Coerced Confession By
Restaurant Manager To Stealing A Bank Deposit is Exposed As
False After The Lost Deposit Is Found Stuck in A Bank Vault
By
Hans Sherrer
Justice
Denied Magazine, Vol. 1 No. 12
On
March 11, 1999, Robert Farnsworth Jr., a 29-year-old day manager of a Wendy's
in
When questioned about the missing money,
Farnsworth insisted he deposited both bags in the night drop, and said that if
the bank found only one bag, then the other bag was still in the machine. Even
though Farnsworth was a ten-year employee with an impeccable record, his boss
at Wendy's didn't believe his claim and fired him a month after the money
disappeared.
Later, while being questioned by the state
police, Farnsworth confessed to stealing the money. However, he immediately
recanted the confession. He claimed it wasn't true, and that the police had
badgered him into falsely confessing.
Farnsworth's claim of innocence was ignored,
and he was criminally charged with the theft of the missing money. In July
1999, a jury convicted Farnsworth, relying partly on his recanted confession
and partly on bank employees who testified it was “absolutely impossible” for a
deposit put into the night drop to be lost. Farnsworth was sentenced to a
six-month suspended jail term with three years of probation, and was ordered to
repay the missing money.
Although Farnsworth's claim of innocence fell
on deaf ears, the got the break he needed happened on December 29, 1999. An $1,825 deposit by a local car wash at the same night drop
Farnsworth used could not be found by bank employees. In a repeat of the
scenario that had happened to Robert Farnsworth, the car wash owner began to
suspect one of his managers that had quit shortly after the deposit was
supposedly made had stolen the money. However, knowing the same thing had
happened to Robert Farnsworth, the car wash owner suspected there was something
wrong with the night deposit drop, even though bank
employees insisted it was impossible for a deposit to get lost in it. Not
wanting to wrongly accuse the former manager of theft, the car wash owner convinced
the bank’s president, a friend of his, to intervene and have the night drop thoroughly
inspected. On February 28, 2000, technicians from Diebold took the night
deposit vault apart. They found three deposit bags full of cash and checks -
the car wash's, the missing deposit Robert Farnsworth had made, and a $2,971 deposit
by Rite Aid made on January 8, 2000 that hadn't been reported missing by the
company. The bank’s employees had been proven wrong, and what they thought was
impossible had happened to Robert Farnsworth’s deposit.
On March 8, 2000, Circuit Judge Charles
Nelson, who presided over Farnsworth's trial and sentenced him eight months
earlier, ordered that his conviction be set aside, that his police photos,
fingerprints, and police file be destroyed, and the restitution and fine he
paid be returned. The judge said at the hearing, “It is obvious you didn't do
it.” The public recognition that he was innocent was hollow consolation for
Farnsworth, who had to declare bankruptcy after going broke paying his legal
fees and court ordered payments after being falsely convicted.
Farnsworth
is married with two daughters. Since being fired from Wendy's, he works at a
factory and struggles to make ends meet, because he is making much less than he
did as the restaurant's day manager.
Robert Farnsworth Jr. after his exoneration of
stealing a Wendy’s bank deposit that the Michigan State Police coerced him into
falsely confessing to stealing.
Talking
about his ordeal, Farnsworth said, “I told them and I told them that the
deposit bag had to be in that bank, and they did not believe me. Their attitude
was that I was guilty and they were going to get me. Everybody turned their
backs on me. Everybody believed I took the money.”
Jackson County Chief Assistant Prosecutor
David Lady defended his prosecution of Farnsworth by telling reporters it was
based on the evidence that was available. This evidence consisted of
Farnsworth's recanted confession and the testimony of bank employees that it
was “absolutely impossible” for a deposit to be trapped inside the bank's night
deposit.
The most remarkable and disturbing aspect of
Farnsworth's wrongful conviction is the incontrovertible proof that his
confession was false. There is no question that Farnsworth didn't steal the
money and was telling the truth. Yet, he confessed to stealing the money after
being subjected to questioning techniques routinely used by every law
enforcement agency in this country. Referring to her husband's confession after
his exoneration, his wife said, “It was their words, not his. They had
pressured him into a confession.”
The ease with which Farnsworth was induced to
falsely confess is not only an indication of how susceptible to coercion people
can be, but is also a real world confirmation of how hollow and ineffective a Miranda
warning is to protect the innocent from falsely confessing. An expanding body
of research shows this is partly because, with the tacit consent of the Courts,
police in the
In 1990, the Canadian Supreme Court tried to
rectify some of Miranda's shortcomings that contribute to false
confessions by adopting the Brydges rule (R. vs. Brydges). Under Brydges,
the police must immediately provide a suspect with a list of legal aid or
lawyers on call 24 hours a day, as well as access to a telephone so they can
consult with a lawyer. If, after talking with the lawyer, the suspect asserts
his or her right to remain silent or to personally talk with a lawyer, then the
police cannot question the person. This is a sensible rule that has proven
workable in
The potent power of standard police
questioning techniques to elicit a false confession from an innocent person has
rarely been made so evident as in Robert Farnsworth's
case. Mr. Farnsworth is an ordinary “Joe” like people we meet every day. In the
blink of an eye, he found himself in the extraordinary situation of being
treated like a criminal. When confronted by police interrogators, he mentally
folded like a house of cards and told them what they wanted to hear.
Robert Farnsworth's case shows that innocent
people, perhaps even more than guilty people, are susceptible to police
interrogation techniques designed to create a psychological environment
conducive to extracting confessions.
The susceptibility of an innocent person such
as Robert Farnsworth to making a false confession is even statistically
predictable. Professor Richard Ofshe, one of the world's leading experts on
false confessions, estimates that 60% of adults randomly selected from the
population can be expected to falsely confess to *murder* if subjected to the
psychological pressure of normal police questioning techniques. His estimate is
conservative when compared to the 70% of American POWs held in
Robert Farnsworth's case is a somber warning
that innocence is no bar to being browbeaten into falsely confessing to a crime[,] even in the absence of being physically harmed. One
can only hope someday courts will recognize how prevalent false confessions
are, and that an important step in eliminating them is forcing the police to
abandon the use of psychological techniques that provide no way of determining
whether a confessor is guilty or innocent.
Sources:
Conviction
of restaurant manager overturned after stolen money found in bank vault, (staff), Detroit Free Press,
Bank
Finds Lost Cash Stuck in Vault: Ex-Wendy's Manager Convicted of Stealing is
Vindicated, (staff), Detroit Free
Press,
Second missing bag led bank to finding a glitch in
machine, Steven Hepker
Staff Writer,
Convicting
the Innocent: The Story of a Murder, a False Confession, and the Struggle to
Free a “Wrong Man”, edited by Donald
S. Connery, Brookline Books,
The
Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, John Marks, Times Books, NY, 1979, esp. Chapter 8:
Brainwashing, pp. 125-146.
R. vs. Brydges: The
Inadequacy of Miranda and a
Proposal To Adopt Canada's Rule Calling For The Right To Immediate Free Counsel, Grace F. Ashikawa, Southwestern Journal of Law and
Trade in the Americas, Vol. III, No. 1, 1996, p. 245.
R. v. Brydges, 1 S.C.R. 190 (1990)
Whither
Miranda: Is the Supreme Court's
review of the case moot, David Cole,
American Lawyer Media, March 20, 2000,
http://www.lawnewsnetwork.com/opencourt/stories/A19043- 2000Mar19.html.
Obedience
To Authority,