(10:36):
had the presence of mind to articulate exactly what he
was feeling. Unbelievable from a twelve year old little and
a twelve year old who had just gone through this
this level of trauma. I mean to be that self aware.
I'm crying because you're accusing me of something I didn't do.
And the detective he's not yelling, he's not screaming, but
he's pressing the point it had to be you boy.
(11:00):
So Thomas, right as a is a smart kid. He's
an honor roll student, and you can see his mind
starts spinning. He's trying to figure a way out of
this horrific situation, and he asks the officers, is there
any way I can prove to you that I didn't
do this way personally, he woke and his idea for
(11:25):
proving his own innocence is this heartbreakingly childlike idea. He
fell asleep that night at five am with a book
in his lap, and he tells the officers that if
he had woken up and killed his sister, the book
would have fallen off his lap and be on the
floor of his bedroom. And he says, go back and
look in my bedroom. You'll see that there's no book
on the floor, which proves I didn't do this. The
(11:48):
officers reject this theory, right, and instead they tell Thomas
he had no choice but to confess. You're going to
have to tell us everything. Thomas keeps denying his guilt
as the pressure is turned up dozens of times. Over
and over. He tells him he didn't kill his sister,
and of course it's the officer's job to cut through
(12:10):
those denials, to make him believe the case against him
is rock solid, to bring him down to that point
of hopelessness. So they lie to twelve year old Thomas.
They lie. They say to him, their investigation is going
to find his fingerprints on the plastic bag that was
over Kayley's head, and his fingerprints are going to be
at a certain angle that somehow indicates that he had
(12:33):
held the bag over his sister's head. And then they
offer inducements to get him to confess. Thomas, you're twelve
years old. If you confess, we're who are here to
help you and your mother. You've got to be flat
honest with us so that we can help you. You're
gonna need some help to get rid of this guilty,
(12:53):
but you've got to be flat honest with us so
we can help you. Okay, what's the help theme again
versus punishment? We're here to help you, that's what we
want to do. Tell us. And it's at this point
during the interrogation that the officers introduce their theory of
the crime. In other words, they start telling Thomas what
(13:15):
it is they want him to say. Could it have
been an accident? They asked Thomas, even though the crime
scene obviously indicates that what happened to Kayleie was with
clearly no accident, And Thomas, who's crying and scared out
of his mind, says he and I don't remember. Okay, well,
it's a possibility it could have been an accident, and
(13:37):
I don't remember it. This goes on, okay, it goes
on for more than an hour, and by the end
it culminates in this horrible ten minutes segment where Thomas
has left alone. The officers step out of the room,
but the cameras still running, and he starts rocking back
(13:57):
and forth in his seat and muttering to himself. It's
like halfway distinguishable gibberish. So I didn't. Oh, you want
why mom wouldn't do this. She loves her daughter, doesn't
(14:22):
she She loves me. I didn't do it, that's the
bottom line. But they don't believe me. Help. I'm scared.
We've seen cases where people are reduced to a place
(14:43):
where they're crawled up in a fetal position on the
floor from these tactics, and they're working their magic on Thomas.
I mean, it's so hard to watch. This is psychological torture,
and this moment, the emotional breakdown of Thomas. This is
the moment when police decide to turn off the video camera.
(15:06):
There's no excuse for that. I think what they began
to realize was that this was awful what they were
recording on tape and Thomas had reached a place where
he was having a breakdown and he still would not
confess to this crime. So they needed some time to
try to work on him outside of the interrogation room
(15:29):
with the camera off. Exactly an outside of this camera
which was recording this trail of emotional destruction that would
turn off any judge, any jury, any listener in America.
(15:56):
So they turned off the camera for what they later
called a break in questioning, right, a break that ended
up lasting about three and a half hours. Now, it's
perfectly legal for them to turn off the camera, right,
That's the thing there was, and in fact, there still
is no law in Arkansas requiring interrogations to be recorded
in full. We need to have the truth, the whole truth,
(16:20):
and nothing but the truth of what happens in the
interrogation room. We can't allow law enforcement officers to have
the discretion on when depressed the stop button. Later, when
the state was prosecuting this case, it said that all
that happened during this break was that the deputy prosecutor
sat with Thomas while he had something to eat, right,
(16:43):
And during that break, while he was eating, the prosecutors
said that Thomas just spontaneously decided to blurt out a
confession to killing his sister, right, not being questioned, not
being pressured, not being manipulated, not being lied to. He
just blurts it out in the middle of eating this hamburger.
