State v. Perea

Riqo Perea (defendant) was a member of the Ogden Trece gang. Perea and several friends were involved in an altercation with a group of people affiliated with a rival gang. Several witnesses saw Perea shooting a gun out of the top of a sport-utility vehicle (SUV) in which he was a passenger. Perea was ultimately arrested and charged with two counts of aggravated murder and two counts of attempted murder. Following Perea’s arrest, police took Perea into custody and questioned him. During the interrogation, one detective suggested that Perea shot from the SUV because he was trying to protect children in the back seat. Later, Perea claimed that he blacked out and could not recall what happened as his party drove off in the SUV. The investigators told Perea that this line of defense was not usually successful and encouraged him to tell the truth. Perea subsequently admitted to shooting out of the SUV and advised that he shot a .22-caliber gun, a fact that the investigators had not mentioned. Perea signed a written statement of his confession, was ultimately convicted of the charges against him, and was sentenced to life without parole. On appeal, Perea argued that the trial court had erred when the court did not allow an expert, Dr. Richard Ofshe, to testify about the phenomenon of false confessions, with an ultimate opinion that Perea had falsely confessed. The State of Utah (plaintiff) argued against the testimony, as Dr. Ofshe would have opined on a legal conclusion, with questionable research backing insufficient to pass muster under Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and on a matter the public would have already assessed regarding the voluntariness of a confession. The trial court excluded the testimony and determined that the defense could pursue the issue of a coerced confession in its argument. On appeal, Perea’s attorney analogized the current case to a recent case in which excluding expert testimony regarding the unreliability of eyewitness identification was ruled an error.