In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

The painful lessons of the Central Park Five and the jogger rape case

Jill

I’m in the Guardian writing about police interrogation techniques and the dangers of coercive and psychologically manipulative tactics. And in exciting news, the Guardian now going to be a weekly thing, so stay tuned for more. A bit from this latest piece:

The Central Park jogger case is particularly compelling because it flies in the face of what we believe to be common sense about criminal convictions. A confession, it would seem, is the most ironclad proof of guilt: why would anyone in their right mind confess to a crime they didn’t commit? How could five boys all confess to the same crime if they weren’t actually responsible?

What Law & Order and whodunit thrillers won’t tell you is that false confessions are startlingly common. According to the Innocence Project, 25% of innocent defendants who were exonerated with DNA evidence made incriminating statements or full-on confessions. A disproportionate number of those who falsely confess are mentally challenged or have mental health problems; children and adolescents also routinely fail to understand their rights during a police interrogation. And false confessions are, sadly, an American tradition: even back in 1692, 50 different women “confessed” to witchcraft in the Salem witch trials.

Police officers want to get the bad guy, but too often they pick what they believe to be the most plausible story and ratchet the facts into it. By the time the police are interrogating a subject, they’ve determined that the person is probably guilty of the crime. The goal of the interrogation isn’t to learn the truth: it’s to solidify guilt.


You read the whole thing here. Trigger warning for, as would be apparent from the title, discussion of sexual assault.

14 thoughts on The painful lessons of the Central Park Five and the jogger rape case

  3. I was living in Europe in 1989, and I totally missed the whole racist uproar surrounding this story…such were the pre-internet days.

    Jill do you know if there is a decent overview of the case somewhere on the net? The best I get from google are the wiki page and articles about the current situation which are similar to yours.

  4. Am I right in thinking that traditional Jewish law doesn’t allow confessions to be used in evidence, at least in capital cases? If I remember right, the reasoning is the same as in Japan, where they require the confessor to prove he’s not making it up.

  5. Great article, Jill.

    There are three things I wanted to mention concerning this topic.

    First, your references to the use of sleep deprivation to coerce confessions is spot-on. I’m sure everyone here knows at least some of the details concerning the West Memphis Three, a case that involved detectives who employed this tactic–or torture, more accurately–to wear down a suspect and draw a false confession.

    Second–and again with the West Memphis Three–we see police hammering away on one of the boys, Jessie Miskelley, a young man who had mental deficiencies of the sort you mentioned above. And of course, this ends with a false confession and what most everyone considers a wrongful conviction.

    Lastly, I’d like to address your comments on the how the courts respond even after they acknowledge that the wrong party has been convicted. I watched a YouTube video recently in which Damien Echols stated that a combined wrongful conviction lawsuit could have cost the state of Arkansas approximately $60,000,000. It boils my blood to hear this, but that’s why the state only grudgingly released the boys into legal Limbo (i.e. an Alford Plea) with a decision that didn’t absolve them of guilt, but still allowed them to leave prison. The interviewer asks Echols why he agreed to such an unfair arrangement. Echols responded by stating that not only had he spent 20 years in prison as an innocent, but he was terrified that the state would have had him murdered in prison if he’d stayed until a rightful exoneration was carried out. After what he’d been through, Echols knew his life wasn’t worth $20,000,000 to Arkansas officials. This perfectly illustrates what Jill brought up in her article.

    Again, great work, Jill.

  6. Good article.

    In the UK, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 codified the way suspects are treated in the police station and during interview (including having mandatory recorded interviews), precisely because of public concerns over well-publicised police fit-ups of the kind Jill refers to.
    When I was a criminal barrister, when prosecuting offenders, I was frequently embarrased by some of the evidence that over-enthusiastic officers would produce, including supposed eye-witness evidence of things they just could not have seen.
    I’m sure this sort of thing happens the world over.

  7. Sadly, this isn’t at all uncommon.

    Illinois, for instance, has a moratorium on executions largely because it has become routine to discover evidence of police torture. One cop, Jon Burge, has lead to more than 50 million dollars worth of settlements for torturing (often with electrocution, suffocation, murdering pets, and holding guns to the heads of minors) suspects. The torture first came to light in 1982 when a suspect was brought to the hospital with injuries that clearly suggested torture. The guy was still convicted. Burge still got promotions. Daley built his career on the strength of those convictions.