And this is a common refrain that we hear from
law enforcement officers, the spontaneous confession. And why is it common. Well,
(17:09):
if someone blurts out a confession without any prompting or
persuasion by the police, police officers don't need to read
them their miranda rights. It's not until ten PM that
officers turn the video camera back on. We're back now
in the same interrogation room with Thomas sitting in the
same seat as in the earlier session. But what we
(17:30):
now see and here is a very different Thomas Condolt
I am to Actually, it's like a completely different person
in that interrogation room. He is calm, he is cool,
he is collected, he is seems to be eager to
(17:52):
want to help police officers. And it's as if someone
presses the play button and he starts telling a story
that involves and implicates him in his sister's death. Exactly.
He's almost cheerful while he's reciting the story one that
sounds really rehearsed and practiced. He tells a story in
which Kaylee had been in her bed, apparently sleeping, and
(18:14):
Thomas had tied her hands and feet to slower down.
He says when she got out of bed, he didn't
mean to hurt her, and then he described putting a
plastic bag over her head, leaving the room, then going
back and loosening it so that air could get in there.
But even this story, right, this confession to be involved
(18:36):
in the death of his sister, it develops inconsistencies. The
police have him go through it a second time, and
this time they have him take out the part where
it was an accident. On the second go round, Thomas
said he put two bags on Kayley's head because the
first one had a hole in it, and he said
he held the bags there until she started twitching. In
(18:58):
this account, he says he tied her up after she
was smothered. Bangs more more bags. Why don't you use
to because the other one had a hole in it. Okay,
so she's jarred, You've gone. You've got these things to
tie her risks and to tie her legs, and you
do that for figure that she's gonna wake up and
(19:19):
come hurt you. So what you're telling us, damn, what
do you do? And turn onto TV? As I said,
live and go back to me falsely. And it's this story,
this confession, that leads to Thomas's arrest and being charged
(19:40):
in juvenile court with his own sisters murder. But it's
still not quite the end of the story because as
soon as Thomas gives this strangely calm confession, the police
bring in his mother, Melody. They're probably hoping that Thomas
is going to confess to his mom and then they'll
have another piece of evidence that they can use against
tom Us. But what does Thomas say, Well, he leans
(20:03):
over and he whispers to his mother something that he's
obviously trying to say without the camera picking it up.
Thomas whispers to his mom not to worry, just go
along with it. He didn't really do it, and they
won't sign his fingerprints on the bag. The interrogators want
to know what he whispered to his mother, so they
(20:25):
asked her when they have her alone again, did go
along with what he says? He said he didn't do it,
and then he wouldn't find his fingerprints, What does he mean?
Thomas knows his fingerprints aren't on the bags that were
(20:45):
found over his sister's head because he never touched those bags.
He believes that the absence of his fingerprints will prove
his confession false and set him free. And then he
appears to think that, having done as he was told,
after having confessed to the murder of his own sister,
he's going to walk out of that room and go
(21:07):
to his cousin's house. Instead, police come back in, placed
Thomas under arrest and charge him with the murder of
his own sister. So let's talk a little bit about
Thomas's confession. One of the best ways to measure the
reliability of a confession is to look at the evidence
(21:29):
that corroborates it, and in Thomas's case, there was no
corroboration linking Thomas to this cry. They took that cloth
measuring tape and they sent it to the lab for
DNA testing. Thomas's DNA wasn't on that cloth measuring tape. Instead,
another male's DNA was on that tape, and the story
(21:49):
didn't account for other findings that the medical examiner had made.
Kayley had bruising on her forehead, suggesting that there was
some beating or some kind of a struggle before she
had been old, and Thomas's confession said nothing about a
beating or a struggle. There's such a lack of corroboration
of Thomas's story and the psychological tactics that were used
(22:10):
to extract this story, including fact feeding, including threats and promises.
This confession bears so many red flags. But let's talk
for a minute though, about that three and a half
hour period when the video camera was turned off. When
you look at this and it just stinks to high heaven,
when they pressed that stop button and then somehow low
and behold come back with a confession and a completely
(22:32):
different child. What happened during that time? How did Thomas
turn from this panicked child having an emotional breakdown to
a cool, calm, confidence, confessed murderer. To hear it from Thomas,
this was no spontaneous outburst, suggesting that he was guilty
(22:52):
the whole time. This was part of an interrogation process
that actually was ramped up during the three and of
our period. Thomas has said that the interrogation continued after
he had that emotional breakdown and was taken out of
the room that off camera, the police had continued telling
him that it was either going to be you or
your mother, and that he needed to stand up and
(23:15):
be a man and admit what he did and if
he did, then he'd be able to go home. Right
That's why he later thought he was going to be
able to go back to his cousin's house after confessing
to the murder of his own sister. And Thomas also
told his court appointed psychologist that they told him that
if he didn't confess, he a twelve year old, would
(23:36):
be charged as an adult and could get the death penalty,
or his mother could get the death penalty if he
didn't confess, because there were only two people who could
have been guilty of this crime, Thomas or his mother.
