Frank Sterling - False Confession / Police Misconduct

Sterling, Frank; murder; NRE: false confession, police misconduct, misconduct that is not withholding evidence

Suggestibility issues

A9 [1636] "Viola Manville, a seventy-four-year-old woman who regularly enjoyed hiking the countryside of Hilton...on the outskirts of Rochester, was killed during the morning of November 29, 1988. She had been badly beaten and shot with pellets from a BB gun. Her body was left alongside railroad tracks, in the general vicinity of where a man had tried to rape her some three years earlier. That man, Glen Sterling, remained in prison following his conviction for the rape attempt. Glen Sterling's brother, Frank, was among the many people interviewed by sheriff's detectives during the homicide investigation. Frank Sterling had no prior criminal record* and no reputation for violence. Although no physical evidence linked him to the crime, the authorities apparently reasoned that he may have had a motive to kill Ms. Manville in retaliation for his brother's conviction and punishment. Sterling accounted for his whereabouts on the day of the murder, explaining that he had been working as a school bus monitor during the morning, returned home, walked to a grocery store to make a purchase, and watched cartoons on television in the afternoon. His alibi was confirmed and neither he nor anyone else was arrested in the ensuing weeks and months."

[* That was also true of Nickel. ]

[1637] "More than two-and-one-half years later, in July 1991, detectives again visited Frank Sterling at his home. He had just returned from a truck-driving job that had consumed the better part of two days. Although tired, he agreed to a polygraph examination, and accompanied the detectives to the sheriff's office in Rochester. During the pre-examination session, the polygraph technician falsely told Sterling that his brother Glen had bragged to other prisoners that Frank had killed Ms. Manville. After the examination, Sterling was advised that he was being deceitful when he denied the killling. As midnight approached, another interrogator took over the questioning. He got Sterling to admit he was angry enough about his brother's incarceration to have killed Manville, but Sterling continued to deny that he had done so. He asked to be hypnotized to prove that he was telling the truth. The investigators responded by holding his hands and assisting him with relaxation exercises. They told him that 'we were here for him, we understood [and] felt he should tell the truth to get it off his chest.' Roughly eight hours into the interrogation session, Sterling admitted killing Ms. Manville. Shortly after five o'clock in the morning, a twenty-minute video-recording preserved his detailed confession."

[But note that investgators failed to videotape the entirety (or even the vast majority) of this many-hours-long interrogation session. (In Nickel's case, detectives failed to videotape anything at all.)]

"Sterling repudiated his confession shortly after making it, but his recantation was not believed. With his incriminating admission serving as the primary evidence of his guilt, Sterling was convicted of murder following trial in September 1992. Just days later, several townspeople alerted the police that nineteen-year-old Mark Christie was bragging that he had 'just gotten away with [1683] murder.' Christie was among the individuals questioned by the police during the 1988 investigation of the killing. Then sixteen, Christie maintained that he had gone to school at mid-morning on the day of the murder. Although school records indicated that he did not attend class until 1:20 that afternoon, investigators did not pursue him as a suspect. Police interrogated Christie again in December 1992, following his reported boastings about the murder. He claimed that he had only been 'kidding around' when he made those statements. The results of an initial polygraph exam, in which he denied the killing, were deemed 'incomplete' owing to Christie's erratic breating and excessive movement. He passed a second exam, administered the next day. The judge in Frank Sterling's murder trial [Donald T. Wisner] concluded that Christie's purported admissions were not believable, and imposed a sentence of twenty-five years to life on Sterling on December 23, 1992.

"In 1994, Mark Christie strangled four-year-old Kali Ann Poulton after luring her into his apartment. He then disposed of her body in a water coolant tank at his workplace. Later he participated in searches for the child, whose disappearance caused widespread alarm and grief throughout the greater Rochester community. The killing remained unsolved until 1996, when Christie blurted an admission during an argument with his wife that he had killed Kali. His wife called the police. Christie confessed to investigators, who subsequently uncovered the child's body."

