Morley Safer reports on 60 Minutes this Sunday on how interrogators can convince innocent people to make a false confession. Here's an e-mail we got about it:

The long-awaited 60 Minutes Story on False Confessions, featuring the cases of two individuals who falsely confessed, is set to air this Sunday night (unless Janet Jackson bares her breast, Martha Stewart is convicted, the Oscars are stolen again, or some other story preempts the show....)

The two false confessions featured are those of Abdullah Higazy, an Egyptian student studying abroad, who was coerced by the FBI into making an inculpatory statement (he claimed he owned a pilot's radio which the FBI believed was involved in the WTC bombings), and Jorge Hernandez, an 18 year old Palo Alto high school student who was coerced into confessing to a rape of an elderly woman . Both young men will describe the pressure which was brought to bear on them by interrogators and should explain why they felt they had no choice but to cave into the pressure.

Higazy was cleared when the radio he claimed was his was actually claimed by an American commercial airline pilot (oops!) and Hernandez, whose admission was captured on tape (though the interrogation was not), was cleared when DNA testing excluded him as the source of the semen. Should make for interesting primetime t.v. -- a nice pre-Oscar warmup.