Show notes
Defense attorney Bob Motta joins me for the part of Richard Allen's Delphi murders appeal that everything else depends on: the cell that produced the confessions. Allen's appeal was argued at the Indiana Court of Appeals on September 21, 2026, and his lawyer opened with what the prison's own psychiatrist saw on April 14, 2023.
Allen's trial lawyers filed an emergency request on April 5, 2023, to get him out of Westville, writing that his conditions were like a prisoner of war's. Nine days later, according to Mark Leeman, the state filed its response, the psychiatrist walked into the cell and found Allen unable to communicate and covered in filth, and Judge Frances Gull denied the request without a hearing. The psychiatrist's own order put the onset of the breakdown at April 4 and started forced antipsychotic injections.
Leeman's argument is that this is what coercion looks like when there's no interrogation room: a state that watches a man decompensate and argues to keep him in place. The state's argument is that Westville held him because a jail could not protect a man accused of killing two girls, that the unit's conditions were ordinary, and that Indiana courts have never called ordinary custody coercion.
We talk through why Indiana puts the burden on the state to prove a confession was voluntary, and why Leeman says Judge Gull flipped that burden twice in her order. The judges kept asking one question: with no detective in the room, who exactly coerced Richard Allen?
Allen has been serving 130 years since December 2024 for the murders of Abby Williams and Libby German. Three appellate judges are deciding whether the statements that convicted him should ever have reached a jury.
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