[1639] "Christie's admission and conviction with respect to Kali's death inspired a new series of challenges to Sterling's conviction, which renewed the allegation that Christie was responsible for murdering Ms. Manville. Beginning in 1996 and over the next several years, Sterling filed a series of motions to vacate his conviction, all of which were denied. In late 2008, 'touch DNA' -- testing on skin cells left on the clothing that Ms. Manville had worn when murdered -- implicated Christie in the killing. In early 2010, after being interviewed in prison by an Innocence Project attorney and an interrogation expert, Christie confessed to murdering Ms. Manville. Frank Sterling's conviction was vacated and he was released from prison in early April 2010, after spending eighteen years incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.

"Christie pleaded guilty to murdering Ms. Manville in October 2011...At the sentencing hearing, one of Ms. Manville's grandsons observed that '[n]ot only did [Christie] murder my grandmother, he also took the life of a child so that's unforgivable.' Kali Ann Poulton's mother wiped at tears while reflecting that her daughter would still be alive if the investigation into Ms. Manville's murder had resulted in Christie's arrest and conviction, instead of Frank Sterling's. 'Of course it has crossed my mind. What if?...But unfortunately it is what it is. We can't go backward.'"

C10 [485] "Frank Sterling was...convicted of murder based on a confession, which he had given after a thirty-six hour trucking shift followed by an eight-hour police interrogation.* Over the course of the next eighteen years, Sterling brought six appeals in which he argued for a new trial on the grounds that the evidence implicated a man named Mark Christie, an original suspect in the murder. His appeals were unsuccessful, despite presenting evidence that Christie had bragged about committing the murder, providing tips to investigators about how Christie frequented the same path where the murder occurred and loved to shoot a BB gun -- the murder weapon -- and highlighting the fact that Christie was convicted of a different murder several years later. Finally, in 2004, the trial court [Frank P. Geraci] permitted testing on a hair that was found in the victim's hand, but denied testing on the 'victim's clothing, vaginal swabs, fingernail scrapings, and/or pieces of the bloodstained BB gun,' on the ground that Sterling had not established a 'reasonable nexus between the testable items, the particular facts and circumstances surrounding his conviction and how DNA testing of such items would have produced a more favorable result at trial.'"

[* So, Sterling had gone without sleep for some 44 hours before 'detectives' (finally) wrung a false confession out of him. This is even longer than the 36 hours in the Daniel Gristwood case.]

"The hair turned out to belong to the victim, and it was not until 2006 that the [DA's] Office agreed to additional testing of the other items. It was this testing that not only excluded Sterling, [486] but also implicated Christie. In 2010, eighteen years after he was wrongfully convicted, Frank Sterling's conviction was vacated."

from NRE synopsis (by the Innocence Project):

"Sterling's alibi was airtight -- numerous co-workers testified that he was at work as a bus aide at the time of the murder."

"Investigators approached Sterling as he returned from a 36-hour trucking job. He agreed to an interview at the police station, which began in the afternoon and continued overnight into the following morning. Sterling maintained his innocence, while saying he had trouble remembering. The interrogation included several highly suggestive methods -- including hypnosis and the suggestion of details. At one point, the officers showed crime scene photos to Sterling to 'help him remember.' Interrogation standards followed by hundreds of law enforcement agencies throughout the country admonish against such techniques.

"The officers had Sterling lay on the floor with his feet up on a chair and his eyes closed. As they rubbed his back, the interrogators insisted that Sterling had committed the murder, showed him pictures of the crime scene and the victim's body and shared key details with him. One of the officers told Sterling that he would feel better if he let out his anger towards the victim, telling him that the victim 'deserved what she got,' and insisted that 'we're here for you, we still care for you.'

"Finally, after more than eight hours at the police station, Sterling tightened up, began to shake, and blurted out 'I did it, I need help.' At this point, the officers demanded a videotaped confession and an exhausted Sterling complied. His confession included numerous inconsistencies, including the incorrect location of the crime scene on a map. Sterling also could not describe what he had supposedly done with the BB gun, and where or how many times he had shot the victim. Despite his immediate recantation of the confession, he was charged with murder."

"Before his sentencing, Sterling and his attorneys learned about Mark Christie, a 20-year-old man ffrom Rochester -- and an early suspect in the murder -- who was not investigated further after he gave police a false alibi that they took at face value."

"Sterling filed a wrongful conviction lawsuit and in May 2014, Monroe County agreed to settle the case for $8.625 million. He also received $2.1 million in compensation from the New York Court of Claims. Sterling died of a heart attack in June 2017."

[All emphases added unless otherwise noted.]