Confession Prompted by Lies, Prisoner Fights for Freedom

SAN FRANCISCO (April 14) -- Joel Alcox had been drinking heavily, had stayed up all night and had taken LSD when Lompoc, Calif., police arrested him in 1986 for the murder of a motel owner.

At first, Alcox insisted that he knew nothing about the murder. But over the course of more than six hours, his two police interrogators built a damning case against him. They told him his fingerprints were found at the scene and that witnesses saw him there. Neither was true, but Alcox began to doubt his own memory. Finally, he broke down and confessed to the killing. He has spent the past 23 years in prison for first-degree murder.

Alcox has always maintained that he was wrongly convicted and, for more than a decade, has been trying to get a court to rehear his case. If granted a new trial, his attorney says, Alcox would show that he falsely confessed to the crime under extreme duress from police and that new evidence establishes his innocence.

Witnesses who did not testify at his 1987 trial -- including another man convicted in the case -- are prepared to testify that Alcox was not at the murder scene and had an alibi. Another witness is ready to testify that she heard the dying man say his killer was "Sanjay," a possible a reference to onetime family friend Sanjay Patel, who came under suspicion but was never charged in the case.

Alcox's appeals have been working their way through the courts for nearly a decade and the case is now before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In practical terms, it is the end of the line for his legal appeals.

"This is his last chance for justice," said his attorney, Juliana Drous, who helped win the freedom of Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt in 1997 after the former Black Panther spent 27 years in prison on a trumped-up murder charge.

Drous argues that Alcox was betrayed by a legal system in which police were allowed to lie to extract his confession and by his own incompetent attorney, who ignored evidence that could have won an acquittal. Now 46, Alcox has spent half his life in prison.

"In our criminal justice system, it is inevitable that on occasions, an unthinkable mistake will be made and an innocent man will be sent to prison," Drous wrote in a brief filed with the appellate court last month. "This is one of those occasions. ... This court now has the opportunity to right a terrible wrong."

The office of California Attorney General Jerry Brown, which is fighting the appeal, contends that Alcox does not deserve a new trial because he was too slow in pursuing his claim of innocence.

If Alcox were truly not guilty, argues Deputy Attorney General Jason Tran, he wouldn't have waited more than a decade after his conviction to request a new trial. Tran also contends that the evidence Alcox wants to present is not sufficiently new to warrant a rehearing.

"Petitioner's lack of diligence ... is fatal to his request," Tran argued in a February brief. "Petitioner is not entitled to [a new trial] because he failed to diligently pursue his actual innocence claim."

Tran declined to discuss the case with AOL News.

Persuaded False Confession?

Police arrested Alcox on March 25, 1986, in the murder of Thakorbhai Patel, who was shot during a robbery attempt at his Lompoc Motel.

During Alcox's interrogation, police ignored his request to stop the questioning and urged him to admit his guilt so he would receive lighter treatment. He had no attorney present. When he ultimately confessed, he incorporated into his statement details of the crime that his interrogators had given him.

Richard Leo, a law professor at the University of San Francisco and a former psychology professor at the University of California, Irvine, examined Alcox's confession at Drous' request. A leading expert in the field, Leo has examined thousands of confessions, including more than 600 he concluded were false.

After listening to tapes of Alcox's interrogation and studying evidence in the case, he found that Alcox's admission was a classic example of a "persuaded false confession."

"In my mind, there is no doubt he is an innocent man," Leo told AOL News..

He said Alcox became convinced during interrogation that his own recollection was faulty and accepted the facts presented to him by the police -- even though some of that information was false.

"Some people like Alcox come to doubt their memory and think they may have done something in a blackout state," Leo said. "They confess to the crime they are persuaded they must have done."

False confessions are more common than generally believed, Leo said. In cases where DNA evidence has been used to overturn wrongful convictions, about 20 percent involved false confessions, he said.

Alcox got several facts wrong in the statement he gave police. He said two shots were fired when there were three; that Patel was shot in the motel office when he was shot in an apartment; and that Patel was nearly 6 feet tall when in fact he was 5 feet, 4 inches.

At Alcox's trial in 1987, his lawyer, Kenneth Biely, did not challenge his client's confession. Nor did Biely pursue numerous witnesses who could have helped Alcox's case, including several who could have given him an alibi and others who treated the dying man and heard him say his killer was "Sanjay," or a variation of that name. Biely died in 1993.

Alcox was convicted of murder and robbery and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Also convicted was Richard Lothery, who took part in the murder and was tried separately. Although Lothery knew that Alcox was not at the scene, he kept silent for 14 years because he blamed Alcox's false confession for his own conviction.

Searching for Family, Finding a Believer

Alcox had been placed in a foster home at the age of 10 and adopted by the Alcox family at 16. In prison, he began searching for his biological family, whose last name was Tissue. He located Sharon Tissue in the San Francisco Bay Area and wrote to her.

It turned out that Alcox and her husband, Will, were distant cousins. She took an interest in his case, began visiting him and held a prayer meeting for him at her church. She collected a few donations and books for him and became a key link to the outside world.

"As a Tissue, and as a Christian, there was no way I could ignore his plight," she told AOL News. "The more we looked, the more we became convinced that this was quite possibly an innocent young man in prison. I began searching for an attorney."

Eventually she found Drous, who looked into the case and became convinced that Alcox was not guilty.

The turning point came in 2000 when Drous contacted Lothery in prison. He told her that Alcox's confession was false and that Alcox was not at the murder scene.

Lothery recounted that he went to the motel with Sanjay Patel, who knew the victim but was not related. The two got into an argument and Sanjay shot the elder Patel, Lothery said.

After the arrest of Alcox and Lothery, Sanjay Patel contacted police and attempted to confess to the murder. He provided details about the shooting that had not been publicly released, but he was never charged. He was last reported living in London.

"A Mountain of ... Evidence"

In her brief to the federal appeals courts, Drous argues that there is "a mountain of integrated evidence establishing Mr. Alcox's actual innocence" that Biely did not offer at trial or that surfaced later. That evidence includes:

• Sections of a secretly recorded 1986 jailhouse conversation in which Lothery berated Alcox for making a false confession that implicated both of them. Lothery also identified Sanjay Patel as the gunman.
• A statement from a woman who helped treat the victim before he died and heard him blame the murder on "Sanjay."
• Statements from alibi witnesses who say Alcox was with them at a party at the time of the murder.
• A statement from a witness recanting her trial testimony that she overheard Alcox admit to the murder. The witness, who was then 15, admits she never met Alcox.
• A 2003 declaration from Lothery stating that Alcox was not at the scene and had no part in the murder.

In 2005, Superior Court Judge Art Garcia held an evidentiary hearing and overturned Alcox's conviction on the grounds that Biely's representation was inadequate.

The Santa Barbara County district attorney's office appealed and won a reversal; a state appeals court ruled it was wrong to second-guess the trial attorney and that Alcox had received a fair trial.

Last year, a federal magistrate rejected Alcox's appeal, ruling that he had waited too long to file, a decision upheld by a federal judge.

Drous questioned how Alcox could have acted more quickly on his case from prison.

"He did everything he could possibly do," she said. "That decision ignores all the realities of incarceration."

She believes the case should not be decided on procedural grounds but on the evidence. For now, Alcox's fate depends on whether she can persuade a three-judge panel that he deserves a new trial.

"The problem with these cases is that the prosecutors and the judges hate to admit that this happens," Drous said. "We like to think the system is perfect. There are way too many cases where innocent people get convicted, and the system has to be open to admitting a mistake and correcting it."