FACULTY FOCUS ON THE RECORD
HAMILL FAMILY CHAIR PROFESSOR OF LAW AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY RICHARD LEO
Professor Richard Leo is nationally recognized as an expert on police interrogations, false confessions, and wrongful convictions. As the Hamill Family Chair Professor of Law and Social Psychology, he combines his passion for justice with his love of research and teaching, engaging students in classes on criminal law and criminal procedure and in a seminar on wrongful convictions. He has written more than 100 articles in leading scientific and legal journals, and is the sixth most cited law professor nationally by state supreme courts and 24th by the U.S. Supreme Court, state supreme courts, and federal circuit courts. He is also the author of several books, including the multiple award-winning Police Interrogation and American Justice (Harvard University Press, 2008) and Confessions of Guilt: From Torture to Miranda and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2012). What drew you to research and write about police interrogation, false confessions, and wrongful convictions of the innocent? My interest began in 1985 when Bradley Page, a fellow undergraduate at UC Berkeley, “confessed” to murdering his girlfriend after 16 hours of coercive and deceptive interrogation by Oakland Police. Although Page was almost certainly innocent, he was eventually convicted of manslaughter. More generally, I have long been interested in how and why a criminal justice system that has so many formal constitutional rights in theory can so often get the most important judgment it renders — whether a criminal defendant is innocent or guilty — wrong, as DNA has repeatedly shown. Wrongful convictions are complicated legal problems that cry out for policy reforms based on first-rate research.