So we have these two different stories of what happened
during this three and a half hour period. Off camera,
the prosecutor says Thomas is eating and he spontaneously confesses.
(23:59):
But tom Mus has a story of continuing pressure, continuing manipulation,
all occurring off camera. So how do we weigh those
two accounts well? During Thomas's break in questioning Melody, the
mom is reinterviewed a second time on video camera, and
during that second interview of Melody, you can hear a loud,
(24:21):
deep male voice yell Thomas, I'm not going to ask
you again. Thomas is being questioned. That much is really clear,
and he's being yelled at. That horrible process that we
saw earlier is still happening just off camera. Thomas is
(24:42):
convicted despite the heroic efforts of a very good attorney
who Laura and I met for the first time in
this case. Thomas's attorney was a public defender named Dorsey Corbin.
My name is Dorsey Corbin, and I represented Thomas Cogdale
from seven months after he was charged with murder until
(25:02):
the Supreme Court handed down its opinion on May six two.
She had challenged the confession aggressively before trial and lost,
and she had tried this case very effectively. Confessions are
one of the most powerful forms of evidence, and it
can be incredibly hard to undwind these cases after the
fact of false confessors who took their case to trial
(25:26):
were convicted even though they were factually innocence of these crimes. Okay,
can I talk about things that don't make sense in
this whole case. The police they originally thought that Kaylee
must have died somewhere between two thirty or three thirty,
and that was the time frame that Thomas used in
his confession. Lividity is the process of which after death,
(25:48):
your blood settles because of basically gravity, So if you're
laying on your bike, you're gonna have red marks on
the back where the blood settles. The medical examiner test
of FID that lividity stops after six to eight hours. However,
the pictures taken at the crime scene at twelve o
two pm in the afternoon, and it won fifty in
(26:10):
the afternoon showed continuing lividity. The time of death being
six to eight hours before two pm in the afternoon
is well after the time Thomas had gone to sleep,
and the police never made him change that part of
his story. He didn't do this in his sleep and
somehow managed to leave no fingerprints, no DNA. It just
(26:35):
didn't happen at the hands of Thomas. The judge had
heard all of the evidence from the very beginning. The
power of the confession again was so strong that the
juvenile court judge believed the confession. Very few people can
understand how or why anyone would admit to a crime
(26:58):
they didn't commit. So Thomas is sent off to a
juvenile detention facility in Texarcana, where he was sentenced to
stay there until his eighteenth birthday. Dorsey Corbin, meanwhile, his
public defender, continued fighting his case. She took Thomas's case
to the Arkansas Court of Appeals and argued about the
confession they're lost, and then she decided to take the
(27:20):
case to the Arkansas Supreme Court. And that's when we
got involved. When we first heard about Thomas's case, it
was right when we were getting ready for Brendan d
Ass's post conviction hearing in Manitoua, Wisconsin, and we reached
(27:44):
out to Dorsey Corbin, and when she learned that the
Arkansas Supreme Court had agreed to hear Thomas's case, she
asked us to file an amicus brief. Write a brief
from experts explaining the problem of false confessions and explaining
how kids like Thomas are more likely to falsely confess
than adults believe it or not. When you're in the
(28:06):
part of the appeals process called a direct appeal, you
can't file it based on whether the confession is true
or false. Instead, the only argument that you can make
is whether the confession was coerced or forced, and whether
there were any problems with the way in which police
read the defendant his Miranda rights. These are the right
to remain silent, the right to have a lawyer with
(28:28):
you during questioning. The defendant has to knowingly and intelligently
waive his Miranda rights. So if the suspect, because of
his or her vulnerabilities, doesn't understand those rights, that's another
way to attack the confession. What was Dorsey doing in
this case? For Thomas? Here we have a twelve year
old in the interrogation room who's being told that he
(28:48):
has a constitutional right to silence and a lawyer, all
these difficult concepts. They tell him he has these rights,
and then they ask him, do you agree to waive
these rights? Well, you sigh a waiver And this is
where inquisitiveness saved the day for Thomas. The detective asks
(29:08):
him to sign a waiver and Thomas said, what's a waiver?
