"The Central Park Five" highlights the danger of false confessions

May 21, 2013 (Press-News.org) "The Central Park Five" highlights the danger of false confessions

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The case of five teenagers who falsely confessed to and were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for the savage beating and sexual assault of a jogger in New York City's Central Park first made national headlines twenty-three years ago. A new documentary about the case from famed-filmmaker Ken Burns has it making headlines once again.

In "The Central Park Five," Burns explores the circumstances surrounding the trial in an attempt to explain how strong evidence of innocence at the time of the trial was insufficient to set the defendants free. A major factor in the case's outcome was the public and jury's unwavering belief in the boys' guilt based on confessions they made immediately after their arrests, even though there was some evidence that the confessions were false and the product of improper conduct at various levels of law enforcement.

The Central Park Jogger case

On the evening of April 19, 1989, a 28-year-old New Yorker named Trisha Meili was jogging in Central Park when she was attacked, beaten, raped and left for dead in a ravine near the park's 102nd Street transverse. Five black and Hispanic teenagers, dubbed the "Central Park Five" by the press, were charged in the incident, tried before a jury in New York State Supreme Court, found guilty and sentenced to prison terms ranging from five to fifteen years.

The Central Park Jogger case, as it came to be known, has been criticized as a blatant mistrial of justice because of the lack of evidence tying any of the defendants to the crime, the admission in court of the defendants' highly unreliable confessions and a number of other irregularities by law enforcement and the defense attorneys. Thus, it came as no surprise to many when in 2002 the Manhattan District Attorney's Office threw out the convictions after another man, whose DNA matched that found at the scene in 1989 and whose story matched the facts, confessed that he and he alone was responsible for the attack and rape.

The Central Park Five's confessions

The defendants' confessions were untrustworthy for many reasons. For example, they were obtained before any of the defendants had been formally charged with a crime and in the absence of their criminal defense lawyers. They also contained a variety of factually inaccurate statements. The confessions taken as a whole or individually did not match the facts of the case or the evidence. Furthermore, every confession contained statements that directly contradicted statements made in every other confession, suggesting at best that four of the five confessions were false. Finally, a police officer testified that the wording in three of the five written confessions was his, not the defendants'.

The problem of false confessions

It seems to defy logic that anyone would confess to a crime, especially one as serious as rape, that he or she did not commit. For that reason it is nearly impossible to convince a jury to disregard a confession, even if all the facts and evidence indicate that the confession was false. However, research has shown that false confessions are not rare and that factors ranging from hunger to devious interrogation techniques can elicit a false confession. To limit the possibility of making a false confession, a person suspected of a crime should never answer any questions or offer information before she or he speaks to a criminal defense attorney.