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FinalCall.com News
Perspectives
The jogger case and false confessions
By Miriam Gohara
Guest Columnist
Updated Jan 8, 2003 - 12:00:00 PM
News continues to unfold about the rape and near-murder of the Central Park jogger 13 years ago. A confession earlier this year challenges the validity of the arrest, interrogation and conviction of five Black and Brown youths from Harlem for this brutal crime. In light of the new evidence, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau consented to the defendants’ motion to set aside all the convictions of every defendant.
While a judge has thrown out the convictions of the youths charged, the Central Park jogger case is the latest demonstration of the fallibility of our criminal justice system and reveals the need for basic reforms in criminal investigation and suspect interrogation techniques to protect the innocent.
It is now well known how DNA evidence can expose serious miscarriages of justice that have sent innocent men and women to jail. According to the Innocence Project, DNA testing has freed 116 individuals after they were convicted, and cleared hundreds more suspects before trial. Less well known, however, is the fact that 15 of the post-conviction DNA exonerations involved people who "confessed" to the crimes during police interrogation.
At the time of the Central Park jogger incident, DNA testing was just beginning to gain widespread acceptance as a tool in criminal investigations. Though a small amount of DNA evidence was collected from the victim, at the time there was no New York State DNA database as there is now to compare the collected evidence with catalogued samples from designated convicted felons. Had there been such a database, Matias Reyes, the man who confessed to being the jogger’s sole attacker, would likely have been identified as the culprit long ago.
However, we cannot rely on DNA to expose the flaws of every criminal investigation for two reasons.
First, the vast majority of crimes do not involve DNA evidence. Criminal investigations often employ the same flawed techniques that implicate the innocent in cases where there is DNA evidence, as well as in cases where there is none. Although DNA evidence has implicated Matias Reyes as the jogger’s rapist, some argue that it does not definitively exonerate the five young men charged in the assault. In this sense, the jogger case is like the hundreds of others in which evidence of guilt or innocence does not rest on DNA evidence alone, if at all.
Second, reform of our criminal justice system requires not only post-hoc revelations that uncover injustice but also meaningful safeguards to avoid it. Any reform aimed at making a meaningful impact on the incidence of false confessions should take into account the fact that 80 percent of people interrogated (including many who are later proven innocent) turn down their right to have a lawyer present during questioning. They often do not understand how a lawyer could protect their rights and, more often than not, cannot afford to hire one.
Experts who have studied false confessions note that innocent people are even more likely to waive their rights than the guilty. Studies show that the young, the old, the mentally disabled, the drug addicted, or those who are suffering from emotional trauma are most susceptible to implicating themselves in crimes they did not commit.
Such people often say what they believe their interrogators want to hear even in the absence of physical coercion because intimidating or deceptive interrogation techniques work best on those with physical or mental limitations. Therefore, any reform should require counsel during custodial interrogations.
Another key to effective reform is to require that every conversation police have with people in custody is videotaped. However, the cameras have to roll long before the suspect is ready to "confess." Currently, only two states, Alaska and Minnesota, require such complete recording of police interactions of suspects.
New York City Councilman Bill Perkins recently introduced a bill that would mandate such videotaping. Without it, judges and juries are left with a recording of only the final statement.
The jogger case provides a useful illustration of the point. One videotape of suspect Kharey Wise shows him admitting to beating the jogger with his fists. Then the prosecutors show him pictures of the victim’s face, which appears to have been hit with a rock or a brick. Several minutes later, Wise begins to tell prosecutors that one of the attackers had hit the victim with a stone.
Such techniques can lead to false confessions. Experts in the factors that lead to false confessions agree that suggestive information delivered from law enforcement to suspects without counsel increases the risk that suspects will respond to what they are shown rather than to what, if anything, they actually witnessed.
Serious efforts to reduce false confessions during intense interrogation must begin with insuring that custodial interrogations include defense counsel and that every conversation is videotaped. We must learn to separate the wheat of useful, independent information about the commission of a crime from the chaff of incriminating statements tainted by coercive interrogation techniques.
Until then, we can expect wrongful arrests and convictions to continue to undermine the public’s trust of the criminal justice system.
(Miriam Gohara is an assistant attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. in New York. This column transmitted by NNPA.)
