Bill James' Popular Crime

I bought the book Popular Crime by Bill James on my Literati (an electronic reader put out by Kobo and Borders) and read the book in a matter of three days. I would probably have finished the book in a shorter amount of time if I devoted more of my time to read the book.  I highly recommend the book, by the way, it was very interesting and made me think more than any book I have read recently.  It also inspired me to do some research into these different crime stories that James writes about.  The number of books that have inspired me are few and far between (all of Malcolm Gladwell's books have, but that's besides the point) so the book comes highly recommended.
I have a few thoughts that were highlighted by Bill James in his book that I want to write about briefly here and I will expand into more thoughts (and more posts) as I do more research.  James writes briefly about false confessions.  He estimates that anywhere from 70 to 90% of confessions made by criminals are actually not true.  I'm not the first one to find this interesting there was a review I found of the book that talks about this as well (it can be found here).  My point in this is not to question where he found this statistic (as I will do my own research to confirm) but this was such a pertinent piece of information to me because I had just finished watching the documentaries on the West Memphis Three in Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost 2: Revelations.  For those who have not watched the documentary, I would argue that the reason for their convictions of the crime was mainly due to the confession of one of them (not that it should be considered, I don't think but I'll talk about this at a greater length in a different post).  It would seem extremely relevant if in fact, it is true that the majority of confessions are false confessions (which I believe to be the case) but as Bill James is not an expert in the field (nor does he claim to be) it would not be fair to cite James in a courtroom and say see here is an expert who thinks that most confessions are fake.
There will be more thoughts on this book as I post later with more coherence and research to back up what I'm saying.