After an exhaustive study of Arizona's infamous Buddhist temple murder case, attorney-author Gary L. Stuart arrived at a conclusion that average folks may find hard to accept: Anyone can be coerced into making a false confession of murder.

"Most of us think we are too smart, too strong, too self-confident to ever confess to a crime we didn't commit," Stuart told an audience at Arizona State University's school of law last week. "But it could happen to us."

Since his book, "Innocent Until Interrogated," was released, Stuart has proclaimed that message while recounting how Maricopa County sheriff's deputies in the 1990s managed to obtain six false confessions in three homicide investigations that involved 13 murders.

The temple massacre of Aug. 10, 1991, was the first and most notorious: Nine people were shot execution-style after being forced to lie on the floor of a Buddhist monastery in the West Valley.

A month later, five Tucson men were arrested based on delusional allegations from a mental patient.

The suspects were handcuffed, taken to a Phoenix hotel, given details of the crime and interrogated relentlessly over three days. Three of them cracked, giving disjointed admissions that contradicted crime-scene evidence.

Nevertheless, four of those defendants were charged with murder and jailed for two months before deputies discovered the death weapon and traced it to a pair of Avondale teenagers, Jonathan Doody and Alex Garcia.

Both boys confessed, but this time deputies also found corroborating evidence, including loot from the temple.

Garcia also admitted taking part in another murder - the shooting of a 50-year-old secretary at a campground near Horseshoe Lake.

By the time of Garcia's admission, Stuart noted, a man named George Peterson was behind bars because deputies had pushed him into falsely taking blame for the woman's slaying.

Peterson, as well as the Tucson defendants, eventually received apologies and cash settlements from Maricopa County.

"Innocent Until Interrogated" meticulously dissects the temple investigation to show how suspects were broken down with sleep denial, lies, bullying, a lack of food and the threat of execution.

Files in the case contained 500,000 digital records and 6,000 pages of court documents. Stuart said the body of evidence shows not only that innocent people can be pressured to confess, but that well-meaning law officers can become so blinded that they believe the very lies they coerce.

When that happens, he said, the innocent are violated, the guilty go free and justice fails.

Stuart argued that police agencies should establish training standards and interview protocols to prevent false confessions, though there is no evidence that such reforms are being adopted.

In the book, he points out that Sheriff Tom Agnos was defeated in his re-election bid by Joe Arpaio largely because of the temple murder case.

During the campaign, Arpaio vowed never to rely on confessions without corroborating evidence.

But in 2003, Stuart wrote, sheriff's deputies obtained another confession using identical techniques.

Without physical evidence, they pressured a man named Robert Armstrong until he acknowledged killing three people he'd never met.

Armstrong was exonerated 14 months later when defense investigators verified an alibi that deputies never checked - that the suspect was in Oregon when the killings occurred.

"None of the suspects in these cases was presumed innocent or capable of telling the truth," Stuart wrote in his book. "All were emotionally vulnerable and terrified. All confessed to gruesome murders they had not committed."