UNTRUE CONFESSIONS

By Jill Smolowe

On this much, the police and Girvies Davis can agree. On Dec. 22, 1978, Charles Biebel, an 89-year-old retired farmer, was found slumped in his wheelchair in a mobile home in Belleville, Illinois, his chest shredded by two bullet wounds. The following August, Davis, a 20-year-old alcoholic with a childhood history of brain damage and suicide attempts, and an arrest record dating back to age 8, was picked up for the armed robbery of an auto-parts store in East St. Louis. Ten days later, Davis confessed to 11 crimes, among them the Biebel murder.

The validity of his confession, however, is heatedly disputed -- no small matter since police have no witnesses, no weapon, not even a fingerprint, to further link Davis to the Biebel case. The police insist that Davis offered his confession without prompting; Davis counters that it was coerced under threat of death. Now, a coalition of Illinois activists-among them a former Chicago police chief, a retired judge, author Studs Terkel and several prosecutors-is scrambling to rescue Davis from execution by lethal injection this Wednesday at 12:01 a.m. at the Menard Correctional Center.

The case has also attracted attention from advocates for the mentally disabled, who believe that any unchaperoned confession by a retarded defendant is suspect. As a teen, Davis was diagnosed with "organic brain disfunction," which doctors date to a bicycle accident suffered at age 10; in their judgment, he falls within the "borderline range of intelligence." According to Richard Ofshe, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in interrogation techniques, "Mentally retarded people get through life by being accommodating whenever there is a disagreement. They've learned that they are often wrong; for them, agreeing is a way of surviving." Eliciting a confession from such people, he adds, "is like taking candy from a baby."

To be sure, Davis is no swaddled innocent, as he is the first to admit. "I made my share of errors and mistakes, and did my share of wrong -- sinned against both man and God," he wrote recently. "But I am not a murderer." That message has been disseminated to tens of thousands of Internet users via a home page that was established by his defense team on the World Wide Web. In addition to the facts of the case, the page presents, side by side, two quite dissimilar handwriting samples: one taken from a note that police say Davis wrote in 1979, the other recently penned by Davis. In response, more than 1,000 people have so far sent E-mail to Illinois Governor Jim Edgar demanding clemency for Davis.

According to the police, that 1979 note, which admits to 11 crimes, among them the killing of an "old man in a trailor [sic] . with a 22 rifle," was written by Davis and passed to a guard at the St. Clair County jail on Sept. 9. Police maintain that Davis was then removed from his cell at 10 p.m. for a five-hour tour to help investigators look for evidence. At the tour's end, they say, he signed documents prepared by police in which he confessed to more than 20 separate criminal charges of murder, attempted murder and robbery.

Davis' clemency petition offers a different version of events. At around 2 a.m. on Sept. 10, it states, "Mr. Davis says the police pulled over to the shoulder of a deserted highway, produced the as-yet- unsigned confessions, removed him from the police car, removed his handcuffs, removed his leg shackles, unholstered their guns and told him he had two options: sign the confessions or try to escape."

His defense team further argues that Davis couldn't have penned the jailhouse confession because in 1979 he was illiterate, a claim buttressed by a 1975 doctor's report that labels him a functional illiterate. The lawyers contend that Davis learned to read only on death row, where inmates prepared flash cards to help him. (Eventually, Davis earned his high school-equivalency degree and became an ordained minister.)

At least seven of Davis' confessions failed to hold up. In some cases, surviving victims didn't identify Davis; in others, different people were either previously or subsequently convicted. Still, juries found Davis guilty of four murders, each carried out in conjunction with an armed robbery. While Davis does not dispute his involvement in two of those robberies, he claims he had no hand in any killings. As for the Biebel case, the only one to carry the death penalty, he claims he had no involvement at all.

Clyde Kuehn, who was the St. Clair County prosecutor at the time of the murders and is now a circuit-court judge, counters that despite the lack of physical evidence in the Biebel case, there was a "unique pattern of conduct" that involved daytime robberies carried out in isolated areas. As for Davis' intelligence, Kuehn says Davis "did not strike me as an individual who is mentally deficient."

The fact remains, however, that standard police-interrogation techniques assume subjects are focused and stable. The 1985 how-to book used by most police departments, Criminal Interrogation and Confessions, encourages the investigator to isolate the suspect, ignore claims of innocence and try to involve the suspect in possible scenarios of how the crime was committed. "An innocent person,'' it states, "will remain steadfast in denying guilt." But a retarded suspect often has "an excessive desire to please,'' says Florida lawyer Delores Norley, who has trained police in 30 states to deal with the mentally impaired. "This is especially true with authority figures." She and her colleagues are currently aware of some 100 cases of possibly false confessions by impaired defendants.

Only a few become causes celebres. Playwright Arthur Miller, who previously came to the aid of a Connecticut teenager convicted of killing his mother, is now involved in the appeal of Richard Lapointe, a brain-damaged dishwasher who was convicted of raping and killing his wife's 88-year-old grandmother after a nine-hour interrogation in which he made three contradictory confessions. "This is a great problem,'' says Miller. "It ought to interest people that when they get a confession from an innocent man, a murderer gets a passport to freedom.''

--Reported by Michele Donley/Chicago and James Willwerth/Los Angeles

With reporting by MICHELE DONLEY/CHICAGO AND JAMES WILWERTH/LOS ANGELES