Richard Ofshe

By TLR Editors

Lecture Title

Overcoming False Confessions and Coerced Statements in the Dawning Age of Interrogation Recordation: “…There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’, It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, for the times they are a-changin’”

Ofshe bio

Richard Ofshe, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley (Emeritus) has been working on the analysis of interrogation tactics and influence in courtrooms and as an academic social psychologist studying extreme forms of influence in the real world for more than 25 years. Serving as defense expert on behalf of innocent false confessors and persons coerced into confessing for more than 25 years in over 350 Federal, state and military courtrooms, he has consulted or testified on landmark, innocent false confessor cases such as the The PhoenixTemple Murder case, The West Memphis Three, The Norfolk Four, The Central Park Jogger and on behalf of hundreds of unknown, innocent, indigent victims of police misconduct — including Adrian Thomas.

Richard Ofshe and Richard Leo’s analysis of interrogation influence published as the Decision to Confess Falsely (1997, Denver University Law Review) is widely cited and was drawn upon extensively by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in their now fammous decision in DeGambattista (2004).

The soon to be released, award winning documentary film “Scenes of a Crime.” is the brilliant and shocking film by NewBox Productions exposing the unspeakable injustice done to Adrian Thomas by police and prosecutors in Troy, New York.

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