Many of us like to please others Ė our supervisor, our spouse,
our children Ė but how many of us would take that as far as
confessing to a serious crime that we did not commit? In a study
completed by the American Association of Intellectual and
Developmental Disabilities in 2008, a researcher discovered 53
cases of serious felonies to which people with intellectual
disabilities confessed and were later legally exonerated. These
exonerations were based on significant evidence such as DNA
tests or eventual confessions by the real perpetrators. In some
cases, the crimes to which the suspects confessed never even
occurred. In many cases, the person with a disability already
had served significant jail time before being exonerated. The
examples, spanning years from 1924 to 2007, came from across the
United States (no cases from Colorado were included in the
study.) They include such cases as a 2002 case in Georgia, in
which a man with intellectual disabilities confessed to being
present at the murder of a 15-year