Two false confessors, friend they implicated declared factually innocent

“There’s no statute of limitations on the truth.”

That is how Steven Drizin of the Center on Wrongful Convictions put it when he forwarded the good news that Michael Crowe and two friends had been declared factually innocent today in the 1998 murder of Crowe’s sister.

Drizin and Rob Warden lead off their excellent book, True Stories of False Confessions, with the story about the outrageous lengths police went to in their relentless effort to persuade Crowe and a teenage friend that they had committed the murder with a third youth despite all the evidence that they did not.

DNA later linked a transient police knew had been in the neighborhood to the crime, and the charges against the teenagers were dropped on the eve of their trial. Today’s ruling wipes clear all records of their arrests.