Innocent Until Interrogated: The Story of the Buddhist Temple Massacre and the Tuscon Four

As a former MCSO deputy, although before this murder, I had known and worked with several of the people in this story. Stuart makes a few errors in fact that while not material to the story does cast some cloud on the rest of his story. He states in the very beginning that Tom Agnos was the first "professional" lawman to be Maricopa County Sheriff. NOT TRUE. One of the sheriff's I worked for circa 1974 - 1978, was Paul Blubaum. Blubaum had retired as the Chief of the Phoenix Police Department and ran for and was elected Sheriff in 1972. In fact, Blubaum had been Agnos' boss at PPD. Second, Stuart gets some of the MCSO ranks and position very wrong. Prior to Blubaum the sheriff was John Mummert, a 15 year former Los Angeles Sheriff's Department Sgt. At the time of these murders, I was a USAF Reserve Captain assigned to Luke AFB. I was acquainted with the Father of the kid that owned the gun. The book is interesting and informative, but I believe that some facts have been omitted.

If you have ever thought that no one would confess to a murder they didn't commit, then you need to read this book. As a lawyer whose career has been in criminal law on both sides, I appreciate that this book is very well documented and well written. The author went through literally tens of thousands of pages of material, hours of video and audio tape to put together a coherent story of a criminal investigation that went terribly wrong in so many ways. It is a lesson that our criminal justice system is not perfect, but that ultimately it does get some things right. I highly recommend this book as a must read for anyone involved in the criminal justice system.

Think innocent people would never confess to a murder? Think again. This book is an excellent study in how unreliable confessions can be, and how judges and other officials slavishly accept them, even if they are obviously coerced. It documents how Maricopa County Sheriffs extracted confessions from five innocent but frightened men by relentlessly wearing them down and repeatedly lying to them. By the time they confessed some of them actually believed they had committed the worst mass-murder in Arizona history in a town over a hundred miles away from where they lived, even though they had nothing to do with it. Worse still, the investigators' own prejudices and predispositions gave them unwarranted faith in the confessions, which in turn caused them to neglect evidence already in their possession that would have led to the real murderers. This, in turn, allowed one of the murderers to kill another innocent person well after he should have been arrested. Every person in this country should know that if they are being interrogated about a serious crime they should say the words "I want to have a lawyer present." This book will show you why.

The read should read this and "Rise of the Warrior Cop" to see how low the level of law enforcement and prosecutors has sunk. I say this as a former copy and prosecutor.

A shocking story.