OAKLAND -- Kenneth Cowling told police he beat a retired man to death to score $100 for a heroin fix. But not before 10 hours in the interrogation room left him a man who later said he would have done anything to get treatment for the painful wave of heroin withdrawal that washed over him.
A jury acquitted Cowling of murder and robbery charges in February after concluding Oakland police based their case on a false confession.
"I figured if I tell them something, I'll get to see a nurse. And then they will investigate and find out it wasn't true. And then they will drop it," Cowling told the San Francisco Examiner of the 1998 interrogation. "I started giving them what they wanted to hear."
The paper cast the story as case in which the Oakland police department -- recently stung by bad cop allegations against four officers -- may have used questionable interrogation practices to target an innocent man.
The Examiner said the Cowling case is one of at least five murder prosecutions in California that judges dismissed in the past two years after because of illegal or improper police interrogation tactics.
Police arrested Cowling, now 49, for the March 1998 bludgeoning death of 78-year-old James Carter after receiving a tip that a man living with Cowling's parents had boasted of the murder. Cowling had cut Carter's lawn for eight years and saw him as a father figure, the paper said.
Once in police custody, Cowling denied killing Carter. Only after hours of interrogation, which police did not record, did Cowling say he was guilty.
Police and prosecutors maintain that a murderer walks free. They said Cowling confessed because he killed Carter, not because he was desperate for a fix.
Indeed, the paper said police investigators said Cowling never mentioned needing medical attention.
"This is not a case of a false confession," said Jerry Curtis, then the Alameda County deputy district Attorney. "And this is certainly not an innocent man."
But an Alameda County court jury did not agree.
A pair of jurors told the paper that they were troubled by a lack of other evidence -- for example fingerprints or witness statements -- against Cowling. They also felt that police had violated his Miranda rights by persisting after he said he didn't want to answer more questions.
"A lot of the evidence had holes in it," said forewoman Lucy Valderrama, a postal worker and mother. "The fact that he was a heroin user and hadn't had a fix in many hours -- one would have had to have gone through some kind of withdrawal. And the fact that they didn't acknowledge it, or claimed they didn't even notice, we found strange."<
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