- Robert Davis' story happens
in a small town called Crozet, Virginia.
Middle-class. A lot of peaceful streets.
It's the kind of place that didn't regularly experience
murder or the kinds of things
that happened in Robert Davis' case.
(mysterious electronic music)
(pages flipping)
The whole community of Crozet is up in arms
who would do this to Nola Charles.
And pretty soon the police settle on some suspects.
There's another family that lives on Cling Lane,
the same street where Nola Charles' house had been:
the Fugett family.
The Fugett family had two teenage kids, Rocky Fugett,
who was 19, and his sister Jessica, who was 15.
Jessica was friends with one of Nola Charles' other kids,
one of her older children.
Jessica didn't like Nola Charles.
She didn't like her friend's mom.
(mysterious electronic music)
(page flipping)
We know these confessions are true,
because Rocky and Jessica were able to lead the police
to a snow-covered field in Crozet
where the police found an iron bar
that had been used to bludgeon Nola Charles
before she'd been stabbed.
So when it comes to Rocky and Jessica, case closed,
(page flipping)
So Robert Davis, 18 years old,
is brought into the police station
at one o'clock in the morning.
He's there by himself, a high school senior,
and he's placed into an interrogation room,
and the video tape starts rolling.
- Robert reacts the way any of us
in the situation would act.
He says, "What are you talking about?"
And he starts asking for ways to prove his innocence.
- These police officers have a polygraph,
but they tell Robert that they don't,
and they don't let him try to prove his own innocence.
The officers say to him,
"We found your DNA at the crime scene."
Now, this isn't true. It's a lie.
But in the United States, police are
about the evidence during interrogations.
But Robert doesn't know that. Most people don't know that.
He knows he's never been in the Charles house,
but somehow these police officers are telling him
that they believe his DNA was there.
They say to him, "We're not allowed
to lie to you about the evidence."
So they're actually lying to him about a lie.
The interrogation continues overnight.
By this time it's about three o'clock in the morning,
and the officers say to Robert,
"If you don't confess, you'll face
the ultimate punishment: the death penalty.
But if you do cooperate, if you do tell us what happened,
maybe you'll be looking at as few as five to 10 years."
Any one of us would do
what Robert Davis did in that situation.
And that's when the officers start feeding him information
for him to incorporate into a confession.
- They tell Robert who he was with.
They have to give him the names Rocky and Jessica.
Robert tries to tell a story
in which he and Rocky and Jessica
entered Nola Charles's home through the back door,
but actually the evidence
is that the entry occurred through the front door.
Robert tries to tell a story in which the crime happened
on the first floor of the house, he never went upstairs.
But the police have to say, "No, no, no, Robert.
You went upstairs."
- Robert finally has to be told by the police
that Nola died from being stabbed.
All this happens over the course of five or six hours,
and by the end of the interrogation,
just as the sun is starting to come up,
Robert looks up at his interrogators, and he says to them:
(page flipping)
- During the interrogation, it was really cold in that room.
And during my bathroom breaks and stuff like that,
Detective Randy Snead would tell me
when we were away from cameras
that if I didn't tell them what they wanted to hear,
they would lock my mom up
and put my little brother in foster care.
So that's one of the reasons why,
after such a long, long interrogation
of being frightened and then being put
in shackles and stuff like that,
and being denied my medicine and all that,
I went ahead and lied to the detectives
because I really didn't want my mom or my little brother
to have to go to prison or to foster care.
And at the time ...
Now, I know that the cops were lying the whole time.
(ethereal music) (pages flipping)
- Reporters' interest was piqued,
and news stories started to come out about Robert Davis.
Could this man have been wrongly convicted?
Steve and I became involved
from the Center on Wrongful Convictions,
and we reviewed Robert Davis' interrogation video
and wrote a report analyzing it,
explaining how the tactics that we saw
on Robert Davis' interrogation video
mirror the tactics that are extract false confessions
in other cases around the country.
people who train police officers how to interrogate
eventually looked at Robert Davis' interrogation video
and concluded that it was garbage,
and that there had been a grave miscarriage of justice.
(pages flipping)
Just as all of these experts' voices were being heard
and there was really a surge of momentum gathering,
one more thing happened, another letter,
this time not from Rocky Fugett
but from his sister, Jessica.
She, too, felt the pangs of conscience,
and she, too, wrote a letter explaining that Robert Davis
had nothing to do with the murder of Nola Charles.
She had just identified him
in an attempt to spread the blame around
to as many people as possible.
She thought that would help herself.
It didn't, of course. It only hurt Robert.
(pages flipping)
- What I wanted to do when I first got out
was go see my mom.
But at first happened when I got out
was I walked right back in,
'cause the media was there, and I was nervous,
and I thought I was doing something wrong,
even though I knew I was given a pardon.
I was just scared, so I walked back in
and composed myself without the tears,
and then spoke to the media,
and then went and saw my mom.
She told me after the fact
that she didn't recognize me in the suit.
But it was the greatest thing that I can ...
It's my best memory right now, because ...
I got to see my mom while she was alive,
and I got out on her birthday,
so that was definitely something special for me.
(pages turning)
I remember that I was sitting in my girlfriend
who's now my fiancee's house,
and I got a phone call from my lawyer, Steven.
He said, as of such and such time,
You got an absolute pardon.
You don't have probation or anything anymore.
I went on Facebook live and cut off my ankle bracelet,
gave a little speech.
It was really amazing.
It was definitely another really good feeling
that I'll never forget.
- It should have been obvious in 2003,
the moment those words came out of Robert Davis' mouth
that the confessions was false.
The whole story had to be fed to Robert.
for unreliability.
These interrogation techniques
that we saw being used on Robert Davis
are used in interrogation rooms
around the country every day.
Bills are just being introduced now in New York
and a few other states to ban deception
during interrogations to prohibit police officers from lying
about the evidence like they did to Robert Davis.
But Virginia did take one step
after Robert Davis' exoneration.
The state of Virginia just enacted a new law
requiring interrogations to be videotaped.
You see, in 2003,
that any of this be caught on video.
It was Robert's good luck that this police department
and these officers decided to tape
what they were doing to him, but it wasn't required.
And if we didn't have the tape,
Robert Davis would still be in prison to this day.
- We've been engaged for I guess two months now,
two, three months.
And, yeah, we're about to move into a new house
away from where we live now and start our life.
Once we finish moving, we're gonna plan the wedding.
I want to succeed in life with many things.
I want to get an education for a trade or something like
that because I wasn't given that opportunity
while I was locked up,
so I'd like to go speak at more places.
I'd like to write my story down in a book.
(pages turning) (soft electronic music)
And guess what.
(snips ankle bracelet)
(cheering)
I'm a free man.
When you see me out and about ...
come give me a hug, whatever, congratulate me, I don't care.
I'm a free man.
And I'm so happy.