By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project
With an opinion yesterday from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, ACLU client Max Soffar moves a step closer to an unjust execution.  And, little more than one year after the execution of Troy Davis, our system moves closer to another miscarriage of justice. 
Soffar is an innocent man on Texas’s death row, who falsely confessed to crimes he didn’t commit.  He’s been there most of the last 32 years after being convicted of killing three people in a 1980 Houston bowling alley robbery. His conviction was based entirely on false words from his own mouth.
Yesterday’s opinion came in Soffar’s latest appeal, filed by attorneys from the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. The court upheld Soffar’s death sentence, even as three judges declared in a joint concurring opinion that they lack faith in his conviction.  They note that Soffar’s “confession does not inspire confidence in its accuracy [and] appears to be a tale told by one who heard about the robbery-murders rather than by one who committed them.”
Penned by Judge Cathy Cochran, this powerful concurrence begins by recalling what a previous appellate judge had said about this case.  When Judge Harold DeMoss reviewed the case (and reversed the original 1981 conviction), he stated that he had lain awake nights "agonizing over the enigmas, contradictions, and ambiguities which are inherent in this record." Judge Cochran expressed that she feels “the same way about the similar record from the second trial conducted twenty-five years later.” She added, “There is something very wrong about this case.”
Sadly, despite the serious doubt over his confession, the court upheld the death sentence against Max Soffar because they didn’t think he proved there were any constitutional violations in his treatment and legal representation (a point on which we disagree, but that’s for another day).
Judge Cochran’s analysis of Soffar’s confession echoes the framework set out just last week by my colleague Denny LeBoeuf in her recent piece for the  New Orleans Times-Picayune concerning the exoneration of Damon Thibodeaux -- who also falsely confessed -- from Louisiana’s death row.  She explained that the police should scrutinize confessions given by suspects suffering from cognitive confusion, limited intellectual functioning or substance abuse, and that officers should check to see if the suspect is providing new information – not information already in the public domain – that matches with the forensic evidence.
Judge Cochran checked all of these boxes in her list of problems with Soffar’s confession: 1) he had a child-like mind, low IQ and substance-abuse problems; 2) he provided no new information not already publicized in the extensive coverage of this well-known crime; and 3) perhaps most importantly, Soffar’s details did not match the known facts.
Indeed, Judge Cochran reviewed 15 different inconsistencies between Soffar’s confession and the known facts.  Summarizing, she observed, “None of these individual inconsistencies, by themselves, would necessarily cast doubt upon the accuracy of applicant's version of events, but when so many of his details do not comport with the known evidence, something smells fishy.”
Echoing LeBoeuf, Judge Cochran noted that many people believe that “only a guilty person would ever confess to murder.” But Judge Cochran showed the common wisdom is wrong with a list of proven examples of false confessions from those in the Central Park jogger case to the “Norfolk Four.”  Damon Thibodeaux makes one more.
Judge Cochran concluded by noting her hands were tied by procedural rules, despite her significant doubts in Soffar’s guilt: “[A]lthough I personally do not have great confidence in the reliability or accuracy of applicant's written statements and hence in his culpability for the triple murders, I was not the chosen factfinder.”
This is more proof that the death penalty is a failed government program.  When our criminal justice system surrenders these types of decisions to procedural technicalities, it surrenders any moral authority to execute.

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project
The ACLU of Michigan recently put out an interesting report on surveillance cameras. Like other ACLU reports on cameras (such as those by our affiliates in Illinois and Northern California, and the materials on our national site) it summarizes the policy arguments against cameras. But it also focuses on a uniquely disturbing application of surveillance cameras: their deployment in residential neighborhoods.
In the picture-worth-a-thousand-words department, take a close look at this photograph that is included in the report:

Would you want to live there? And be subject to police monitoring 24 hours a day, seven days a week? I suspect most people would not like it if a live police officer were stationed on the sidewalk in front of their house, photographing their comings and goings at all hours. This is little different. As the report notes,
Today’s surveillance units in residential Lansing not only provide a 360-degree view of the area up to 500 feet, but also have zoom capabilities. Each day, the cameras engage in 24-hour viewing and imaging of the surrounding area utilizing high-definition color, night vision, and focus features that resolve minute detail in even the most severe environmental conditions. This means that the Lansing cameras give police the ability to read words on a piece of paper in someone’s hand within 50 feet, clearly discern a license plate that is 300 feet away, or recognize a face at 400 feet. Although the cameras are not monitored 24 hours a day, everything viewed by the cameras is digitally recorded and stored on hard drives for two weeks or more
There are limits placed on surveillance of private areas, but they are not adequate:
“Privacy zones”—defined by the LPD as windows of homes and other “non-public areas”—are not recorded. Still, while most private windows have been blocked from viewing, many front stoops and fenced backyards were only blocked after the ACLU’s recommendation to do so.
I spoke with Rena Elmir of the ACLU of Michigan and she told me,

The police feel that they’ve included sufficient safeguards by including that feature. Still, if you have a mailbox that’s at the end of your property line, the idea that a police officer could see whom you’re getting mail from using the zoom ability of the camera is worrisome. And just as easily as you can blur those areas, such as windows, you can disable that feature. The idea that this could be misused by police—even if it’s just one person, one bad apple—is pretty scary.

The ACLU of Michigan also had an independent researcher look at the impact of the cameras on the minority population. Comparing the representation of black residents to white residents, the study concluded that African Americans were twice as likely to be under camera surveillance as white residents. Concludes the report:

The disproportionate monitoring of people of color actually exacerbates the conditions that facilitate anger and resentment of law enforcement. In a society where many African Americans already feel profiled, installing surveillance cameras in their communities to constantly monitor their behavior only serves to heighten their sense of powerlessness and to foster mistrust of government officials…. One resident in an affected neighborhood expressed fear that when his grandson practices basketball on his driveway, the stranger on the other side of the camera would be silently judging him according to his own prejudices and stereotypes…. The installation of cameras has elicited negative responses from some African American residents, many of whom feel they are being viewed with suspicion as potential criminals. Their sentiments have been reflected in studies verifying that racial minorities are frequently targeted by camera operators in other communities “with a relish that impl[ies] a deep prejudice.”