Central Park Five

[StrangeSox]

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/centralparkfive/

 

THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE, a new film from award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns, tells the story of the five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City’s Central Park in 1989. The film chronicles The Central Park Jogger case, for the first time from the perspective of these five teenagers whose lives were upended by this miscarriage of justice.

 

Some background:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_Jogger_case

The Central Park Jogger case involved the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a female jogger in New York City's Central Park, on April 19, 1989. Five juvenile males—four black and one Hispanic—were tried and convicted for the crime. The convictions were vacated in 2002 when Matias Reyes, a convicted rapist and murderer serving a life sentence for other crimes, confessed to committing the crime alone and DNA evidence confirmed his involvement in the rape.

 

Although the suspects (except Salaam) had confessed on videotape in the presence of a parent or guardian, they retracted their statements within weeks, claiming that they had been intimidated, lied to, and coerced into making false confessions.[12] The detectives had indeed used ruses to convince the suspects to confess, with Salaam confessing to having been present only after he was told that fingerprints were found on the victim's clothing.[13] While the confessions themselves were videotaped, the hours of interrogation that preceded the confessions were not.

No DNA evidence tied the suspects to the crime, so the prosecution's case rested almost entirely on the confessions.[4] In fact, analysis indicated that the DNA collected at the crime scene did not match any of the suspects — and that the crime scene DNA had all come from a single, as yet unknown person.[12]

One of the suspects' supporters, Reverend Calvin O. Butts of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, told the New York Times, "The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that's what happened here."[4]

 

 

Seeing the whole story of how it unfolded, how weak the case against them was, how the police openly lied on the stand, how the whole media and city condemned these kids and called for their death from the start was pretty despairing. The worst part is that the city is still fighting this case.

 

The two main things I took away were the psychological conditions at play in the false confessions (and mirrored by the one hold-out juror) and the fact that you should NEVER, EVER TALK TO THE POLICE. Lawyer-up and don't say a damn word until then.

[StrangeSox]

Good topic to drop a link to the Innocence Project

[southsider2k5]

I figured you would have saw this long ago.

[StrangeSox]

Burns was just on Colbert a week or two ago promoting it (first I had heard of it), and it just came to PBS on April 16th.

[Jenksismyhero]

http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/centralparkfive/

 

 

 

Some background:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_Jogger_case

 

 

 

 

 

Seeing the whole story of how it unfolded, how weak the case against them was, how the police openly lied on the stand, how the whole media and city condemned these kids and called for their death from the start was pretty despairing. The worst part is that the city is still fighting this case.

 

The two main things I took away were the psychological conditions at play in the false confessions (and mirrored by the one hold-out juror) and the fact that you should NEVER, EVER TALK TO THE POLICE. Lawyer-up and don't say a damn word until then.

 

How on earth do you confess to touching someone's clothing when you never touched their clothing? That makes no sense to me.

[Jenksismyhero]

And after reading the Wiki page on this, how on earth do you make up stories to implicate your friends? The whole thing seems really strange to me.

[StrangeSox]

How on earth do you confess to touching someone's clothing when you never touched their clothing? That makes no sense to me.

 

You do it when you've been interrogated aggressively without break for 30+ hours. These kids "confessed" to all sorts of things, many of which were contradictory and didn't match what actually happened. They confessed to helping in the rape, to fondling her, to hitting her, yet they didn't do any of that at all.

 

False confessions can and do happen, even when it's a grown adult and not a 14 year old kid who just wants to go home. Part of it is that the police can openly lie to a suspect about what others have said and what the consequences of a confession would be ("we're just going to use you as a witness, tell us what we want to hear and you can go home!")

[StrangeSox]

And after reading the Wiki page on this, how on earth do you make up stories to implicate your friends? The whole thing seems really strange to me.

They weren't really 'friends.' There was a large group (25-30) of kids who more-or-less randomly assembled in Central Park, harassed some other bikers and joggers, and then split up when the police showed up. Some of them knew each other from being in the same neighborhood, but they didn't even know all of the others' names. Police fed them this information.

