Dan Abrams On Today: Joran Van Der Sloot Will Have Hard Time Getting Confession Thrown Out

Yesterday, the Peruvian judge handling the murder trial for which Joran van der Sloot is being tried ventured to the prison where the 22-year-old is being kept. However, van der Sloot refused to speak to him, citing a petition filed by his new attorney (his former lawyer quit after receiving death threats) to have the confession he made to the murder of Stephany Flores thrown out. Mediaite founder and NBC’s chief legal analyst Dan Abrams appeared on the Today Show to discuss why this will be a hard argument for van der Sloot’s team to make.

The first portion of the segment, though, featured a tour of the prison which van der Sloot is trying so hard to get out of. Correspondent Michelle Kosinski was allowed to film some of the nicer sections of Miguel Castro Castro prison, including a garden and a pottery area. She was not able to go to van der Sloot’s private cell though, which apparently has a bit of a rat problem. If that wasn’t bad enough for van der Sloot, Kosinski also reported that some of the other prisoners in the jail have bragged about wanting to kill him. It’s no wonder then that van der Sloot would be attempting to recant his previous confession (he has also tried to get sent to Aruba, the location of Natalee Holloway’s disappearance).

Abrams believes that that will be very difficult to do:

“First of all, just to say you were scared isn’t enough to try and retract a confession. There are a lot of people who are scared when they’re being questioned. Now he’s saying he was tricked. The police, even in the United States, let’s not call it ‘trickery,’ engage in tactics, a lot, to try and get someone to tell the truth. Now, Joran van der Sloot is saying, ‘I wasn’t telling the truth and, as a result, you shouldn’t trust what I said there.’ But it’s always very hard to go back and retract a confession once you’ve said it. You’ve to to prove more that just, ‘I was scared.'”

Even if the confession is thrown out, the case will probably still go to trial. As Abrams has said before, he believes the most important evidence is not the confession, but the video tape of van der Sloot and Flores entering the hotel room together and him leaving it alone.

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