Opinion | False Confessions and the Jogger Case (original) (raw)
Opinion|False Confessions and the Jogger Case
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/01/opinion/false-confessions-and-the-jogger-case.html
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- Nov. 1, 2002
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November 1, 2002
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The reopening of the Central Park jogger case has exposed for scrutiny the confessions of the five defendants that led to their convictions. Four of the boys, now men -- Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise -- confessed on camera to the district attorney, Elizabeth Lederer. (The fifth defendant, Yusef Salaam, did not agree to be taped.) The videotapes themselves are shocking in their details and the seeming truthfulness of the defendants speaking.
Yet we now know from DNA evidence that Matias Reyes, a convicted serial rapist and murderer, had raped the jogger. He says he acted alone. No DNA or other physical evidence connected the five defendants to the crime scene.
Why then do the taped confessions seem so compelling? To appreciate how a confession can be both compelling and false, one has to understand the process. Every confession begins with a simple, stripped-down admission: ''I did it.'' But that's not enough to prove guilt because people are too easily coaxed into compliance. To tell whether an admission is true, investigators seek proof in the form of a full post-admission narrative -- a story from the suspect that tells what he did, how, when, where and why.
Most people cannot imagine that they would ever confess to a crime they did not commit. Yet false confessions have been amply documented -- as in recent cases in which new DNA evidence exonerated convicted confessors, some on death row.
There are ways to assess whether a confession corroborates an admission of guilt. The first step is to see whether there were factors present that would have increased the likelihood of coercion -- like the age and competency of the suspect as well as the conditions of custody and interrogation. Coercion increases the risk of a false confession, but does not guarantee it. Coerced confessions may be true; conversely, innocent people sometimes confess to acts they did not commit, even without prompting.
A second step requires considering whether the confession contains details that are consistent with the statements of others, accurate in their match to the facts of the crime and lead to evidence unknown to police.
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