 

These five were picked up over the harassment stuff. Right before they were about to be released, the rape victim was discovered. Police thought they had the person or persons responsible in the group, so they held them for further interrogation. It wasn't an unreasonable thing for them to do, but they pressed right on even after it became clear that these kids had no idea what had happened, where it had happened or how it happened. They crafted their own story and fed it to the kids one-by-one, all the while telling them "hey, the other guys are all blaming you! why don't you tell use what they did and you can be a witness and go home soon?" Classic good-cop/bad-cop interrogations.

Edited May 6, 2013 by StrangeSox

[StrangeSox]

Ta-Nehisi has a piece up on the movement to get one of the prosecutors removed from her position at Columbia Law

 

Social Power and the Central Park Five

Should a prosecutor responsible for locking up five innocent boys be training future lawyers at Columbia?

 

For my part, I'm a little puzzled by Dwyer's defense. Before she scrubbed her bio, Lederer proudly advertised her role in the prosecution of the Central Park Five. Ledere did not simply fail to live "without error." She sent a 16-year old boy to Riker's Island on the basis of coerced testimony. She sent four other boys off to prison, and she did this even after it was revealed that no DNA from any of the attackers was found on the victim. The real rapist was not found because of the investigative efforts of the police or Lederer, but because of his own need to confess. If not for that confession the Central Park Five would still be considered rapists. By that time the rapist had gone on to rape other women, killing one.

 

The notion that someone who played a principle role in this travesty should be training lawyers at one of the best schools in the country is rather amazing. We are not suggesting that our prosecutors must live "without error." We are suggest that those who participated in one of the most dubious cases in the city's history, and have never apologized for it, should not be in the business of educating the next generation of lawyers.

 

I think Chris Hayes had it exactly right:

 

Along with all of the other rising inequalities we've become so familiar with -- in income, in wealth, in access to politicians -- we confront now a fundamental inequality of accountability. We can have a just society whose guiding ethos is accountability and punishment, where both black kids dealing weed in Harlem and investment bankers peddling fraudulent securities on Wall Street are forced to pay for their crimes, or we can have a just society whose guiding ethos is forgiveness and second chances, one in which both Wall Street banks and foreclosed households are bailed out, in which both inside traders and street felons are allowed to rejoin polite society with the full privileges of citizenship intact. But we cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside.

Edited May 6, 2013 by StrangeSox

[Jenksismyhero]

You do it when you've been interrogated aggressively without break for 30+ hours. These kids "confessed" to all sorts of things, many of which were contradictory and didn't match what actually happened. They confessed to helping in the rape, to fondling her, to hitting her, yet they didn't do any of that at all.

 

False confessions can and do happen, even when it's a grown adult and not a 14 year old kid who just wants to go home. Part of it is that the police can openly lie to a suspect about what others have said and what the consequences of a confession would be ("we're just going to use you as a witness, tell us what we want to hear and you can go home!")

 

I guess I can never imagine myself confessing to a crime I didn't commit, regardless of how long I've been questioned or what "promises" a cop provides. If torture was involved, maybe, but simple questioning? No way.

Edited May 6, 2013 by Jenksismybitch

[witesoxfan]

I guess I can never imagine myself confessing to a crime I didn't commit, regardless of how long I've been questioned or what "promises" a cop provides. If torture was involved, maybe, but simple questioning? No way.

 

I don't think I could either, but I'm 25 and you're older than that, so we don't exactly have impressionable minds anymore, we are in a position where we generally understand our rights, what's expected of us, and what's going on around us. We aren't 16-20 anymore. If I was under the impression that all I had to do was confess to something and I could be done with something like that, I probably would do so after 30 hours of testimony.

[cabiness42]

Tip of the day: If you're ever getting interrogated for a long time, just start complaining of chest pains.

[StrangeSox]

I guess I can never imagine myself confessing to a crime I didn't commit, regardless of how long I've been questioned or what "promises" a cop provides. If torture was involved, maybe, but simple questioning? No way.

