In 1989, police in Peekskill, New York, approached tenth-grader Jeffrey Deskovic and told him they needed his help solving the rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old classmate. Over the next six weeks, they met with him again and again—bringing him pizza, treating him like a “junior detective,” and asking what he thought had happened. What Deskovic didn’t realize was that they already considered him their main suspect, even though DNA from the crime scene didn’t match him.

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At the end of those six weeks, the police convinced him to take a polygraph test with Daniel Stephens, a polygraphist who boasted he could get a confession out of anyone. The session lasted six hours. During that time, Stephens administered three separate tests—all of them bogus. He fed Deskovic multiple cups of coffee to make him more agitated and nervous, yelled at him, invaded his personal space, and then told him he had failed all three tests.

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Stephens and his fellow officers then intensified the pressure.  They warned Deskovic that other officers were waiting outside the examination room and would hurt him if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

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Exhausted, overwhelmed, and afraid for his life, Deskovic confessed. Immediately afterward, he collapsed onto the floor, curled into a fetal position and sobbed uncontrollably. That confession became the centerpiece of the case against him.  He was convicted of rape and murder. 

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Sixteen years later, Deskovic was exonerated after new DNA testing revealed that Steven Cunningham—already serving time for a different murder—was the real perpetrator.