    In 1989 Burge and other officers were arrested. Gradually the charges disappeared or officers were cleared in court. Burge was tried twice, once resulting in a hung jury and once in an acquittal. He went right back to work. In 1990 a local paper started breaking the story and the reporter responsible was routinely threatened by police. By then there was a growing momentum to do something. A professional standards inquiry determined that torture under Burge was “systemic,” “methodical,” and “planned.” Amnesty International got involved. Daley (now the mayor) interfered at every step. In 1993 the Police Department decided to fire Burge, other officers involved received suspensions but were reinstated, still others were demoted. Those demoted were promoted to their old ranks within a year and given back pay. Even while the city was pretending to discipline it’s officers it was fighting the appeals of people it was punishing it’s officers for torturing. Burge, of course, was allowed to retire with a full pension. The city has covered his legal fees, too. In 2011 Burge was finally charged federally, although because of the statute of limitations he was only charged with perjury and obstruction. He was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison. The city continues to shield Daley from being questioned in various proceedings around the case.

    This is not a few bad apples, this is a systemic problem. Anyone with a badge is suspect.

    1. I was living in Chicago in the early nineties, and remember when it seemed like something was FINALLY going to be done about that asshole but still…nothing. Words cannot describe the level of mistrust I have for the CPD.

      1. The last I’d heard Burge was suing to keep his pension and the city was settling cases specifically to keep Daley from being deposed.

    2. I’ve heard it said—and I don’t know how true it is—that those willing to actually engage in practices like torture (or, more prosaically but still problematically, “testilying” about the circumstances of an arrest or search) really are a small number of bad apples. But because there is such strong resistance to accountability throughout police departments, as you describe in the Burge case, those bad apples are never dealt with. That just feeds the legitimate perceptions by minorities and others that police departments are more interested in increasing their own power and protecting their officers than in protecting citizens.

      1. I don’t know about the “few bad apples” theory. I’ve seen a lot of police misconduct first hand in a lot of precincts and not seen a pattern other than the powerful using their authority to prey upon the powerless. I know that it wasn’t a few bad apples who beat the shit out of protesters and before gassing them at the ’68 convention and that those old monsters became the brass that trained and set the standards for today’s criminals in blue. I know that the city can hardly go a year without a serious police scandal. I know that in Illinois the problem of police misconduct got so bad that a Republican governor ended up putting a moratorium on the death penalty and commuted a staggering number of sentences because he just didn’t trust the system anymore.

        More importantly, though, it seems that every major urban jurisdiction in the city is rife with police corruption and abuse. We keep hearing “oh, its just a few bad apples” and maybe the true sadists are a tiny percentage of officers but the casual cruelty is endemic. The use of tasers and pepper spray as “pain compliance,” the schizophrenics beaten to death on camera, the almost daily stories of someone (usually poor and black) dying under suspicious circumstances in police custody, the ugly clusterfuck that is Oakland (or New York, or Chicago, or New Orleans), the increasing militarization of police in America that has lead to SWAT serving search warrants on nonviolent offenders and American citizens becoming collateral damage in a war on drugs. All of these things have become so normalized that we tend to forget that it cannot be the work of just a couple of bad eggs. There comes a point when you must begin to suspect that the pattern of abuse and violence is a feature of the system rather than a bug. There comes a time when you must begin to wonder about all these cops who are supposedly standing by and doing nothing while brutality becomes the norm.

        1. There comes a time when you must begin to wonder about all these cops who are supposedly standing by and doing nothing while brutality becomes the norm.

          And those few who try to do something end up in terrible situations. I’ll always remember this particular episode of This American Life, where a police officer was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward because he was attempting to let people know of the illegal activities going on in the NYPD.

  8. Also I imagine that this problem is compounded by confirmation bias.

    I have no idea how it would work but I begin to wonder if a better way might be to make juries choose between alternatives, rather than between guilt and innocence, sort of like picking people out of a lineup. Or make confessions work that way.

  9. This is horrific, on so many levels. Can we only wish/hope that these better interrogation strategies become the norm? Or is there something we can do?

Comments are currently closed.