 

Everybody thinks that, but few have actually gone through it. The comments on the Ta-Nehisi article I linked go into it a bit:

 

This advice doesn't actually cohere with the realities of the power equation when confronted/interrogated by the police. When one is randomly swept up and taken away behind closed doors, there is a well documented disorientation that takes place. The fear generated by the commonly understood potential to be brutalized (in the short term), and possibly incarcerated for YEARS, is absolutely paralytic for thought and action. When it happened to ME, I was taken to the docks in Jersey City well away from any access to a lawyer (in Newark, no one can hear you scream). I was a 3rd year undergrad, politically astute and well informed as to what SHOULD happen. I did not confess (car theft, eluding the police, criminal damage) because it clearly "wasn't me". But I WAS compliant beyond anything I would have believed about myself.

 

That belief that you'd never personally falsely confess is what makes confessions so damn powerful, even though we have numerous examples of coerced forced confessions. Police are free to lie to you endlessly to try to get more information, and they will. You're in a very, very stressful situation and probably not thinking clearly. You're being shouted at and threatened and psychologically abused for hours. Most people are not fully aware of their rights or how to exercise them, and may be afraid to do so in. Now throw being only 14 years old into the mix.

 

This case should be a lesson to everyone about what can happen, how criminal justice can go so appallingly wrong that we coerce five false confessions from five kids, prosecutors see no problems with them, judges allow them and a jury buys them and issues harsh sentences despite there being no evidence actually linking these kids to the crimes, evidence contradicting the state's theory and numerous inconsistencies. It should also tell us something about the disparity in funding between public defenders' offices and prosecutors' offices.

[StrangeSox]

I don't think I could either, but I'm 25 and you're older than that, so we don't exactly have impressionable minds anymore, we are in a position where we generally understand our rights, what's expected of us, and what's going on around us. We aren't 16-20 anymore. If I was under the impression that all I had to do was confess to something and I could be done with something like that, I probably would do so after 30 hours of testimony.

 

Plenty of people older than 20 have given false confessions in the past. There's very strong psychology at play in these situations that comes with the whole authority/power structure you're drag into during interviews and interrogations.

 

Plus you'd have to consider that if you are actually innocent, you might have the instinct to try to help the police in catching the actual criminal. That's happened plenty of times, where somebody willingly tells the police all sorts of information in an interview, gets some facts wrong (because hey, we're all human), and then the cops and prosecutors relentlessly pursue them as the criminal because of those simple mistakes.

 

I think I've linked to this Frontline episode in the past:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/th...interrogations/

 

Time had an article earlier this year:

http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/11/why-innoc...se-confessions/

In 1995, Daniel Taylor was convicted of a double murder in Chicago in what seemed to be a clear-cut case: he gave police a signed confession. But now his supporters — including Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions and a Chicago Tribune columnist — are insisting he is innocent. They are asking that Taylor, who is serving life in prison without parole, be freed.

 

They have a compelling argument: there is strong evidence that Taylor was actually in police custody when the 1992 murders took place. He had been picked up on a disorderly conduct charge, it seems, and was being held in a North Side jail — and he was only released on bond two hours after the killings.

 

But what about his confession? Why would an innocent man sign a statement saying he had committed murder? As it turns out, Taylor’s case is a fairly typical story: a frightened young person manipulated by police into making statements whose significance he did not understand. If the past few years have taught us anything it’s that false confessions are not only possible, but they also happen more often than anyone would think.

 

West of Memphis was another recent documentary that covered a prominent false-confession case:

False confessions play a major role in two recent documentaries about wrongful convictions. West of Memphis examines the case of three young Arkansas men who were locked up for the horrific 1993 murders of three 8-year-old boys. Perhaps the most powerful piece of the prosecution’s case was a confession by Jessie Misskelley describing in graphic detail how he and his two co-defendants beat, raped and mutilated the boys. The documentary, however, showed how the police could — after hours of intense interrogation, heavy with leading questions — manipulate and extract a false story from Misskelley, an unsophisticated young man with a low IQ.

[StrangeSox]

Central Park Five settle with NYC for $40M

[greg775]

Central Park Five settle with NYC for $40M

 

40 million dollars to split? Amazing how their lives must have changed upon receipt of that money. Doesn't make up for what happened to them. At least it's a nice stipend for them.

[Jake]

I'll have to look for it, but I think This American Life did a story on a police officer who later realized that he forced a false confession out of someone and his quest to make amends.