You know, waiver is a legal term exactly. You know,
every time you go bungee jumping you have to sign
a waiver to protect the business from getting sued. Here's
Thomas about to go off the cliff, right, I mean
a different kind of cliff. So the detective freezes and
(29:32):
he has never been asked that question. He says, well,
this simply states that what you were doing, you were
doing of your own free will. That's not what a
waiver means. That that's not what it means to give
up your rights. This is the issue that Dorsey Corbin,
Thomas's lawyer, brought before the Arkansas Supreme Court, and it
(29:53):
was the issue that we supported her with by writing
an amicus brief that not only talks about how insane
it is the twelve year olds like Thomas are allowed
to waive their constitutional rights without any adult advising them,
but that also highlighted all of the reasons why this
confession we thought was not worth the tape it was
recorded on, and it worked. The Arkansas Supreme Court held
(30:16):
that the detectives explanation of what a waiver was was wrong,
and that as a result, Thomas did not knowingly and
intelligently waive his miranders. The confession was out and the
conviction was overturned. It angers me so much that police
(30:38):
officers lie to children, isolate children, and do all the
terrible things that they did to Thomas in this interrogation,
and God only knows what they did to him for
the three and a half hours that they didn't bother
to put the tape on. Because he was an honor
roll student, he wanted to make sure he understood this
(30:59):
new word he hadn't heard before, waiver. That's what freed him.
How many other Thomas Cogdals are They're out there, children
twelve fourteen years old who were interrogated in just this way,
but who didn't have that moment of good fortune in
a way to be able to ask what a word means.
As the captain of the police foresaid at the time
(31:21):
of trial, had we known at the interview what we
know now, we would have conducted the interview differently. That
speaks volumes. They focused in on Thomas, they had tunnel
vision and their sole goal was to get a confession
out of a scared twelve year old boy. Congratulations, they
did it. No one else has ever been charged with
(31:44):
the murder of Kayleie Cogdal. Thomas deserves closer, and equally importantly,
Thomas's sister deserves justice. Melody never confessed to this crime.
And the bottom line is police and prosecutors made a
judgment that there wasn't enough evidence pointing to an alternative suspect.
We were there on the scene. We can't tell you
what the evidence on the scene Shower who had pointed to.
(32:07):
But what we do know is that Thomas's confession is false.
Two weeks or so after the Arkansas Supreme Court, throughout
his conviction, Thomas was free living with his grandparents. When
he was younger, his mother had taken Thomas and his
sister to the Department of Human Services and basically said, here,
(32:29):
take these kids. I can't deal with him anymore. I
suspect that when Thomas came back he felt somewhat of
a burden to be more of a caretaker for both
his mother and for his sister after the murder. I
think it was very important for Thomas to live with
people who would take care of him, nurture him, and
(32:52):
love him. He found that with his grandparents, and they
were so very happy to have him their home. Despite
the ordeal of trial and conviction, everything that Thomas went
through after he was released, he still had dreams. He
wants to be an astronomer, and he wants to go
(33:13):
or people don't know him. Thomas, wherever you are, we
wish you all the best. My friend and Dorsey, thank
you so much for allowing us to play a role
in this case. It's a great honor to be able
to work with people like Dorsey to fight for the
freedom of kids like Thomas. But there are larger questions here.
What can we do to prevent these kinds of cases
(33:35):
from happening again? What kinds of reforms are needed. One
of the laws that Steve has been fighting for is
a law requiring lawyers in the interrogation room for kids
like Thomas, not allowing them to give up their rights
to a lawyer, but rather insisting that they have someone
there by their side to advise them. And they need
help in understanding what the Miranda warnings are and understand
(33:58):
what the concepts is are of giving them up. That's
why you need lawyers to be an advocate for that
child in the interrogation room. Thanks for listening to Thomas
Cogdle's story. Next week, we'll take you to a small
farm town in Nebraska that was racked by a double murder,
(34:19):
a false confession, and a surprising twist that sounds like
it's right out of a Tarantino movie. Until then, thanks
for listening. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of
Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One.
Special thanks to our executive producer Jason Slam and the
(34:41):
team at Signal Company Number one Executive producer Kevin Wardace,
Senior Producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by
Connor Hall. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You
can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura night
Rider and you can follow me on Twitter at s Driven.
For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast
(35:03):
dot com and be sure to follow the show on
Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast,
and on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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