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instructed Marquez to say—falsely—that he had information about another murder in Bolingbrook, a nearby town, and to suggest that Alex and he tell police details of that case and the Nicarico murder and then share the $10,000 reward. To cement the idea, detectives actually put a shoe box filled with cash in the room and had Marquez tell Alex it was the reward money. Marquez never required that what Alex and he tell the cops be true, and the record shows instead that they were making it up as they went along. Marquez spun out a bunch of phony details of the Bolingbrook crime, and Alex, who thought he was there to aid police and had been told that he could get the reward by extracting the Bolingbrook information, responded with a number of statements about the Nicarico murder. It was in this context that Alex supposedly said, “I held her down.” Virtually every other statement he made about the crime that was capable of extrinsic verification proved to be false. To make it worse, after he was out of jail, Marquez said that his testimony against Alex was fabricated. Nor did the state ever explain how someone, no matter how weak-minded, would believe he could confess to a horrible murder and be free to use reward money. Logic notwithstanding, though, Alex spent the next twelve years in the penitentiary.
    Interrogation techniques that clearly risked eliciting false statements were not limited to Hernandez’s case. Gary Gauger was the first to discover the body of his father in April 1993, in the family motorcycle shop in McHenry County, an exurban area west of Chicago. When the police arrived, they found Gauger’s mother slain as well, and took Gauger as the prime suspect in the murders. They interrogated him for twelve hours, until he made a statement which the police called a confession, and which Gauger says was a hypothetical discussion they encouraged about how the murder occurred. Gauger—whose case is among those depicted in the popular play The Exonerated— was sentenced to death. Years later, two members of the Outlaws motorcycle gang were convicted of crimes that included the Gauger parents’ murders.
    Sometimes the methods utilized in gaining statements were not subtle. Ronald Jones, convicted of a rape and murder in Chicago in 1985, maintained that his confession had been beaten out of him. The state claimed the marks visible on Jones’s face at the time he was arrested were from a skin condition. Years later, DNA evidence categorically established that Jones’s confession was false.
    And there was also the Cruz case, where a grand jury found probable cause to believe there was no confession at all. The police claimed Cruz had told them about a vision of the crime, filled with details only the killer could know. Yet somehow the DuPage officers also maintained they had forgotten about the statement until days before the start of Rolando’s and Alex’s trial in 1985 and had also neglected to make any written report of it in the first place—remarkable lapses given usually rigid law enforcement practices.
    While false confessions were the dominating problem in the Illinois exonerations, and have appeared in other jurisdictions, as in New York City’s Central Park jogger case, where DNA evidence indicated five young men had gone to the penitentiary for a rape committed by someone else, the thirteen Illinois cases also called into question other forms of evidence in which courts and lawyers have long placed confidence. When I started trial practice twenty-five years ago, an eyewitness was regarded as the evidentiary gold standard. What better proof could you have than a bystander who saw the whole crime take place and could thus confidently name the perpetrator? Subsequent psychological research has demonstrated that the sheer extraordinariness of witnessing a crime challenges perception. Anthony Porter was falsely identified as a multiple killer by two people