A modified soft output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) detector receives a sequence of soft information values and determines a best path and an alternate path for each soft information value and further determines, when the best and alternate paths lead to the same value for a given soft information value, whether there is a third path departing from the alternate path that leads to an opposite decision with respect to the best path for a given soft information value. The SOVA detector then considers this third path when updating the reliability of the best path. The modified SOVA detector achieves max-log-map equivalence effectively through the Fossorier approach and includes modified reliability metric units for the first N stages of the SOVA detector, where N is the memory depth of a given path, and includes conventional reliability metric units for the remaining stages of the detector.