Colorado Supreme Court People v. LaRosa 11SC664

Decision here.

   Jason LaRosa, who was in Florida, called the police in Colorado to report that while in Colorado he had performed oral sex on his two year old daughter while masturbating in the shower of a public swimming pool.  He made this confession to a number of people including his wife, his mother, his pastor, the police dispatcher, and the police officer who called him back.  He agreed to return to Colorado to turn himself in.  He did so, and was arrested.  In court, he would claim that he was really tired at the time of his confession, and under a lot of stress because of marital and financial problems, and so he had confessed to fictitious events.

   The jury didn't buy that either, and LaRosa was convicted on all counts.  The trouble is that there wasn't much evidence against him, other than his confession.  There were some pictures of the rec center, and a log showing that he went swimming on a particular day, but all of that only shows that he had the opportunity to abuse his daughter.  None of it proves that the crime actually happened.

   He appealed his conviction, based on the corpus delicti rule.  This is a rule which has been recognized in Colorado for more than a century, which says that someone can't be convicted of a crime solely on the basis of a confession.  The prosecution has to prove the crime independently of the confession, and then just use the confession as additional evidence.  This decision spells out some of the criticisms which have been made against this rule, and the reasons that a lot of jurisdictions have abandoned it, but I won't go into all that here.

   What's important is that in this decision, the Colorado Supreme Court also abandons the corpus delicti rule.  They replaced it with a trustworthiness test: in order to convict someone of a crime based solely on a confession, the prosecution has to present evidence that the confession is trustworthy.  Specifically, they need one of three things: 1- Facts that corroborate information contained in the confession, 2- Facts that establish the crime (and corroborate information contained in the confession), or 3- Facts which show that the confession was made under circumstances which show that it is reliable.

   Unfortunately, the new standard couldn't be applied to LaRosa's case without violating his due process rights (because this case overturns a 100 year old precedent).  So although the court now recognizes a trustworthiness rule, his case was still judged against the corpus delicti rule and his conviction was reversed.