People v. Kowalski

After the brother and sister-in-law of Jerome Kowalski (defendant) were murdered, police questioned Kowalski four times. During the third interview, Kowalski agreed with the interviewer’s statement that there was a 50 percent chance he killed his brother. Kowalski then claimed that he had a blackout and that he thought he had a dream, but it was the actual shooting. During the fourth interview, held after a night in jail, Kowalski confessed to the murders. He initially said he shot his brother in the chest from a distance. However, he later changed his account to align with a roleplay based on other evidence. Kowalski’s confession was the primary evidence against him when he was charged with murder. Kowalski filed notice of intent to call two expert witnesses at trial, psychologists Richard Leo and Jeffrey Wendt. Leo planned to testify that false confessions existed, that they sometimes resulted from certain police interrogation techniques, and that those techniques were used in Kowalski’s interviews. Wendt proposed to build on Leo’s foundation, testifying that the circumstances of Kowalski’s confession were consistent with Leo’s research. Wendt also planned to testify regarding Kowalski’s psychological profile, which was based on psychological tests and clinical interviews. The trial court excluded Leo’s testimony on the basis that it failed to comply with requirements for expert testimony under Michigan Rule of Evidence (MRE) 702. Specifically, the court found that Leo’s testimony (1) would not help jurors because the phenomenon of false confessions was common knowledge and (2) was unreliable because Leo’s methodology relied upon information from newspaper accounts and attorneys representing confessors, rather than actual interview recordings, and assumed a confession was false and worked backward to find commonalities with other false confessions. Because the court excluded Leo’s testimony, it concluded that Wendt’s testimony should also necessarily be excluded because it built on Leo’s testimony. The state appeals court affirmed the exclusions, and Kowalski appealed.