True or False, the Power of Confessions is Great

The Etan Patz murder trial is the latest test case for measuring the power of a confession, whether or not it's actually true.

In this courtroom sketch, Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi Orbon delivers her opening statement in the case of Pedro Hernandez, accused of killing 6-year-old Etan Patz, in New York state Supreme Court, Friday, Jan. 30, 2015. Etan was last seen alive walking to the bus stop in 1979. His body has never been found. AP Photo/Elizabeth Williams

Over the next several months, defense lawyers for Pedro Hernandez will seek to undercut the central evidence against him: his videotaped confession to having killed 6-year-old Etan Patz.

They will depict the confession as inaccurate when set against the known facts of the infamous 1979 missing child case. They will portray Hernandez, a onetime bodega clerk in the Manhattan neighborhood where Patz lived, as mentally ill. They will paint the detectives who gained the confession as manipulative and coercive. 

It’s a daunting assignment, but here’s what may well be scaring the lawyers the most: They could succeed in every aspect of their attack on the reliability of the confession and still not win an acquittal.

Pedro Hernandez appears in Manhattan criminal court in New York, Nov. 15, 2012. AP Photo/Louis Lanzano, Pool