At the receiver in a wireless communications system, the likelihood of a false CRC pass that can occur when a weak received signal produces an all ZERO output from a convolutional or a turbo decoder is minimized. To prevent an all ZERO output, a convolutional decoder selects from among those determined equally most likely transmitted sequences of bits in a data block one that has a weight greater than the one having the minimum weight. A turbo decoder selects a ONE rather than a ZERO as the value of a transmitted bit in a data block when for that bit a bit value of a ZERO and a ONE are determined to be equally likely.