97
‘Psychologically tortured’: California city pays man nearly $1m after 17-hour police interrogation
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
97 points (100.0% liked)
U.S. News
2234 readers
61 users here now
News about and pertaining to the United States and its people.
Please read what's functionally the mission statement before posting for the first time. We have a narrower definition of news than you might be accustomed to.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Post the original source of information as the link.
- If there is a paywall, provide an archive link in the body.
- Post using the original headline; edits for clarity (as in providing crucial info a clickbait hed omits) are fine.
- Social media is not a news source.
For World News, see the News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
A California city has agreed to pay $900,000 to a man who was subjected to a 17-hour police interrogation in which officers pressured him to falsely confess to murdering his father, who was alive.A judge said the questioning appeared to be “unconstitutional psychological torture”, and the city agreed to settle Perez’s lawsuit for $898,000, his lawyer announced this week.
The extraordinary case of a coerced false confession has sparked widespread outrage, with footage showing Perez in extreme emotional and physical distress, including as officers brought his dog in and said the animal would need to be put down due to “depression” from witnessing a murder that had not actually occurred.
Officer Joanna Piña, who took the call, reported Perez Jr’s demeanor as “suspicious”, claiming he seemed “distracted and unconcerned with his father’s disappearance”.
Perez Jr sat for hours of initial questioning while officers obtained additional search warrants allowing them to access devices they had seized.
During the interrogation, Perez Jr started pulling out his hair, hitting himself and tearing off his shirt, nearly falling to the floor, at which point the officers laughed at him and told him he was stressing his dog, the judge summarized.
Saved 82% of original text.