May 16, 2006 | Research

Drizin Starts Blog on False Confessions

By Pat Vaughan Tremmel

CHICAGO --- Steven Drizin, legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions and assistant director of the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University School of Law, has started a new blog.

Featuring Drizin's comments, the blog offers the latest news about the problems of false confessions and police interrogations.

Early efforts of the Center on Wrongful Convictions involved a number of cases that were based on false confessions. Those efforts coincided with Drizin's early work on several high-profile juvenile cases of false confessions.

Because of his scholarship and national leadership on police interrogations and false confessions and in legal reform initiatives, Drizen recently was appointed to the legal director position at the Center on Wrongful Convictions. He frequently is consulted by attorneys and is a regular commentator in the media about false confessions.

As Drizin said in his May 1 welcome to bloggers:

“I collect 'false confessions' like some people collect coins, stamps or baseball cards. Using the documents I obtain about each case, I try to 'autopsy' each case to learn as much as possible about the causes of false confessions and to use what I learn to try to prevent such tragedies from recurring.”

To access Drizin's blog, go to http://blog.law.northwestern.edu/bluhm/false_confessions/

The creation of the Center on Wrongful Convictions followed the award-winning work of Rob Warden, its executive director, and Lawrence Marshall, its former legal director, in several high-profile exonerations in Illinois. The center opened shortly after the historic National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty brought men and women freed from death row center stage, for the first time ever, at the School of Law in 1998, garnering unparalleled media attention on wrongful convictions. Later, the center's work in exposing flaws in Illinois' capital punishment system played a significant role in former Gov. George Ryan's decision to commute Illinois death row inmates' pending executions to life in prison.