Rob Warden: On false confessions

Rob Warden examines the phenomena of false confessions and how they can be attributed to half of all murder cases. His plan to eradicate them from the legal system has the potential to revolutionize the justice system as we know it

As a founder of the Center of Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, Rob Warden is concerned with how frequently people confess to crimes they didn’t commit — because they were scared of being accused of something worse, because they thought they might have blocked the crime out of their memory, or because they feel desperate after hours of police questioning. At TEDxMidwest, Warden gives the shocking statistic that, in his county, nearly 50 percent of wrongful convictions to date involved a false confession.

Rob Warden is the executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, Bluhm Legal Clinic, Northwestern University School of Law. An award winning legal affairs journalist, he is the co-author with David Protess of A Promise of Justice on the pardons of the Ford Heights Four, and Gone in the Night[2] on the reversal of David Dowaliby’s conviction. He provides a legal analysis in the 2005 Northwestern edition reprinting of The Dead Alive, a 19th-century novel by Wilkie Collins based on the 1819 wrongful murder conviction of the Boorn Brothers. A recipient of numerous journalism awards, he was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame in 2004. Warden founded the monthly journal Chicago Lawyer in 1978, serving as editor and publisher until 1989. Before that, he was an award-winning journalist on the Chicago Daily News.