Despite another man's credible confession, George Lettrich, Jr. was convicted of murder
George Lettrich, Jr. was convicted and sentenced to death in 1950 for the murder two years earlier of a 10-year-old girl in Cook County, west of Chicago. The conviction rested on a confession that Lettrich signed after 60 hours of questioning by Lyons, Brookfield, and Chicago police.
A few days after the crime, another man confessed to the director of a county psychiatric clinic that he had committed the crime. Authorities ignored the other man's confession and proceeded to bring Lettrich to trial.
Lettrich repudiated the confession, claiming it had been coerced during sixty hours of interrogation by Chicago police. He said one officer threatened that “he would knock my head through the wall and go on the other side and make mincemeat out of it.” Police denied any coercion and the statements were admitted into evidence even though, as the Illinois Supreme Court would find, they did not “coincide with many of the known facts and cannot be entirely true.”
The Supreme Court reversed and remanded the case for a new trial in 1952, saying that the other man's confession should not have been suppressed. The court also found that the prosecutors had “made inflammatory and prejudicial remarks to the jury.” Prosecutors dropped the charges in 1953. — Billy Warden
