False confession by man with limited mental ability

We hear a lot about people with severe mental illness ending up in prison because they lack the treatment they need; we hear less often about people with limited mental ability, who also have problems with our courts and prison system. An Associated Press article by David Eggert from November 25, 2007, describes the unfortunate imprisonment of a man with limited mental capacity for a crime he did not commit.

Claude McCollum, a 30-year old homeless man with a low IQ, was arrested and convicted of the murder of a Lansing Community College professor in 2005. He was released after 18 months in prison, when another man confessed to the murder. It was discovered that a video surveillance camera showed that McCollum was somewhere else at the time of the crime and that this was in a detective's report from March 2005, but the defense attorney says he never saw the report and the jury never heard of the report.

McCollum, who sometimes slept in a campus building and was taking classes there, was an easy target. During questioning, he was asked hypothetical questions and in the answer to one question "he agreed he possibly could have killed Kronenberg while sleepwalking if she threatened his life." This was taken as a confession. In his willingness to please his interrogators, McCollum concocted an elaborate story of how he might have killed the victim and everything that might have led up to the killing and what happened afterwords, had he actually been the murderer.

There was only one piece of physical evidence that might have connected McCollum to the crime, but the prosecution was warned by a forensics expert that McCollum likely had nothing to do with it.

The prosecution of this case is being investigated by the state Attorney General and McCollum is suing the prosecutors, the state police, and the community college for damages.

Here is a good summary of the case by Kevin Grasha and Christine Rook of the Lansing State Journal.